Dave Lindorff: The Power of "No" and the Need to Keep the Pressure on Congress

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/lindorff/151


Incredible! This time, when the People spoke, Congress listened.

At least 228 members of the House listened. They voted early this afternoon to reject the Bush Administration's scaremongering, and the cowardly Democratic Congressional leadership's attempt at ducking and covering by attaching some meaningless verbiage to what remains a case of legalized highway robbery. At least for the moment, the bailout scam is killed.

Earlier in the day, the Congressional switchboard was jammed. You could get through, but it took a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations with phone calls (and e-mails) urging them to vote "No" on the Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today was no exception, even after Democratic Party leaders (and both major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama) had bought into the plan following their adding of some window-dressing measures designed to make it look more palatable, showed that the public is not being fooled (calls were reportedly running better than 9:1 or more like 999:1 against a bailout, perhaps more like 99:1).

People see clearly that this proposal is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the U.S. economy for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written of this outrageous ripoff, there are four problems facing the financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one -- getting the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands. Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form of loans made to people and companies that cannot be repaid, which will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system -- a major crisis that the bailout will also not solve.

[David Dunham]

1. NY, NJ, CT, CA, and IL all depend on finance. No bailout, we're screwed