The No, No, No Bailouts Act!

(Protect your retirement, income and an opportunity to buy a home at a fair and real market price. Sign U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' petition against the Bush bailout of Wall Street. Also, listen to Glenn Greenwald's interview of Pulitzer-prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston on how the corporate media has once again failed the American people.)

A House Democrat has presented a pragmatic plan—the No Bailouts Act—to help solve the country’s current investment banking and financial crisis.

The Democratic leadership, including presidential contender Barack Obama, should get behind this plan, help to improve it and then work to pass it. Essentially, the plan shifts the burden and risk of saving Wall Street to those people who made the bad decisions that led their companies into insolvency.

There is some government help and guarantees, but nothing along the lines of the $700 billion plan pushed by President George Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to further enrich the GOP political base on Wall Street.

Here is what the corporate media is not reporting: There are many established economists who believe the Bush/Paulson bailout plan will not even work. Can you imagine giving a $700 billion gift to Wall Street bankers without any real sense or guarantee the money would settle the market and help regular people with credit, retirement and mortgages? But that is exactly the real risk of the Bush/Paulson plan. The corporate media coverage of the Bush bailout is similar to its coverage of the run-up to the Iraq occupation. It takes every utterance of the Bush administration as the truth, fails to fact check hysterical and outrageous claims and mocks and dismisses anyone who has a different opinion.

The No Bailouts Act ((Bringing Accountability, Increased Liquidity, Oversight, and Upholding Taxpayer Security) is sponsored by Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat. According to media reports, the plan is based on ideas presented by former FDIC Chair William Isaac, who wants to help banks get enough capital to weather the current financial crisis. A similar program during the 1980s banking crisis only cost the federal government $2 billion.

The idea is to lend help to the short-term banking crisis while allowing political leaders time to develop a more comprehensive economic plan that helps all Americans. This plan will probably have to be implemented after the November elections because of the possible political fallout.

Media pundits from all sides of the political spectrum, including Paul Krugman and George Will ("Congress should disconnect from a public" that cannot comprehend the nuances and complications of high finance), have now arrogantly mocked anyone who wants to respond to the so-called financial crisis outside of the Bush/Paulson rubric. The prevailing hysterical mantra in the corporate media is “we have to do something right away,” and if you do not favor the Bush/Paulson plan then “you do not get it.” But no one has offered a shred of compelling evidence that Bush is somehow right on this issue given his administration’s past failures.

As I have said in earlier posts, this is a carpe diem moment for Democrats. Now is the time, as the country focuses on the abject failure of right-wing ideology, to reclaim our economic system for regular people after eight gruesome years of the Bush program, which has rewarded the rich at the expense of the middle class. The bottom line is the Wall Street crooks will squander your income and retirement money as their media lapdogs, some of whom disguised themselves as liberals, openly laugh in your face. What else is new, right?