Slow-mo party fracture

Steve Benen on some of the politics of the bailout earlier this week:

Let me get this straight. The Republican president supported the bill. The Republican Senate leadership supported the bill. The Republican House leadership supported the bill. The Republican presidential nominee supported the bill. And the Republican National Committee runs an ad insisting that Obama's bailout package "will make the problem worse."

I'm so numb to this stuff I have no outrage left. I'm just confused.

...to be fair, the Republican rank and file dissented just enough for the first attempt to pass the bill in the house failed. But I think that only sort of proves my point about the party fracturing.

....the left hand is campaigning for the bill and the right is campaigning against it, and there's no cognitive dissonance whatsoever. Funny.

Monday

BuyMyShitPile.com. Awesome.

Literally no one in America thinks the economy is getting better. (See the the third table down.) Also, Bush's approval rating is down to 19% - and yet, I still predict the Democrats will capitulate and bail out a bunch of financial institutions that f*cked up with no meaningful oversight and no guarantee of future good behavior.

As Atrios says: Capitalism! Fuck Yeah!

Preznit takin your turkee

When I said this:

This is also, in a way, the continuation of one way of reading neoliberalism: The privatization of profit and the publicization of risk. Only in this case, it's being done in the open - the risk is being publicized (that is, the bill is being footed by taxpayers) after things went bad.

I didn't think it would be taken so literally:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets.

...

A $700 billion expenditure on distressed mortgage-related assets would be roughly what the country has spent so far in direct costs on the Iraq war and more than the Pentagon’s total yearly budget appropriation. Divided across the population, it would amount to more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

All those political philosophy classes I took seem more relevant than ever right about now. Sadly, this is depressing, not exciting.

So I'll say to Bush what I refrained from saying to Hering yesterday: Fuck you.

... if the Dems fold/cave/go along on this one, there's no doubt I'm fucking voting for McKinney. This is insane.


Also, Atrios retains his ability to spell it out like no one else can:

Again, the problem is that lots of bad loans were made, lots of people made highly leveraged investments in those bad loans, and still more people bet on those loans by insuring them. The loans are bad. The mortgages are not going to be repaid in full. Housing prices are not going to magically shoot up 50% over the next 6 months. People gambled and lost and now the Democrats are racing to bail them all out.

In case that I'm not being clear enough, what's happening is that the US government just proposed giving $700 billion to a bunch of companies that knowingly made bad deals. Crony capitalism doesn't even begin to describe it.

UPDATE: Atrios finds this bit in the text of the act submitted to Congress authorizing the spending:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Why anyone in their right mind is going to do anything but kick the ass of the folks who submitted this is beyond me. Nevertheless, I predict that Democrats will take this 'bill' seriously.

A Brief Thought on Politics and Government

I like the distinction Lebanon Truth makes in this comment thread between politics and government. However, I think Rovian/Bush Republicans don't make that distinction anymore. Government is politics, to a degree never before seen.

Take, for example, any of the following:

- Department of Justice disqualifying anyone who worked for any kind of liberal or liberal cause from being hired under certain programs (google 'Monica Goodling').

- Karl Rove giving presentations to civil service employees regarding how to make sure Republican candidates win elections.

- That the Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control (this was in the NYT recently).

- HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson saying outright that "of course" he would never give contracts to companies who have donated money to Democrats.

- Republican Senators setting records for filibustering once Dems took the Senate in 2006; this after trying to eliminate the filibuster as an option for four years when they had control (the so-called 'nuclear option').

Those are from a few minutes of thinking, and all are focused on those things that, in theory, should be the realm of government and not politics. I've heard dozens, if not hundreds of examples.

When I try to make this point to others, the most common rebuttal I get is that the Democrats are just as guilty, so let me address that now: Of course the Dems are guilty of patronage and bending the rules - but as I mentioned, this is a conflation of politics and government in what is effectively a new way (even if it's really just an old way brought back to life), one that actually threatens the functionality of government. It also shatters the understanding that certain things are best left unpoliticized.

Does this make me naive? Not at all - I am not terribly surprised at the behavior of Karl Rove so much as I am a little surprised the Dems haven't pushed back at all. However, the uneasy consensus that had existed around this distinction is gone, and people's lives are being rather negatively affected by the changes (see, for example, either the refusal to fund anything but abstinence-only overseas or the current housing crisis and the pathetic, ideological response of Ben Bernanke and the Fed). Rather, I'm deploring it not because it's the loss of some ideal state of existence - far from it - but because it's materially hurting people.

Thank you, Todd Simmons. My degree is now worth less for having read what you had to say.

While perusing the GT archives, I found this awesome story on how OSU ranks according to the US News and World Report. Check out this choice bit:

Over the years, Simmons said, OSU has remained steadily in the third tier, which he said is actually a testament to how hard the university has worked to keep retention, graduation and quality steady despite some very lean budget years.

Although OSU might be firmly stuck in the third tier, Simmons said the university isn’t suffering because of it.

“It really doesn’t have an impact on our recruitment,” he said.

One bright spot on the newly released report, Simmons said, is that OSU’s graduation rate has improved from 56 percent to 60 percent.

Simmons is more interested in other rankings, such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s classification, which ranks a university’s quality of research activity. OSU is the only Oregon university to receive a top ranking from the foundation.

“It’s a better reflection of what we really care about,” Simmons said.

Translation: F*** students F*** teaching! Bring on the research dollars!

I'm not saying research isn't a big deal, especially at land-grant school, and one that does do an amazing amount of world-class research. However, it clearly reflects OSU's bottom-line priority that research is more important than students - after all, tuition can't go up too fast, and state funding is, in the long run, decreasing, so it makes a certain amount of economic sense to concentrate on bringing in research funding. But there are 20,000 students here, and someone should tell them they're worth less to the OSU elite than a bunch of bacteria in a lab in a basement somewhere. This kind of move suggests that OSU, at the top, is less about being a university that offers a broad, rounded education and more about being a series of research labs and professional schools that offer job training.

Someone should make copies of this and distribute it at START sessions this summer...

Dispelling Myths

Dani Rodrik:

Look at the figure below, and then look at it again, and again, and again. It is the most telling picture about the U.S. political economy I have ever seen.

I pretty much concur wholeheartedly. Click the link to see for yourself.