Bankruptcy

`Too Big to Fail' Has an Easy Answer: Anti-Trust or Public Ownership

dlindorff — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:01:19 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

The one thing we are not hearing from Congress or from incoming
president Barack Obama in the current economic crisis facing the
country are the words “anti-trust” and “public ownership.”

From the moment the crisis first struck, with the near collapse of
AIG, the mantra has been that companies like AIG, Morgan Stanley,
Merrill Lynch, Citibank, etc.--and more recently General Motors Corp.
and Ford--are “too big to fail.” That is, it is argued that these
companies are so huge that if they were to collapse into the rubble
they deserve to be, it would damage the nation irreparably.

The question is, if that is genuinely the case, why were they
allowed to be that big in the first place, and why aren’t we rethinking
that policy?

It’s not as though they got that way through organic growth by
being successful at what they did. Hardly. GM was the quintessential
result of a merger of smaller automakers. Ford grew too, by acquiring
the competition, most recently Volvo. Most, if not all of those
acquisitions were first vetted and approved by the Federal Trade
Commission and found to be acceptable as a matter of economics and
public policy.

In the banking industry, which is regulated, the picture is even
worse, with the government first opening the door to the creation of
national banking companies, and then routinely approving the gobbling
up of one after another regional or even national bank by another. At
some point we reached the point where the giants in the
industry—Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo,
etc.—were able to say, when they ran into trouble, that allowing them
to fail would have dire consequences for the national economy. This
kind of extortion should never have been allowed to happen.

First of all, the argument for national banks never made sense for
ordinary people, and wasn’t necessary for large customers either. Large
corporate fundings have always been done by bank consortia, and this
could have been accomplished with the nation’s banking industry
fragmented into small state-chartered institutions. Meanwhile, small
businesses and individuals always lose when a bank is national in
scale. It is much more costly to handle the banking business of small
enterprises and individual families than it is to handle the business
of huge corporate clients, with the result that the major banks have
made it costlier and costlier for small customers to do business with
them.

The answer is clear. Bigness is fundamentally bad when it comes to
capitalism. There is a point where any company in any industry becomes
too big for it to be socially acceptable. Big companies not only
attempt to behave in a monopolistic fashion by destroying or buying up
the competition, both nationally or, as in the case of a retailer like
WalMart or a bank like Citibank, locally, using their huge financial
power to locally underprice the competition and drive them out of
business (after which they are free to gouge the local customer base).
They also ride roughshod over local political interests, demanding tax
breaks, zoning waivers, etc. This being the case, the government should
simply not be allowing corporations to achieve such scale and market
dominance.

Companies, whether banks, car makers, or media companies, should
never be allowed to grow to a point that they become “too big to fail.”
If that can be said about any company, whether because of the assets it
holds, or because of the number of people it employs, it is time to
break it up.

Think of GM. If GM were ripped up into six or seven competing
companies, it is certain that at least one of those smaller entities
would be producing electric cars by next year. The Saturn plant already
made one, the Impact, that was wildly popular (see the excellent
documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car”), and if left to its own
devices to sink or swim, could probably be cranking those out in volume
for the 2010 model year.

Some companies would certainly fail. But that’s what is supposed to happen in a capitalist system.

This piece is not meant to be a paen to capitalism. But having said
that, if you’re going to have capitalism, which is the ruling ideology
here in the US of A, you have to let it function as intended. As soon
as the government comes in and starts encouraging the establishment of
monopolies or quasi-monopolies, and preventing the failure of poorly
managed enterprises or dying industries, as it is doing in the case of
the banking and automotive sectors, it is no longer true capitalism.

That could work, too. Many democratic countries, including Japan,
Sweden, France and Germany, have the concept of shared governance of
corporations, in which large corporate entities are partially owned and
run by government, and of planned economies, in which certain sectors
are deliberately protected and promoted by government policy. The US
has moved in that direction with the investment by the government in
nine of the country’s largest banks, and in discussions to provide
$25-50 billion in financial assistance to the major US auto companies.
But in the US case, the government is studiously avoiding demanding a
role in running those companies. It is by design only a “passive”
investor.

This is the triumph of ideology over rationality and the public
interest. I recently interviewed a number of investment strategists in
the course of working on an article for an investment magazine. They
all had the same advice for worried investors: invest in shares of the
“magic nine” banks that are recipients of tens of billions of dollars
in bail-out money from the federal government. As they all point out,
the government’s stake in these banks means that they will not be
allowed to fail, and moreover, they are in a unique position to use
their flush capital reserves to acquire, at fire sale prices, the
assets of smaller banks that are being left to sink or swim in the
current credit crisis and recession. That is not a free market. It’s a
government program to reduce the competition in the banking sector and
hand all the business over to a favored few giant banks.

Now that would be okay if the government, in return for its
investment, were taking a management role in those favored banks. But
it is not. Congress, the Bush administration, and, so far at least, the
incoming administration of Barack Obama, have not been demanding a
management stake in any of the companies that are getting bail-out
funding. If the government takes ownership positions at all, it is
taking non-voting shares in those companies, solely in the hope of
someday getting some of the invested money back by selling those
shares.

This is not just a rip-off of the taxpayer. It is a craven program
to enrich big investors in the bailed-out enterprises, while putting
control of the nation’s economic destiny increasingly into a smaller
number of hands of people whose interests are not even aligned with the
national intereest (these are, after all, all transnational
corporations only nominally headquartered in the US).

There is, of course, another reason that companies should never be
allowed to become “too big to fail.” That is political clout. The US
political system is already largely an owned-and-operated subisidiary
of corporate America. When companies become as large as AIG or GM or
Bank of America, they also gain a disproportionate influence over the
political apparatus that is an order of magnitude larger than their
share of the national GDP. It’s not just that they have limitless money
to donate to political campaigns. They also, by their size, are able to
dispense political favors in virtually every congressional district,
much as the Pentagon has been doing for the past half century, and also
to threaten national havoc if they don’t get their way.

Don’t expect much in the way of scrutiny of this bailout process
from the corporate media, by the way, which has been engaged in the
same process of national consolidation for the past few decades. But
clearly, the public needs to wake up and start demanding that if our
money is going to be used to bail out these corrupt and horrifically
managed enterprises, we the people need to have a controlling interest
in running them, so that they are run in our interest. Better yet, we
should be demanding that these bumbling colossuses be broken up into
little pieces, and then left to sink or swim on their own like the rest
of us.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Egad! Is the Government Going Socialist? No. It Only Looks That Way

dlindorff — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:58:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

After watching the markets plunge and the credit freeze become
glacial, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson backed away from his scheme
to rescue his investment banking colleagues by spending hundreds of
billions of dollars buying up worthless credit derivatives. His new
strategy: follow Britain’s lead and invest that same money--$250
billion for starters—into the banks as equity—specifically into the
shares of nine of the country’s largest banks.

This might sound a little like socialism—the kind of mandatory
nationalization that the US has devoted decades, and tens of billions
of secret dollars to trying to undermine and attack when practiced by
leaders in countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Chile or post-war Italy. But
Paulson’s no red.

To avoid this government investment in the US banking industry
being labeled “socialist,” Paulson and his fellow conspirator, Fed
Chairman Ben Barnanke, are only buying non-voting shares of
the banks. Get it? They’re giving hundreds of billions of our dollars
to bankers in the form of ownership shares of these companies, but they
aren’t asking for any say in the banks’ policies in return.

The rescued banks will be able to write trillions of dollars of
loans against the new capital being injected into them courtesy of the
American public, but they won’t have to lend any of it to us. They
could, and most likely will, lend it to foreigners, or to anyone
offering a higher interest rate on the money. They could pay it out in
the form of bigger bonuses for executives. They could use it to buy up
smaller competitors who aren’t getting a piece of the federal bailout.
My guess is they’ll do all three.

The thing is, they can do whatever they damned please, because
Uncle Sam is not asking for votes on the banks’ boards of directors in
return for all that invested cash.

Why not?

Well, that would be socialism, right? It would amount to public
ownership of the means of loan production. And we all know where that
would lead: to decisions by bankers that might actually benefit the
common good.

And we cannot have that! That’s not what America is about. America
is about rugged capitalism, where hard-nosed executives make decisions
based upon a rigorous cost-benefit analysis that magically ends up
putting capital to its most productive use. That’s why we in America
have, um, well, that’s why we have car companies that only produce
giant, gas-guzzling SUV’s, muscle cars and trucks, cities that are
entirely composed of hotels and casinos, houses that are big enough to
hold four families, collapsing transit systems, failing schools, and a
hollowed-out economy that hardly produces anything the rest of the
world wants to buy.

Hmmmm. Maybe those free-market capitalists aren’t so good at making
investment decisions after all—at least where the good of America and
the American people are concerned.

I’m not saying that politicians would necessarily do a better job,
but judging by the latest turn of events, which is to say the
near-death experience for the global economy, I’d say that they could
hardly do a worse job than the capitalist class has done. And
maybe, if we could get our democratic system up and running again, with
citizen/voters taking an active interest in what the political class is
doing, maybe we the People could compel our politicians make some
investment decisions for those banks that would be in our actual
interest.

Maybe if we demanded that for our hard-earned money, we the People
got voting rights on the banks’ boards of directors, we could see to it
that those banks invested in the public good. Maybe we could get them
to make loans for housing projects that made sense—for example near
public transit, or for renovating housing in urban centers. Maybe we
could get boards to agree to break up their banks so that they’d be
more responsive to local needs, instead of always voting for
acquisitions that have made banks bigger and less responsive. Maybe we
could vote out the empire building executives, and replace them with
more civic-minded folks who wanted to make their banks engines for
local development.

But that sounds like those dreaded Euro-Socialists. The ones who’ve run their countries into the ground, you say?

Um. Have you been to Europe lately? Europeans are by most standards
living better than we are. They don’t fret about health care, they have
secure jobs, and if they lose a job, the state takes care of them, so
they don’t have to worry about being put out on the street. Their cars
are smaller than ours, but then, they don’t need to use them to get to
work because they have excellent public transit systems, so they can
get along fine with one, instead of two or three vehicles to a family.
Oh, they get real vacations too, where they get to leave for a few
weeks and have real down time with the family. Imagine that!

At this point, we don’t even know if Paulson’s latest
boondoggle—throwing a quarter of a trillion dollars at a handful of
humongous banks that are bigger than any bank should ever have been
allowed to get—will work at unclogging the backed-up sewer that is the
American financial system. Maybe before he blows too much of that
money, we should demand that Congress stay his hand and say that for
such equity stakes, he should be getting voting shares, putting
public-minded members on those banks’ boards, and attaching rigorous
strings to what can be done with our money.

Nationalization lite isn’t going to accomplish anything except to waste
more of our money while enriching the same people who got us into this
mess in the first place.

If we’re going to have social ownership of the banks, then let’s demand social control of them too!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Flash: Photo Proves Obama Consorts with Marxists!

A blog called Gateway Pundit
is breathlessly claiming to have "discovered" photo evidence of Obama's
secret Marxist background. The document, a photo showing a young
legislative candidate Obama and four other Chicago local candidates for
office endorsed by the Chicago New Party is headlined: "Great... We're
two shakes of a lamb's tail from having a former(?) Marxist as
president."

Only problem is, the New Party was an affiliate of the Democratic
Socialists of America, probably the most mildly socialist and clearly
non-Marxist of left parties in the US. Founded by a group of
anti-Communist leftists associated with former Socialist Party leader
Michael Harrington, the DSA, originally known as the Democratic
Socialist Organizing Committee, modelled itself on the social
democratic parties of Western Europe, notably the German Social
Democratic Party of Prime Minister Willi Brandt and the British Labour
Party.

So tame are the DSA's policies, which included actively supporting
all Democratic presidential candidates, that it was hard to tell if the
organization was socialist at all. Indeed, when the DSA hosted an
international meeting of the leaders of the Second International in
Washington shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, it appeared
that leaders who attended, like Spanish Socialist Party leader Filippe
Gonzalez, German SDP leader Brandt and certainly British Labourite Tony
Benn were far to the left of most of the DSA members present.

If that's the best Obama's right-wing critics can come up with (and
they don't have him even as a New Party member, just as an endorsed
candidate of the New Party), they have a lot more work to do to show
he's a closet socialist, much less a closet "Marxist."

By the way, how is it that the right is claiming Obama is a Marxist and
a Muslim jihadi? Have they checked out what the Muslim governments have
done and are doing to the Marxists in their midsts? It's probably
easier to survive as a Christian or an apostate in Iran, Egypt,
Pakistan or Iraq than as a Marxist.

______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

We Need to Demand Hearings!

dlindorff — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:03:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

With the Bush Administration, the two leading presidential
candidates, and the Congressional leadership, as well as a phalanx of
Wall Street lobbyists all pushing hard for a massive transfer of
taxpayer money to the coffers of banks and investment banks, the
American people need to demand a halt to this bums' rush to a bailout.

We've seen what happens when Congress forgoes the time-tested
process of deliberative and investigative hearings and simply takes a
floor vote on a Bush Administration-backed measure. First there was the
October 18, 2001 resolution for use of military force against Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Because there were no hearings on that measure, its
loose, deliberately ambiguous wording has been used ever since by the
Bush/Cheney crew as authorization for their global so-called "War" on
Terror, including the claim that the president has the dictatorial
power ignore treaties, US law, and bills passed by the Congress.
Shortly thereafter, there was the Patriot Act, a compendium of
anti-Democratic measures that had failed to win passage in Congress
over the years which were cobbled together in the dead of night by
Bush/Cheney zealots and passed on a voice vote the next day by a
Congress too cowed to hold hearings on the measure. Then, in October
2002, there was the second authorization for use of military force
resolution, this time against Iraq, which has ended up miring the US in
a disastrous five-year-long war without end that has killed 4500
Americans, chewed up 40,000 more, and killed in excess of one million
innocent Iraqi civilians.

Had there been serious hearings on any of these three terrible
measures, there is a chance none of them would have passed, or that at
least, had they been passed, they would have been reworded to tie the
administration's hands. The first AUMF could have limited military
actions to attacking Al Qaeda. Period. The Patriot Act's constitutional
overrides could have been exposed early, and challenged. And the
administration's lies about the alleged threats posed by Iraq could
have been challenged in public by other witnesses, plus a clear
requirement could have been included that any attack on Iraq would need
UN authorization.

Now Congress is being pressured to pass an equally horrific bill
with no hearings. We know that 200 leading economists, including at
least three Nobel Laureates, one of them former World Bank economist
Joseph Stiglitz, are opposed to the bailout, saying throwing a trillion
dollars at Wall Street won't work and will be a waste of taxpayer money
or worse. We know that it fails to address the root problem--the
housing and mortgage crisis. We know that it could be a crippling blow
to the dollar. Yet without hearings to expose this giant scam, the only
ones getting through to members of Congress are Wall Street lobbyists,
their pockets stuffed with campaign cash.

Citizens can't even get past the Capitol switchboard, which is
jammed with angry callers trying to get through to their
representatives and senators.

The point that needs to be made is that there is no great urgency to
pass a bill. The administration's claim that the bottom will fall out
of the economy and that the country will be plunged into a depression
if the bill isn't passed immediately is nonsense. The Great Depression
took years to develop after the 1929 stock market crash.

The current market could collapse, and there'd be plenty of time to
act to revive the national economy. Meanwhile, the credit crisis, which
is serious, has been underway for months and months. It is not
something that came up last week and needs to be resolved tomorrow (as
if that were possible by the mere passing of a give-away bill). There
is plenty of time to hold the kind of hearings that will let members of
Congress, and the American public, learn about the causes of the
crisis, of its impacts, and about what the various strategies are that
might most effectively address it.

So the public demand should not be for passage of a "good" bailout
bill. It should be for a halt to this rush to passage of any bill. The
demand should be for "No Bill Without Hearings!"

So call Congress (202-225-3121, 202-224-3121 or 800-828-0498) and
tell your representative and your two senators that you don't want them
railroaded. Tell them you demand hearings before legislation. And tell
them, again, that you will vote against anyone who votes for the
current bailout for Wall Street. (Hint: If you can't get through, then
call one of their local offices, which are listed in the blue pages of
your phonebook, or go visit a local office.)

Don't forget to write letters, too, to your local paper demanding hearings and a reasoned response to the crisis, not a bailout.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

ACORN Is Right, Lou Dobbs Is Wrong

davidswanson — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:54:05 -0400

By David Swanson

In this video clip, Lou Dobbs of CNN tries to blame the community group ACORN, for which I used to work, for the crimes of Wall Street and of predatory lenders, not to mention Congress:
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/36465

Dobbs seems to oppose the proposed bailout, and ACORN favors modifying it to include relief for homeowners (which could include business for ACORN Housing Corporation helping renegotiate loans). So, I agree with Dobbs, not ACORN. I want the bill voted down in anything remotely resembling the form it was in on Monday.

But the bulk of Dobbs' reporting is absolutely crazy. He tries to depict ACORN as a criminal operation because the Republican Justice Department has leveled accusations of "voter fraud" against it. Dobbs doesn't mention that it was David Iglesias' refusal to play along with this scam that got him fired, something for which the former Attorney General of the United States and honored guest of CNN Alberto Gonzales is under investigation: http://bradblog.com/?p=4372

And Dobbs focuses on the claim that by promoting the Community Reinvestment Act, ACORN has promoted predatory lending. Dobbs gives a few seconds to a spokesperson from ACORN who points out that three-quarters of subprime loans have had nothing to do with the Community Reinvestment Act, but the point is lost in the blizzard of BS coming out of Dobbs' immigrant-hating, ignorance-spewing mouth.

When I worked for ACORN we spent more time and money and energy on blocking predatory lending than on anything else. Here's something I wrote about that work:

Flame-Broiled Shark: How Predatory Lending Victims Fought Back and Won

Published in "The Wealth Inequality Reader" by Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together and after three years of work brought the nation's largest high-cost lender to its knees, forced it to sell out to a foreign company, and won back a half a billion dollars of what had been taken from them -- one of the largest consumer settlements ever -- you'd probably ask me what country this had happened in. Surely it couldn't have been in the United States of the Second Gilded Age, the land of unbridled corporate power and radical government activism on behalf of the rich and the greedy.

And yet it was. These victims of predatory lending identified the problem and named it "predatory lending" in the late 1990s, and their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That's part of why more people haven't heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I was ACORN's communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent), and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African-Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People's Action to force banks to make loans in these communities. But the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity, and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live-checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when the yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage. High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They're often made, rather, to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods. After HSBC bought Household, it announced that 46 percent of Household's real estate-backed loans had been made to borrowers with 'A' credit. Household made no 'A' loans.

ACORN members don't take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an old ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household's abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household's executives' compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest. The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. ACORN members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Ken., had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result of ACORN agitation, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. And ACORN was getting the word out through local ethnic media to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. And ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. ACORN let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these law suits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure from ACORN.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans. And they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, ACORN members took the step that Household executives would bring up again and again in later negotiations. On a beautiful summer day in the unbelievably wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country simultaneously poured out of busses by the hundreds and thousands onto the lawns of the board members and CEO of Household. They knocked on the doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered "Wanted" posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members' neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims' stories and contact info and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household's predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We produced lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Forbes Magazine. We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc. We maintained an enormous website about Household that no longer exists.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. And this campaign was a success by the one and only measure ACORN judges campaigns by: it increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender who is next on ACORN's list.

David Swanson is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America and formerly Communications Coordinator at ACORN. The views expressed are his alone.

****

If Congress passes any bill this week it ought to include a comprehensive ban on predatory lending and a ban on state or federal preemption of local or state restrictions on predatory lending. Tell Congress at 202-224-3121.

Surprise! Congress Listened to the Voting Public!

dlindorff — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:43:24 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The most entertaining thing about this Wall Street crisis and the
refusal of the House of Representatives (not failure but refusal) to
pass a bailout bill negotiated by the Bush White House and the House
leadership is how shocked and upset those leaders and the pundit class
have been by the idea that members of Congress would actually heed the
wishes of their constituents!

The Founding Fathers always saw the lower house of Congress as
voice of the people—the elected body that, because its members had to
face the voters every two years, would be most responsive to public
sentiment.

Because of the power of money and the role of the corporate media
in filtering the information that voters get about what is actually
going on, that close connection between public and public servant in
the House has long ago broken down. This time, however, because the
crisis hit within five weeks of the national election, and because the
crisis involved something that everyone cares about—their money—it
worked.

The public is paying attention, and most of us got it. It was
obvious that Congress and the White House were out to screw us out of
our money in order to protect the millionaire and billionaire traders
and conmen who have been running the Wall Street casino for the last
decade and a half without any adult supervision.

Now that people are paying attention, it will be interesting to see
how these corrupt leaders, Democrat and Republican, will fashion that
bailout and get it passed. Once aroused from their TV-induced slumber,
the American public may not be willing to get rolled. If the anger
grows, and the calls and emails to Congress—which brought down the
Capitol website Monday and jammed the switchboard for several days
beginning last week—continue to flood in threatening an electoral
Armageddon for those who back a bailout, Congress may yet be unable to
pass a bill.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Now let’s make something clear. The stock market crash that
happened on Monday was no crisis. The market can rise and fall with
little or no significant impact on the broader economy, or even on
those who have their retirement income invested in equities. While
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and House
leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Minority Leader John Boehner may
point frantically to the falling Dow as a dire warning to members of
Congress to take action, it is all just scaremongering.

The real issue is not the stock market—it’s the credit markets. And
these have been shut down to borrowers—both individuals and
corporates—for months. Which means that there is no sudden urgency to
pass a lousy, rip-off bailout bill in days without proper hearings and
investigations into what is really needed.

The Bush Administration’s whole idea here from the start was to use
scare-mongering and high-pressure tactics honed in the 2002 campaign to
gin up a war against Iraq to get a bill through Congress that would
make a virtual dictator out of the Treasury Secretary, and to siphon a
trillion dollars or more out of taxpayers’ accounts and into the
pockets of the already stunningly rich financial class. It was to be
one final wrecking ball by the Bush/Cheney gang launched at the
American economic and political system, allowing the people who have
run the country into the ground over the last eight years, and their
financial backers to walk away with all the cookies.

It could still happen if the public doesn’t stay fired up and
angry. But for now, it’s at least exciting and deeply satisfying to see
the Administration, and the cowards who run the so-called Democratic
opposition in Congress, scrambling frantically to come up with a scheme
to get this ripoff passed.

What should happen? Congressional Democrats should put a hold on any action until after Election Day, which after all is only five weeks off. They should say that the voters must be heard on this critical national issue of how to rescue the economy and fix the financial system. Hearings should be scheduled in the relevant committees—oversight, banking, securities regulation, housing, the elderly, health and human services, etc. (yes, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is right in observing that given that most bankruptcies in the US are caused by medical emergencies, if the US had national healthcare, we wouldn’t have the housing foreclosure crisis)—and a special prosecutor should be established to look into the corruption behind all the recent financial sector failures. The real victims of the deregulatory orgy need to be heard, as do some of the 200 economists (including at least three nobel laureates) who have opposed this bailout. Then when the true nature and extent of the crisis and its causes have been laid out in clear public view, along with some real solutions for real people, appropriate legislative reforms should be drawn up, debated and voted upon, to be finally enacted into law.

No rush to judgment! No short-circuiting of the critical process of hearings!

The economy will survive this process.

What we cannot survive is a continuation of secret government, backroom deals and trillion-dollar bailouts.

BACK TO THE PHONES!
_______________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Power of "No"!

dlindorff — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:53:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the
very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy
for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do
whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant
oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written
of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the
financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting
the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands.
Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form
of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which
will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed
too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably
lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz
says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a
major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this
trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank
failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking
$1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage
is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that
will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar
collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of
huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in
dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that
Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life
thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise
dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding,
interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the
economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress
joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter
to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to
get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public
gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's
nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public
is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are
being sold a bill of goods.

If you haven't made an effort to call your two senators and your
representative to demand that they vote "No" on this bailout, do it now
(the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don't give up when
you get a busy signal. That's a sign that you are not alone. Just keep
hitting "redial" until you get through. At that point, get the
operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your
three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard
number after that.

Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, this latest bum's rush can still be stopped.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Iraq All Over Again: Bush, Paulson and Bernanke are Just Crying Wolf

dlindorff — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:09:57 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Hold everything!

Talk about déjà vu. Remember when Bush and his cabinet officers were
running all over in late 2002 crying wolf about Iraq’s supposed nukes,
and threatening that inaction on a war resolution by the Congress would
leave them to blame when the “mushroom cloud” appeared over some
American city?

Well, now they’re doing it again, this time claiming that economic
Armageddon faces the US and even the global economy if Congress doesn’t
hand over all power over the economy to the Secretary of the Treasury
in absolute contravention of the most fundamental principle of the
Constitution, which establishes that the budget be in the control of
Congress. These guys are saying if Congress doesn’t vote to hand over
$700 billion or more of taxpayer money to the Treasury to dole out to
fat cat bankers, the resulting economic collapse will be on their heads.

But here’s the thing. Just as nobody else in the world was freaking
out about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear threat, nobody is
particularly panicked about the US or the global economy. If investors,
who are supposed to be all wise about things economic, were worried
that the roof was about to cave in, they’d be selling stocks as fast as
they could dial their brokers. And the institutional investors—those
with the real inside information—not to mention the managements of
companies, who really know the true state of affairs of their own
firms—would be unloading shares at fire sale prices. The stock market
would be falling like it fell in 1987, or, if what these administration
con artists are claiming were really the case, even farther. That is to
say, we’d be seeing a 3000-4000 point drop in the Dow.

But we’re not seeing that. The Dow Jones average this week fell a
modest 8 percent and then recovered by 4 percent, and yesterday, the
broader S&P index actually rose. Some panic!

We’re told that there is a credit crisis, but people are still
getting mortgages. I know a retired woman of modest means who just went
in and refinanced her mortgage at a lower rate. Businesses are still
receiving loans, too, and while they might want a lower rate, they’re
still meeting payroll. Banks haven’t jacked up interest rates to absurd
levels.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told
a select group of Congressional leaders earlier this week that if they
didn’t rush through their three-page proposal giving them draconian
power to shovel public money into banker’s coffers, the country would
be instantly plunged into a major recession.

But when Congress balked at this power-grabbing rip-off, it caused
barely a ripple in the stock markets, which are down less than 10
percent from their level when the crisis first struck with the bailout
of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Let’s be honest: this is an artificial panic, or worse, an effort
to create one. It’s not a real panic. When you have the president and
the treasury secretary and the Fed chairman going around warning of a
steep recession or a depression, you have to ask yourself why these
guys are yelling “Fire!” in the theater. In a real crisis, President
Franklin Roosevelt preached calm (“We have nothing to fear but fear
itself.”). This president says, “Be afraid. Real afraid!”

The truth is, this is a very normal economic downturn, with the
exception that a lot of banks are holding an unusual amount of really
rotten debt—the result of their own greed and fraud.

The answer is not to bail these rotten institutions out. It’s to let them fail.

I realized what was happening when the Bush Administration spent
$85 billion assuming all the bad debt of AIG in return for warrants
giving it the right to up to 80 percent ownership of the insurance
giant, when, at that day’s share value, the Treasury could have bought
the whole company outright for just $7 billion.

If we’re concerned about the homeowners who hold subprime
mortgages, the government can step in and order the banks to
renegotiate the terms of those loans to make them fixed 30-year
mortgages that people can actually afford to pay, and it can step in
and guarantee them. In return for covering the bankers’ asses on those
loans, the government can take over the worst banks, and take ownership
positions in others as it sees fit.

If the economy slows down because of all of this, the answer is for
the government to start spending on programs that will create new
jobs—R&D funding for new non-carbon energy sources, public funded
power generation projects using wind, waves and solar energy,
infrastructure repair, public transit expansion, more teachers for our
schools. Every dollar spent on these kinds of things will circulate
back into the economy immediately, helping to bring the economy back.
Funneling money to banks won’t help, because the odds are, much of it
will flow overseas where there’s a better return.

In short, Congress needs to call the president’s bluff.

The public knows it’s being had here. We’ve seen the deceitful
nature of this administration, and we know now that everything it says
is a lie.

Bush and his treasury secretary, however, are right about one
thing: Congress is going to be blamed if they do the wrong thing. But
the wrong thing isn’t failing to approve a $700-billion Wall Street
bailout. The wrong thing would be approving it.
________________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Corporate Media Journalists Just Love Rich Guys

dlindorff — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:39:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are
in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous
praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion
on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested
wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s
$700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street?

Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman
Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about
to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with
government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5
billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step
up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly.

What a guy! A true hero.

And then the corporate media praises the man for his “courage” and his “faith in the markets.”

But that’s only one guy. We also have the panic among Wall Street
industry lobbyists, working overtime to make sure that nobody in
Congress seriously tries to limit executive compensation in the
financial sector. As one lobbyist put it today, “If you limit the
amount a bank or investment bank can pay for talented people, they
won’t be able to hire them.”

Wait a minute. Wasn’t America famous for the “work ethic” of its
people? We’re always told that Americans want the “dignity” of a job,
and that we Americans have this wonderful “work ethic.” Give us a
job—any job—and, whatever the pay, we’ll buckle down and do it to the
best of our ability.

That apparently doesn’t apply to the upper ranks of the banking
elite, though. If they can “only” earn $400,000, instead of $40 million
a year, they’re not going to lift a goddam finger.

Smart guys like John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch, and Kenneth
Lewis, head of Bank America, or Dick Fuld, head of now bankrupt Lehman
Brothers, would never do a lick of work in the Wall Street mines if
they could only earn a few hundred grand for their efforts. If that was
all they could earn, they’d rather stay home and clip coupons.

There’s your “work ethic” for you.

I’m not so bothered by the sloth and greed of the Wall Street
crowd. What bothers me is the respect they are treated with by the
journalists covering them.

I mean, come on. These are just greedy people who got where they
got because they went to the right schools, made the right connections,
and checked their principles and morals at the door when they entered
the building. Their sole motivation in life is making money—as much as
they can possibly hoard.

The truth is it’s pretty easy to get rich if you’re willing to
screw the public to do it, and it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s
what’s been going on with Wall Street, especially over the last two
decades of deregulated boom times.
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:05:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What nobody in the corporate media is mentioning amid all the
blather about the $700-billion Paulson bailout proposal is the impact
it will have on the US dollar.

We are told that this huge gift to the financial sector—the
assumption, at top dollar, of all the bad debt they’ve piled up--will
be at taxpayer expense, but that’s only the half of it. (Really only
the quarter of it because since the US government is technically
bankrupt already, spending more than it takes in each year, all that
money will be borrowed, and will be added to the national debt, meaning
that just as the real cost of the $500-billion Iraq War is closer to $2
trillion, the real cost of the $700 billion bailout will be more like
$1.5-2.5 trillion.)

But besides the direct bill handed to taxpayers for this gigantic
con, there is the fact that adding that much to the national debt is
also going to drive the dollar down precipitously against foreign
currencies. We’re already seeing that happen, even while they’re just
talking about the bailout. The dollar is falling against all major
currencies—the Euro, the Yen, the Renminbi and the British pound. And
it will continue to fall as the details of the bailout come out.

This will add to already powerful pressures in countries like Saudi
Arabia and China, which hold huge quantities of US dollars and US
dollar-denominated debt, to shift out of dollars and into other
currencies—particularly the Euro and the Yen. Last week, an article in
China’s People’s Daily, which like Pravda in the old Soviet Union, is
the official voice of the leadership in China, called for just such a
move. Russia is also calling for an end to the dollar as the
underpinning of the global economy.

For some years now, many economists have been predicting an end to
the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, but this latest plan by the
US Treasury will push such a shift forward from “some day” to “now.”

As long as the dollar has been the reserve currency—the currency in
which key commodities like gold or oil were priced, and the currency
that exporting nations stocked in their treasuries as a store of value
– it was protected against collapse. But once it loses that status,
there will be nothing to prop it up any longer, and it will quickly
slide to a value that it deserves. We got an inkling of what is going to happen today, as crude oil
prices leapt in the course of one hour by 25%, the biggest jump in the
history of the oil market. This was purely a move caused by loss of
confidence in the dollar. There was no oil supply disruption. In fact,
demand for oil has been sinking as the economic crisis grows. Oil
producers and traders simply realized that the dollar is going poof, so
they radically jacked up the cost of oil in dollars.

If you want to see what where the dollar is headed,, look to the
currencies of the debtor nations—countries like Mexico or perhaps
Mozambique. A nation that makes almost nothing, and that imports most
of its needs, cannot have a strong currency.

This might not matter much if we had a functioning domestic
economy, where people could find the goods and services they needed
without turning to sources from abroad. A big country like the US could
simply turn inward and function on by its own domestic economic
standards.

I remember back when the former Soviet Union was in a state of
economic and political free fall in the early and mid 1990s, the
currencies of the constituent countries, like Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had had collapsed to virtual worthlessness on the international
market. A Byelorussian friend, an engineering professor from Minsk,
living and working near me in China at the time, explained that
although when he traveled the world, he felt like a pauper, things
weren’t so bad back home Belarus, where he and his family would go in
the summer. “My apartment only costs a few dollars a month to rent,” he
explained, “and our food is bought on the local market using rubles, so
it is very affordable.” The same was true for other needs, like
clothing and books for school, he explained. The only problem was
buying gas for his Russian Volga. “Gas,” he explained, “is priced as an
international commodity, so it takes me one month’s wages in Belarus to
buy the gas to drive once to and from our country dacha.”

You can start to see the problem. Since agriculture has been killed
off in most of the US, in favor of giant agribusiness enterprises
situated in the western part of the country and some parts of the
Midwest, most people elsewhere will not have local produce available,
and the cost of transporting food from California to places like New
York or Pennsylvania will be prohibitive once the dollar collapses,
since oil is priced internationally. Meanwhile, goods like TV sets,
computers, phones, cars (or at least the key components of cars),
clothing, etc., are no longer even made in the US, and will thus be
completely unaffordable. As for the service jobs that are supposed to
have replaced our old manufacturing sector, no one will be interested
in buying what they’re offering, because they’ll be scrimping just to
buy the key staples they need to survive, so of course joblessness will
soar.

Eventually, of course, entrepreneurially minded people will begin
establishing local farms again where they once flourished generations
ago, and small factories will be built to provide key essentials, but
all this will take time, and will have to cater to a market of people
operating at a much lower standard of living.

The banking sector, meanwhile, which is the proximate cause of this
monumental disaster, won’t mind any of this, for it will continue
operating on the international stage, shifting its focus to lending
money (no longer dollars, though), to growing economies in Asia and
Latin America and eastern Europe. And this is what, in truth, the
“rescue” of Wall Street is all about.

It’s not about saving Main Street, as Paulson claims. Main Street,
under the bailout, is toast. It’s about helping the banks and
investment banks and insurance companies that brought on this crisis to
ride it out in style, their astronomical losses bankrolled or absorbed
by the American public, so that they can shift their operations
overseas and continue with their rape and pillage of the global economy.

The US will be left behind, a smoking ruin, with Americans, like
Weimar Germans before them, going shopping with wheelbarrows full of
worthless green paper to exchange for a few days’ groceries.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

"No Blank Check" or "No %$#!*@ Check"

davidswanson — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:35:24 -0400

By David Swanson

The last time the Democrats all started bleating "No blank check - No blank check" it meant only one thing. They were signing a check and scribbling a bunch of nonsense in the memo line.

If history is any guide, we can expect a bill to come out of Congress requiring that the Secretary of the Treasury make a report to Congress within three months on all areas covered by the legislation, with the exception of those he chooses not to report on.

In particular, he will be required, if he chooses, to report on the progress being made toward compelling families that have lost their homes to pay for their own foreclosures. Fair is fair, and the Iraqis are going to start paying for their own occupation someday very soon.

The Treasury Secretary will be required to report, if he chooses, on key benchmarks, including equitable sharing among all plutocrats of our Social Security savings. This is a question of fair and equitable distribution of resources and might serve as a model for the still badly needed Iraq hydro-carbon law, which is also purely about fairness. The same goes for Medicare and the money raised from selling off our schools.

At least that's the pessimistic prediction. On the other hand, there is an important variable that has been altered in this case. We are talking about throwing a trillion dollars of our grandchildren's money at people who do not need it, but this time we're proposing to do it for something other than war. There are no flags waving or war music playing for this one. As a result, it's possible to see things like an article on CNN that begins:

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- 'NO NO NO. Not just no, but HELL NO,' writes Richard, a reader from Anchorage, Alaska. 'This is robbery pure and simple,' Anna from Denver posted on CNNMoney.com's TalkBack blog this weekend. 'It's our money! Let these companies die,' added Claudio from Plainville, Conn."

Similar comments on wars are simply not published by CNN in the heat of an invasion. Will our so-called representatives notice the difference? I wouldn't count on it. The smart investment right now is in a moving van pointed toward Canada.

I just read Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew," and his central point is a timely one. When neocons wreck government they consider it a victory. Scandalous earmarks on bills are a good thing because they make people hate government, which is the higher purpose of all governmental malfeasance. When FEMA proves incompetent, success has been achieved, because the goal is to convince everyone that government is incompetent, that corporations are where all skill and responsibility can be found.

"People being pissed off at government is the very ore of right-wing discontent," Frank writes. "Corrupt earmarks, inserted by conservatives, lead to conservative victory. But, you protest, nobody really falls for this. Everyone knows that the guy who got the 'Bridge to Nowhere' earmark was a conservative Republican. People know where the blame belongs, and they punish the malefactor.

"Maybe so. But remember the long-term effects of Watergate. While the immediate consequences of Nixon's outrageous behavior were jail sentences for several conservative Republicans and the election of a bumper crop of liberals to Congress in 1974, Watergate permanently poisoned public attitudes toward government and stirred up the wave that swept Ronald Reagan into office six years later -- and made antigovernment cynicism the default American political sentiment."

All of which puts a different perspective on a government proposal to hand governmental levels of funding over to Wall Street. If the proposal goes through and the companies survive, the credit goes to Wall Street and the crushing debt requiring slashing of useful services goes to government. If the proposal fails, it also succeeds, by turning people against big government spending and interference in the Marketplace. After all, this proposal is "socialism," and if you oppose it, then you certainly must oppose such identical horrors as "socialized medicine."

For neocons, this was an easy decision. When you control the media, and your opponents are Democrats, there's almost no way for you to lose. So why wouldn't you propose borrowing a trillion dollars to hand out to your friends?

Of course, in theory, the Democrats could stop saying "No blank check" and start saying "No +&*^%!# check!" but I'm not going to hold my breath until they do.