Bailout of Insiders by Insiders

Dennis Kucinich interviewed on the bailout by Amy Goodman:

I said we’re the Congress of the United States; we’re not the board of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is struggling to survive. And, you know, their former chief is now the head of the US Treasury. He’s in a position to be able to direct assets in a way that would help enhance his own financial standing. I mean, that’s a clear conflict of interest. And, you know, that’s something that needs to be said. You know, why are we permitting the person who has essentially been in a position where he’s managed assets that—you know, many of which are now in trouble, and he can come back and help clear the books for a lot of his friends? This is wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong. And, you know, it’s one of the things that adds a degree of stench to this.

And to the larger points, Kucinich says:

It seems to me there’s a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it. And that really concerns me, because we haven’t had enough time to look at this in an in-depth way, to analyze the impact of it on the economy, to see if it’s going to do anything about a recession that we’re obviously headed into, to see if it’s going to handle the underlying concerns on Wall Street about the speculation and a lack of regulation. The bill doesn’t, by the way, address anything about the speculation, anything about the lack of regulation. The SEC has failed. The Fed has failed. And we’re essentially telling all the same actors, “Go for it. You know, here’s another opportunity,” except this time it’s with taxpayers’ money.

Comments

[JJ Commoner]

I think he's right.

[History's Actors On Stage]

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

[ikorush sikorsky]

The problem with this is that Kucinich's descriptive genius, the uncanny knack with which he is able to pull the blinders from our eyes, and in plain language, shockingly assert that "something about capitalism stinks," is then followed by an stunning prescriptive lapse, in which he advocates abolishing the Federal Reserve as we currently know it. He's an advocate of full reserve banking, which has adherents only among hard money crackpots (of course, there may be some sympathy in this region for hard money crackpots, based on previous posts).

When it comes to a collapse of the banking/credit/stock system, I don't really have a dog in that race, so I can only speak as a disinterested observer, but given the choice between Wall Street's Plan A and Kooky Kucinich's Plan B, I say go with plan A!

[Phil]

I am grateful for his diagnosis. The prescription is beyond us all, it seems.