Deepsepia
06-20-2011, 07:19 PM
I'm always interested when folks who ordinarily are at odds are in [surprising] agreement. Here Michael Hudson of the Progressive Radio Network offers a rather unexpected endorsement of Michelle Bachman and the Tea Party. I don't necessarily agree with either of them, and Hudson certainly doesn't like Bachman, but he's observant enough to say "I may not agree with her much of the time, but I agree with this"
The result is a financial schizophrenia extending across the political spectrum from the Tea Party to Tim Geithner at the Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Fed. It seems bizarre that the most reasonable understanding of why the 2008 bank crisis did not require a vast public subsidy for Wall Street occurred at Monday’s Republican presidential debate on June 13, by none other than Congressional Tea Party leader Michele Bachmann – who had boasted in a Wall Street Journal interview two days earlier, on Saturday, that she:
“voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) ‘both times.’… She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. ‘During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions [just [giving] the Treasury a $700 billion blank check], and his response was, “Well, Congress passed the law.” …With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided ‘Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.’”
Clarifying her position regarding her willingness to see the banks fail, Bachmann explained:
“I would have. People think when you have a, quote, ‘bank failure,’ that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It’s called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes.”
{snip}
Contrasting Bachmann’s remarks to the panicky claims by Geithner and Hank Paulson in September 2008 confirm a basic axiom of today’s junk economics: When an economic error becomes so widespread that it is adopted as official government policy, there is always a special interest at work to promote it.
full article at:
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/economic-news/2011/6/20/michael-hudson-when-only-crazies-see-the-bank-giveaway-for-w.html
The result is a financial schizophrenia extending across the political spectrum from the Tea Party to Tim Geithner at the Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Fed. It seems bizarre that the most reasonable understanding of why the 2008 bank crisis did not require a vast public subsidy for Wall Street occurred at Monday’s Republican presidential debate on June 13, by none other than Congressional Tea Party leader Michele Bachmann – who had boasted in a Wall Street Journal interview two days earlier, on Saturday, that she:
“voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) ‘both times.’… She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. ‘During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions [just [giving] the Treasury a $700 billion blank check], and his response was, “Well, Congress passed the law.” …With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided ‘Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.’”
Clarifying her position regarding her willingness to see the banks fail, Bachmann explained:
“I would have. People think when you have a, quote, ‘bank failure,’ that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It’s called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes.”
{snip}
Contrasting Bachmann’s remarks to the panicky claims by Geithner and Hank Paulson in September 2008 confirm a basic axiom of today’s junk economics: When an economic error becomes so widespread that it is adopted as official government policy, there is always a special interest at work to promote it.
full article at:
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/economic-news/2011/6/20/michael-hudson-when-only-crazies-see-the-bank-giveaway-for-w.html