Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Bennett: Congress Has One More Shot to Get Wall Street Bailout Right

Senator Bennett jumps aboard the bailout bandwagon

Well here we go again, gentle readers. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah Senator For Life Bob Bennett is champing at the bit to pass the "slightly tweaked" U.S. Senate version of the Banking Cartel Bailout Bill which was defeated in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday. From this morning's SLTrib story:

WASHINGTON - Utah Sen. Bob Bennett joined other proponents of the failed Wall Street bailout who tried Tuesday to repackage it as a "financial rescue plan" that will save the average American from financial ruin.
In a 20-minute speech on the floor of the Senate, Bennett, a Republican, warned that Congress would only have one more shot at this before the market tanks. He said the stock market plummeted Monday because Wall Street thought Congress had failed in its bid to pass a $700 billion boost to faltering financial firms. The market rebounded Tuesday, Bennett said, because political leaders promised to stay in Washington until a deal is reached.
"If we break the expectation once again, this time the market will drop and there will be no coming back up," Bennett said. "This time your 401(k), your pension plan, your retirement account will be hurt in a way that will take years to recover."
According to various other media sources, this bill could be brought to the Senate floor as early as this afternoon for a vote.

What Senator Bennett doesn't mention, of course is the $107,999 in campaign contributions the "good Utah Senator" has soaked up from banking interests since 1989, raising the inevitable question: exactly whose interests does Senator Bennett propose to protect, with his vigorous embrace of the U.S. Banking industry bailout?

In this connection we link a fine article from the Ludvig von Mises website, which provides this instructive text:

In this article, we will of course cover why the Keynesian justifications — coming from a "free-market" administration — are nonsense. But in the grand scheme, that's not entirely relevant. People didn't seriously consider the testimony of the tobacco company CEOs about the nonexistent dangers of smoking, because everyone knew those executives stood to lose billions from the settlement. So by the same token, no one should pay much attention to the official statements made by Henry Paulson, since he stands to personally be put in charge of doling out hundreds of billions of dollars to some of the most powerful people on the planet.
Whether Senator Bennett can faithfully serve the interests of his consituents, while being the beneficiary of such banking industry largesse we do not know... but we believe his relationship with his banking benefactors raises some interesting questions. At the very least, Bennett is clearly parroting the sales pitch of the banking industry, who have a direct pecuniary interest in this bailout.

Being the curious type, we googled. We were interested in the viewpoints of non banking industry economic experts without such financial interests... and we found something most enlightening. We link below the September 24, 2008 statement (updated 9/27/08) of 231 American academic economists (including several Nobel laureates) on the subject of the bailout:

9/24/08 U.S. Economists' Statement

Experts are in plainly serious disagreement about this important matter. Taking the foregoing into account, it's obvious that this matter deserves further public debate, and should not be summarily shoved down the lumpencitizens' throats.

Contact Senators Bennett and Hatch, and demand public hearings on this matter. This is too important for a kneejerk response. Do it NOW:

Congressional Contact Links

Comments, anyone?

Update 10/1/08 9:51 a.m. MT: American taxpayers are enraged about the bailout. We learn now that the U.S. Congressional email server has been intermittently jammed. One of our gentle readers has thus forwarded to us a list of alternate Congressional contact links, which we've pasted to an archive page here:

Congress / Senate Switchboards

Snoozers will be losers.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Senator Bennett says the market is going down because they didn't pass a bailout. I wonder why it was going down before that. Could it be years of Bennett's sucking up to the banks allowed them to run amok and almost ruin us? And now he wants to bail them out too?

Who votes for scum like this?

Anonymous said...

Not me.

He's an idiot.

Trust me on this...

RudiZink said...

We post here this fantastic article, dealing with the origins and lingering problems that threaten our western world economy, due to the failure of private, unregulated "bubble economics," i.e., "overinvestment and "malinvestment."

There's considerable economic jargon here.

We post it nevertheless, because it's the best article we've seen to date explaining, in concise macroeconomic theory, the mechanics of current "The U.S. Mortgage Market Meltdown."

Read it over and over... you'll ultimately get the drift.

Tonight's hastily-drafted Senate bailout bill is definitely NOT the "silver bullet" which will save our ailing economy.

It's not "perfect," all of these market meddlers readily admit. It will not solve the "dollar valuation" problem, nor put 300,00 recently canned U.S. workers back to work.

The only aspect it addresses, even now, is rescuing the very financial institutions who got us into this mess in the first place.

It's narrowly geared to throw a life raft to the comnaies who put the worls economy in jeopardy in the firsts place.

Anonymous said...

More Scare tactics from the Bush clown and his buddies... Although I thought there would be more Republicans and not so many Dems jumping in on the scare-o-meter. Tyical and completely predictable reaction by the administration... but I can't help but wonder what all these Dems have to gain by supporting a bill that still has overwhelming opposition.

Anonymous said...

Listened to Sen .Jim DeMint and now listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders on C-SPAN.

Very good guys. There are just too few of them.

So many of the senators are scum like Bennett. Trash who say, gee, this is too bad, but I gotta do it, while the bankers are stuffing their pockets behind the podium.

Senate will probably pass it. Hope the House saves us.

Anonymous said...

The last act of any corrupt government before they're driven from power:

"Loot the public treasury."

Vote Obama!

Anonymous said...

Ron Paul: Buying bad debt is the wrong solution:

Roberts: OK, OK. So we recognize all of the things that got us here. But, right now, today, what would you do, if not this bill?

Paul: You have to liquidate those mistakes. Those mistakes were made due to monetary policy. So you have to allow the market to adjust prices downward. And that's what we're not allowing to do.

If there are too many houses and the prices are too high, the sooner we get the prices down to the market level, as soon as we quit trying to encourage more housing -- this is what we're doing. They're trying to stimulate houses and keep prices high. It's exactly opposite of what we should do.

So, we should get out of the way and not buy up bad debt. There's illiquid assets, but most of those are probably worthless. They're mostly derivatives. And we're sticking those with the taxpayer. So we have to recognize that the liquidation of debt is crucial. And if we did that, we would have tough times, there's no doubt about it, for a year. But if we keep propping a system up that's not viable, we're going to have a problem for decades, just like we did in the Depression. That's what we're on the verge of doing.

Anonymous said...

I knew Senator Wallace C. Bennett.

He was an honest, old school Republican conservative.

Believe me, his idiot son is no Wallace C. Bennett

Anonymous said...

Bennett and Hatch both voted for it.

After the bailout passed the Senate, the Dow Jones Index fell 100 points over the next hour.

This won't work. Tell Rob Bishop and Jim Matheson to hold firm against the pressure the fat cats will apply to them.

Anonymous said...

The culture of corruption is still on capitol hill.

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