The Republican Party tried to have it their way, but the GOP revolt may have just made things worse.
The economy is in peril.
"At this point, we have absolutely no participation or cooperation from House Republicans," Barney Frank said.
CNN reports that "Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson got down on one knee to half-jokingly beg Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders not to go to the television cameras and blast the failed negotiations, according to two senior Democratic aides."
These are not funny times.
If this is how the Republicans are acting during this awful time in our history, then we must vote every one of them out of office.
Our future is at stake!
George Vreeland Hill
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Comments: 48
The GOP had come up with a different plan, one that also wouldn't pass, and there's no guarantee that the first one would've passed -- though definitely not as-is. There would be changes written in (normal), and those changes might not benefit the homeowner.
Something will eventually pass, and as usual, nobody will be happy with it. I just read this article also on the AP site, with a bit more added on to it. If President Bush's own party doesn't agree with him, that really says something about the last eight years.
Back to the negotiating table today - with no guarantees that the Republican negotiators will even be there. What a mess - a mess we should've taken care of years ago, or fired those who were supposed to keep watch.
Good post, George.
Marilyn
But when elephants are fighting it's the ants on the ground at their feet who suffer most. We do have a huge stake in this but we have no control. We can affect the language that our political leaders use to describe the settlement but we can't really affect where the money goes. Don't you just love it?
To see how and why these things keep happening over and over you can visit www.nopom.info or read Invisible Hand. The latter is more fun but the former allows you to pick and choose specific aspects of the situation.
I will NOT grab my knees and kiss my butt good-bye. This is bad, but it aint' the worst. What could make it worse? The SOB that is commonly referred to as the President of these UNITED states could declare a national emergency and put the entire election on hold; NOT forfeit his position. Can he do that ? Yup.
Go ahead, Madam Speaker, tell us one more time that impeachment is "off the table".
It's time ~ no, it's PAST time that the backbone folks of our country finally show their strength!
There was no chance for Repub support, when shenanigans such as the funneling of Millions to ACORN was part of the "deal." Thank Bowney Fwank for that.
We're being taken for fools.
It's about time they started acting like the fiscally responsible party they like to claim to be instead of the drunken frat boys they've been acting like for the last 8 years.
John McCain’s sudden intervention in Washington’s deliberations over the Wall Street bailout could not have been more out of sync with what was actually happening.
He lamented that “partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges.” But for days, bipartisanship has been the rule in this argument.
Republicans and Democrats alike were highly critical of President Bush’s proposal to inject $700 billion into the financial system. Yet leaders of both parties were trying hard to negotiate an agreement with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. That’s why they were close to an agreement in principle even before the two presidential candidates arrived Thursday for the White House meeting that McCain thought was so important.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner normally fight about everything. But on Wednesday they issued a joint statement noting that “working in a bipartisan manner, we have made progress,” even if Boehner was having trouble delivering his party’s votes.
And if McCain had been following the negotiations closely, he would have known that at times this week Senate Democrats worried that Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was too eager for a deal.
Frank did not need McCain to make him bipartisan, and he grumbled that Thursday afternoon’s White House gathering was a mere “photo op.” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called it “political theater” that may have stalled the final agreement.
“political theater” & a mere “photo op.” is exactly what John McCain's presence is
I still insist, if the Federal Government purchases these bad loans for .50 on every dollar, they should then make affordable to the homeowners a new mortgage to repay the federal government the exact amount spent on the bail out.
If any bailout of the big boys takes place, then you will see real problems. We are no where near the "great Depression" of the 1930's. That one was manufactured so that big banks could buy property at bargain basement prices and take over little banks, 10,000 of them. There are no little banks today and they already have the property.
This is basically a market correction. Don't let the politicians scare you into turning the country completely over to them, and bailing out their brethren on wall street. If you look closely this is a close-knit group protecting their own, and trying to do it with our money.
The original bailout gave Paulson the powers of a dictator and that was totally unacceptable. That's why the public wanted no part of it.
Again, don't be afraid. No matter what we will survive. If the stock market drops, buy some.
You say that as if everyone involved with a bad mortgage was initially a scammer.
What about the new couple who bought their first house and then they both lost their jobs ?
Sometimes even Credit-worthy people fall on hard times.
You comment seems reflective of Hannity who said the Federal Government shouldn't loan money to "those minority people" who have never been credit worthy.
Richard Owl Mirror, care to hazard a guess as to how many ILLEGALS have Mortgages???
My sense is no bailout. Get McCain out of there if you want a chance for bipartisanship. The longer the nominees stay there, the longer this process takes.
Just an observation.
Even with that problem, mortgage foreclosures and late payment are under 5%.
This is a manufactured event for a power shift and a indirect money-grab. If left alone, the only to get significantly hurt are the cronies that brought it on.
There is nothing worthwhile in approving any plan granting a bailout. It will only further increase the plunder of the people and destroy the economy. There is an opportunity to set real goals to recreate the United States society and economy. But not along the lines the politicians are saying.
It would be insane to grant unconstitutional powers to the Treasury as proposed by Mr Paulson. Nothing that the government couldn't do today could be enhanced by doing so - except to give the banks more excuse to speculate as they would do - as they did with commodities, oil etc the past year - because they were bailed out. The mortgage business, credit crunch etc has to be dealt with by Congress - the banks and Wall Street won't do it - and that will require a different program including investment in creating jobs and rebuilding the economy. That could be planned for seriously in January. There is a sensible proposal by J K Galbraith I suggest you look into .
"A bailout we don't need"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/24/AR2008092403033_pf.html
And, by the way, need I remind you that both McCain and Obama are elected representatives from their states, and SHOULD be apart of this process. Being a senator, and doing his job is apparently of zero interest to Obama.
They have no business on the Campaign Trail, when there is serious WORK to be done!
"Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, said the Wall Street bailout is crucial, even though he doesn't believe it will solve the credit crunch that was hitting his members before the crisis started.
For this reason, Howard said as soon as Congress returns to work from its upcoming recess, his trade group will be asking for another package of between $40 billion and $90 billion directed towards the housing market."
So where will it end?
In Ron Pauls letter he said the bail out was a bad idea. I think I would believe Ron Paul over Bush any day
The "fuss" that the Republicans in the House have caused was basically an attempt at an alternative idea--insuring these loans instead of buying them. Private investors would have a whole lot less fears of taking them over, and the situation can be sorted out faster. That would save taxpayers billions of dollars.
If we're going to vote people out, let's vote the people out who caused this mess in the first place--the Congress members who were paid and lobbied to turn a blind eye to the original problem. I would love for part of this deal to include an investigation on the level of Enron. There may be a few Republicans in this mess, but it would bring down a whole lot of Democrats who blocked reform legislation for years.
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."
Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
They'll bring it to a vote again, and I hope it fails again!
"No" votes came from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. More than two-thirds of Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats opposed the bill. You Dems can blame the GOP if you want but if a dozen Dems had changed their votes, it would have passed too.