Saying “no” to the Bailout

By now you have read the newest reports concerning the corporate bailout Congress is voting on and one headline, doubtless, is stuck in most people’s minds: It is proposed that the statutory limit on public debt is to be raised from a mere $9.815 trillion to a healthy $11.315 trillion.

These are, of course, trillions with a “T.” Unimaginable amounts of money to us simple mortals, but to the gods inhabiting the White House and Congress and running Wall Street, evidently a trillion dollars with a “T” is something comfortably discussed – perhaps over golf or the obligatory three martini lunch.

Certainly it is something they feel safe discussing in a piece of legislation that will put each of us on the hook for $700 billion (with a “B”) to assist mismanaged firms and a ruined economy – and we each have the requisite $2000 apiece lying around the old estate to contribute to this bailout, don’t we? We’d better, as that will be the amount each of us is signed up to produce when and if this legislation is rammed through this week.

Unfortunately, I was not invited to the country club to share in the private discussions that led up to my elected representatives innocently trotting out these numbers with dollar bill signs, nor did the limo swing by to take me to the luncheon – no conviviality, no martinis, and no information for me. I wasn’t even allowed to read this masterwork, “The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,’’ prior to it being debated and voted on.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to make it to the party anyway had I been invited. As most of you are, I was busy working and paying the ridiculous taxes required to keep multimillionaires in business after they’ve shown their stunted talents for producing anything of value and that their capacity to take wild risks at my expense is evidently unlimited.

But an invitation would have been appreciated, nonetheless. Why didn’t I receive one, or you either? Nigh every elected official from the president down has lamented that rumors and misrepresentations have dogged this bill – as if it was the fault of the citizenry that its government failed to keep us completely and honestly informed of the allegedly dire situation with investment banks and Wall Street as that trouble developed. No, all we heard for months was that the market was “sound in its fundamentals” and that anyone who thought the economy was in a slump was “obviously” suffering some bizarre mental affliction since the Bush Administration’s economists chanted “All is well” repeatedly.

And it is pretended that it’s somehow the fault of the citizenry that we are provided with a copy of the legislation with no time to actually read and analyze it prior to the vote. Once again, on the way out the door, we hear Mr. Bush and his gang uttering their immortal motto: “Trust us!” while desperately pleading we are in a “crisis” that must be addressed “immediately” by “extreme measures” or all is lost. The only thing missing is the Homeland Security Code-Orange-Fast-Heading-To-Bright-Red Thermometer of Doom flashing across the television on every channel with graphics of dancing skeletal corpses rising from their graves to drag innocent families from their homes by the hair, courtesy of Hieronymus Bosch.

I am a bit incredulous at this point, with all the governmental abuses and mismanagement since 11 September 2001, that our elected representatives in the Bush Administration are surprised so many of us no longer “just trust them.” These are the same people who painted a false picture of atomic desolation in order to acquire the authority to go to war with a country that was not directly involved with 9/11. And then they wasted money and lives to help create a world in which the threat of terrorism has increased, not decreased, while the pockets of their corporate partners got fatter with tax money.

These are the same people who got their Patriot Act passed by scaring the citizens into believing their next door neighbors might be terrorists so the FBI needs to be able to check up on their reading habits at the public library.

These are the same people who simply broke the law outright and potentially bugged all of our e-mail and phone conversations with its domestic spying program – and then talked Congress repeatedly into making it OK after they were discovered.

The Bush Administration’s habitual performance is clear: Demand far more power than is actually necessary by inflating the threat or need, take the power once it is granted, and then abuse it. That has been the story of our government for the past 8 years.

Given this and given the utter vagueness of the 451 page Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, why would anyone be surprised many Americans are terribly suspicious of this move by Mr. Bush? Look at what one finds in this monster: The inclusion of all manner of oddities, from tax breaks involving wool to wooden arrows for children, and curious short passages with cryptic wording such as, under “TITLE IV—EXTENSION OF TAX ADMINISTRATION PROVISIONS, “ something called “SEC. 401. PERMANENT AUTHORITY FOR UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS” and “SEC. 402. PERMANENT AUTHORITY FOR DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION RELATING TO TERRORIST ACTIVITIES.”

Some of us simply become uncomfortable thinking about how badly our government has abused its power over the past 8 years while reading any legislation with words such as “permanent authority” stuck in, with no fanfare, around pages 296-297.

Yet you and I are simply supposed to trust these people to do the right thing if we hand them a blank check and give the Secretary of the Treasury free reign over the economy?

People, some clichés are telling because there is an element of truth in them, and one occurs to me now: “Past performance is a good predictor of future returns.” What you got in the past out of the Bush Administration is likely what you are about to receive again. These things are bets – there is no way to be absolutely certain, as there is no way to be certain when investing money, picking a career, or electing presidents and members of Congress. But what people have done in the past is a better than average sign of what they will continue to do. And we have to base our support for or opposition to bills such as this on something.

There is a chance that, in this case, Mr. Bush is the Boy Who Cried Wolf and now the wolf has arrived. The country may actually stand on that “brink of economic collapse.” But it just may be that this crisis is hardly severe enough to require us to hand such sweeping powers to the Secretary of the Treasury, an unelected official, as have been proposed. And it may be that we don’t need to begin by offering a $700 billion (with a “B”) bailout to multimillionaires who are supposed to know how to run businesses conservatively.

If we’re going to help anyone, perhaps it should be the middle class taxpayers who are having difficulty keeping jobs, making house payments, buying food and fuel, paying medical bills, sending their children to school – and investing and saving.

Perhaps it is time to, at long last, doubt Mr. Bush’s honesty and judgment. Perhaps it is time to call your elected officials and demand they do to this legislation what Nancy Reagan told us all those years ago in another context: “Just say no.” That, or remind them that you are more than capable of saying “No” to them come election day.