AND THE B.S. BANKERS

I see the Senate Banking Committee is interrogating Sec. Paulson. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s someting wrong…oh, yeah; where is Senator Obama? He told the Israelis that this was “his committee”. Yet he’s nowhere to be seen. Odd.

Maybe he meant that it was ‘his committeee’ in the sense that he and Chairman Dodd lead the nation in taking donations from Freddie & Fannie. And that the two guys who looted millions and millions from Freddie are his advisors. Maybe that’s what he meant.

Newt Shoots, Toots Roots:

If a Democratic administration were proposing this plan, Republicans would realize that having Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Dodd (the largest recipient of political funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) as chairman of the Banking Committee guarantees that the Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Paulson plan that will emerge will be much worse as legislation than it started out as the Paulson proposal.

If this were a Democratic proposal, Republicans would remember that the Democrats wrote a grotesque housing bailout bill this summer that paid off their left-wing allies with taxpayer money, which despite its price tag of $300 billion has apparently failed as of last week, and could expect even more damage in this bill.

But because this gigantic power shift to Washington and this avalanche of taxpayer money is being proposed by a Republican administration, the normal conservative voices have been silent or confused. ………..

The result [of Sarbanes Oxley] has been in the second quarter of this year, we had zero new public offerings by new companies, and in the third quarter we had one. We used to have thirty or forty every quarter. That’s how bad Sarbanes Oxley is weakening this economy.

As a principled conservative it is even more sobering to see the amount of economic power being centralized in Washington with these interventions. Deals are being struck behind closed doors with little or no transparency. Things are happening at the intersection of politics and finance that we, the American people, know nothing about except the potential price tag we will pay. These many new federal responsibilities will politicize finances at giant institutions and will guarantee massive increases in lobbying.

Lobbyists are a consequence of big government not a cause of it. The more money centered in government the more value there will be in hiring a lobbyist. …It will become more profitable to influence a politician than to invent a product. If the market rejects you or your ideas fail to compete, the help of your lobbyist may be all you need. Your lobbyist may be able to get government to protect you from your own failure. …..What we need is to return to a Reagan-Thatcher policy of economic growth through fundamental reforms. Faced with bad policies in the late 1970s both President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher rejected the political establishment’s policies and advocated a bold return to the fundamental principles of a market economy.

It’s clear that the National Disgrace Congress will never own up to the fact that they forced these institutions to make bad loans in the first place, in the name of ‘fairness’. They will never admit to all the money they took, such as Rangel’s 10 million from AIG. They will not admit how they blocked all attempts to reform, including Bush’s 2005 attempt. They will not repeal the bad laws they’ve made such as ‘Sarbanes’, nor refrain from making more as evidenced by Barney Frank’s cowardly voice vote to return to making no down payment loans to broke people.

In other words, while I think Treasury means well, this looks and smells like Business As Usual for the Politician/Industrial Complex.