I for one welcome our unaccountable, conflicted Treasury overlord

Tula Connell of the AFL-CIO has a good post on what's wrong with the Bush Bailout scheme:

The bailout legislation that U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is insisting Congress pass immediately with no changes would give unprecedented power to a single political appointee: Paulson.

It’s not bad enough that Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs chief, wants America’s taxpayers to buy millions of worthless bonds from U.S.-based companies—with no penalties and no oversight for the corporations responsible for this mess. He wants to load us with the same junk debt from foreign corporations—overseas corporations like UBS, which just so happens to employ Phil Gramm, economic guru for Sen. John McCain.

Yes, the Phil Gramm who berated Americans for being a nation of whiners. According to Gramm, tough times are all psychological...unless, of course, the entity that needs money is a corporation instead of an American. Gramm has been out of the limelight lately, but he's still a close friend and adviser to McCain. McCain chaired Gramm's failed presidential campaign in 1996.

Ezra has a great post on the five worst flaws in the bailout. Think Progress notes that Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the largest beneficiaries of the bailout.

Update: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) has issued an interesting counter-proposal which includes strong Congressional oversight, limits on executive pay, bankruptcy reform, and measures to expedite future corporate governance reform.

Comments

[rawdawgbuffalo]

I just wanna know who either McCain's or Obama's Treasury Secretary

[Biochem Prof]

Let's not beat around the Bush here. The bill proposed by the White House would give Paulson more economic leverage than any person has ever had before -- ever. One man would choose which companies live, and which die. That is an immense and immediate grant of nearly absolute power to a single human being.

And we know what absolute power does, don't we?

[TB]

Gramm has long been said to be the guy McCain would put in to head the treasury, and McCain's chief campaign spokesman refused to deny that Gramm would get the job if McCain is elected.

[Eric Jaffa]

Ezra Klein writes:

"There's little doubt that a bailout must be constructed quickly, but watching the Bush administration demand instant passage of an emergency bill that arrogates enormous power to the executive branch and shifts tremendous quantities of cash to the moneyed elite is bringing up bad memories, and rather a lot of them."

So Ezra Klein wants Congress to act quickly, even though he realizes that Congress acted quickly in passing the Iraq War authorization.

Personally I don't want Congress to act quickly. I want them to wait until there is a new president and then carefully consider his proposals.

[Norman Costa]

PUT AN END TO CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

-->> Yes, the Phil Gramm who berated Americans for being a nation of whiners. According to Gramm, tough times are all psychological...unless, of course, the entity that needs money is a CORPORATION [emphasis mine] instead of an American. <<--

Change can be profound and long lasting when it is fundamental and structural. Getting rid of CORPORATE PERSONHOOD through legislation - maybe even a constitutional amendment - would be the single-most powerful act to end the corporate governance, and the attending corruption, of the United States.

Most folks will not consider voting for Nader, but ending CORPORATE PERSONHOOD is a major part of his platform. I support the idea wholeheartedly.

[Alon Levy]

You know, Norman, in the other thread Uncle Kvetch just swore to me that leftist ideas about economics aren't necessarily communist.

[parse]

Alon, are you saying that ending corporate personhood is inherently communist? I don't get that.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

There's nothing inherently communist about abolishing corporate personhood. Are you confusing abolishing corporate personhood with nationalizing corporations, Alon?

Abolishing corporate personhood means preventing individuals from exempting themselves from the normal consequences of their collective decisions by declaring these actions to be those of a corporation, which is treated under the law as if it were an individual, except that it can't be punished the way actual people can.

Corporate personhood is akin to kids who make up imaginary friends and try to blame things on them.

[TB]

In summary:

Smack Down

I think Kos, Digby and Kilgore have this about right. The Republican/McCain plan is to get the Democrats to bail out the GOP's Wall Street friends and then run against them for doing it.

--Josh Marshall

[Norman Costa]

CORPORATE PERSONHOOD DEBATE

From Wikipedia

The corporate personhood debate refers to the controversy (primarily in the United States) over the question of what subset of rights afforded under the law to natural persons should also be afforded to corporations as legal persons.

Opponents of "corporate personhood" believe that large corporations as juristic persons have enjoyed certain constitutional rights intended for natural humans as the result of a misinterpretation of an 1886 Supreme Court Case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Opponents claim that certain rights of natural persons, such as the right to political and other non-commercial free speech, are now exercised by corporations to the detriment of the American democratic process as provided under the Constitution. Some opponents point to the recent discovery of correspondence [1] between then Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, and court reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis as proof of a conspiracy among the railroad corporations to intentionally create a misrepresentation of that decision for the benefit of the railroads.

Proponents of corporate personhood believe that corporations, as representatives of their shareholders, were intended by the founders and framers to enjoy many, if not all, of the same rights as natural persons, for example, the right against self-incrimination, right to privacy and the right to lobby the government.

[Norman Costa]

Alon Levy,

I'm not sure what you intended to say. Would you explain, please.

[Alon Levy]

Lindsay, I'm not confusing the two. These are two separate concepts, though they often occur together in American leftists. But the idea that the corporation is at the root of the evils of capitalism tends to be confined to communists, anarchists, and fellow travelers. It's standard that corporations can sue and be sued in court, for actions that are too collective to be individualized - just like governments. It occurs across wildly different levels of private sector corruption, which suggests to me that the main corruption issues have nothing to do with corporate personhood.

The reason I suspect communism or something similar is that the corporation is so central to the operation of modern capitalism that it's hard to see how you can abolish it without abolishing capitalism. It might in principle be possible, but it isn't inspiring that the advocates of abolishing corporate personhood don't look for major economists who propose alternatives but instead rant about the evils of capitalism.

One characteristic of radicals is that they try to abolish or cripple parts of civil society that make them uncomfortable. Right-wing radicals try to do this to the universities, the courts, and the schools. Left-wing ones try to do this to private industry, with far less success (not having concerned rich people donate millions to your hackhouses is a serious obstacle).

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

So, Alon, you admit that challenging corporate personhood is not inherently communistic, or even socialistic.

[Alon Levy]

It's not inherently socialistic, no. It's just inherently bad, and crippling for the market.

[Norman Costa]

Thanks everyone. For a moment I thought I was a communist and all my friends were too embarrassed to tell me.

[Norman Costa]

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the single dimension of 'left to right' too limiting a geometry when it comes to criticism of corporate abuses?

For example, if I say that the principal evil of unchecked capitalism is the abnormal concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, is a geometry of one dimension sufficient to debate the issue?

Heck, if quantum mechanics and string theory can postulate 10 physical dimensions plus the dimension of time, can't we lay claim to at least two of them - maybe three?

Q. "Who you callin' a Lefty? ... you fuggin' Righty!"

A. "Yo' mama!"

[Uncle Kvetch]

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the single dimension of 'left to right' too limiting a geometry when it comes to criticism of corporate abuses?

Hmmm...in one sense, no. As I said on another thread, I think it really is fundamentally a left-right thing...but that presupposes that you have a bona fide "left" holding down one side of the debate. But there's been a bipartisan consensus for deregulation, unchecked corporate power, and state capitalism in the guise of "free enterprise" in Washington for several decades now. As many people have pointed out, Bill & Hillary Clinton are, in this respect, pretty much Eisenhower Republicans, as is, from all indications so far, Barack Obama. (Which just makes the baying among the wingnuts about their supposed radicalness all the more amusing.) By the standards of most other developed countries, our political system runs the gamut from far right all the way to center right. No wonder we end up debating idiocies like lipstick on pigs while Rome is burning.

But in another sense, Norman, I would agree with you. The massive influence that industries like banking have in Washington is, more than anything, an indictment of our thoroughly broken and corrupted political system. The obscene amounts of money being raised and spent on the upcoming election makes this painfully obvious. Somehow Canada is able to hold elections for a new national government with each party limited to $20 million in spending in toto...an amount that our two major candidates each spend on television advertising in a week. [h/t Rachel Maddow] That's not a "left-right" debate, it's a "democracy-oligarchy" one, but I fear it's a debate that we're unlikely to ever have in this country.

[Norman Costa]

Uncle Kvetch,

-->> That's not a "left-right" debate, it's a "democracy-oligarchy" one, but I fear it's a debate that we're unlikely to ever have in this country. <<--

And isn't it a shame.

[JohnL]

Alon, you seem to be missing something. If we abolish the 'person' rights of a corporation, it does not mean we abolish corporations. There were corporations in the US long before the court decision to make them 'natural persons'. The argument to abolish these rights is that they were given to corporations by the courts (now there's some judicial activism) via an amendment designed to give freed slaves rights (the same courts that said the amendment applied to corporations said it did not apply to the freed slaves).

It could be that corporations should have some of those rights, but they should get them by legislation.

[thelonegunman]

LB: ari fleischer and other repug talking heads were on the telly last night calling this the bush / pelosi bailout...
ari's statement: congress is now asking for 'more' (sic) regulation? they voted all this time for less regulation and not they're proposing and pushing through this bailout - led by the speaker of the house.
this is fast turning into and being painted by the mccain campaign as something they can use for political gain (no way... tell me something new, huh)...
the point: they're saying this (from Digby)
"Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.

God Himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That's why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say "No" and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress...."
folks need to see / understand this and tell their democratic reps to not be the repug's "bitch" on this one...

[Uncle Kvetch]

Norman:

Glenn Greenwald (responding to a truly breathtaking piece of hackery from David Brooks) is thinking in similar terms...the fault lines that are being exposed by this crisis aren't partisan ones:

"One can look at these economic disputes in terms of "Republican v. Democrat" but, when it comes to economic policy, that is often unhelpful because the core leadership factions of both parties are funded and controlled by the same corporate interests. [...] Often, and certainly now, the more relevant dichotomy is "Plutocrat (or 'kleptocrat') v. Populist," and there are angry populists in the rank-and-file of both parties -- meaning the ordinary voters -- who haven't shared in the very limited and increasingly unequal prosperity created by corporate control of our Government. [...] [W]hile cultural wedge issues have divided ordinary American on the Left and Right, there is a growing, angry populism among both factions against the dominant Washington establishment elite that is so transparently running the Federal Government on behalf of the tiny group of corporate elite which funds and owns them. The backlash against the Paulson plan on both the Left and Right is a function of that same anger and resentment."

[Alon Levy]

There were corporations in the US long before the court decision to make them 'natural persons'.

Yes, and there were corporate abuses long before the court decision in question. And even with this court decision, a corporation doesn't have exactly the same rights as an individual - for example, it can't vote or contribute to political campaigns.

The argument to abolish these rights is that they were given to corporations by the courts

So what? Desegregation, one-man-one-vote, Miranda, and Roe were all given to people by the courts. The only people who oppose Roe on such principled grounds are professional contrarians.

[Alon Levy]

That's not a "left-right" debate, it's a "democracy-oligarchy" one, but I fear it's a debate that we're unlikely to ever have in this country.

It's going on right now. It happened at its ugliest in Mississippi last year. On one side, there are the populists, who are defined by their concern for values and ordinary people, their disdain for expert advice, and their hatred for minorities (they used to hate blacks; now they hate Hispanics). On the other, there are the elitists, who are defined by their technocratic ideas of competence, their contempt for community activism or anything else that goes bottom-up, and their belief that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid or ignorant. In Mississippi the Democrat was the populist and the Republican the elitist, but it doesn't have to be that way - the West Wing was successful because there was a big constituency of liberal elitists who would watch it.

[JohnL]

Alon, now I'm just confused. In a reply about getting rid of corporate personhood, you implied that that would get rid of corporations (and in a second response, you said getting rid of it would be a very bad idea). That's why I noted it wouldn't get rid of corporations.
This begs the question: why would getting rid of corporate personhood be such a terrible idea?
Oh, on a quibbling note, corporations can (and do) donate to political campaigns.

[Alon Levy]

Because the way it's advocated, it's meant as getting rid of corporations as we know them. The chief complaint is always the fact that corporations can sue and be sued in civil courts in lieu of individuals acting on their behalf. This isn't a small thing; it's what the entire civil tort system is geared toward. If you have a patent that a company violated, you can sue the company, instead of have to track down the relevant employee. If you've suffered a million dollars' worth of personal injury, you can sue the government or the corporation, without needing to find the specific person who's responsible, who doesn't even have that money to hand to you. Nader et al want to abolish that, without even a clear idea of what it would do to either the economy or the court system, besides the thinking that corporations are inherently evil.