Stimulus Package. The Politics Of Panic.

here's a plan. panic first. solve problems never.

Who came up with the cockamamie idea of the ‘economic stimulus’? The Bushies. During the post Bear-Stearns policy meltdown, when Paulson and his merry band of idiots put together policy on the fly, all we heard was how we needed to stimulate the economy. Well, we did an awful lot of stimulating but we’re in deeper trouble now than we were then.

And yet, Obama, continuing his annoying tendency to shape policy through a Republican prism, is continuing with this absurd “got to rush through the package now before its too late” rubbish. Many of the changes in the package are going to take months or years to be seen but that doesn’t stop him from giving the poor, downtrodden American people hope (remember that word) that this is a quick fix. It isn’t, and by branding it as one, Obama is only setting up problems for himself.

Treasury Runs Out Of Money To Give Away. Fed Rides In

paulson + bernanke

This is getting silly. Two days ago, Toxic assets were out. Then Treasury bailed out Citigroup’s…toxic assets. And now the Fed (they’re the ones who actually print all those T-bills) have taken over and pledged $800 billion to bail out all toxic securities built on consumer credit card debt. In one fell swoop that’s a bigger bailout than the one we haggled over during the campaign.

Crass incompetence is kind of quaint when we can chuckle about it in other parts of the world, but when it’s taking place here at home and hitting you hard in your pocketbook it’s not quite so funny. It only goes to show, you can only really judge the quality of government during a time of crisis.

By the time Obama rides in, we’ll be lucky to have an economy left at all.

The Cannibalism Of Capitalism

feed me

There’s something diabolical about a creature that consumes itself. It seems so profoundly irrational, so utterly insane. We file stuff like that in some ‘unspeakable’ part of our minds.

Except that we live it every single day.

Capitalism is a great system in many ways, but it has a tendency to destroy itself if left unchecked. We’re seeing that all too clearly right now. There are two areas where capitalism is profoundly cannibalistic.