Rep. Brad Sherman of California
"Today, Congress approved the $700 billion Wall Street Bailout Bill. Under the Bill, hundreds of billions of dollars will be used to buy toxic assets currently in safes in London, Shanghai, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Bailed out Wall Street firms will use their bail out money to pay million dollars a month salaries, and to even increase them to two million dollars a month. (For details, see paper at BradSherman.house.gov.)
"Our economy will not do well in the months to come, and dropping $700 billion on Wall Street is not going to make things much better. But now Wall Street will use the same fear mongering tactics which were used to pass the Bill, in order to justify the bill.
"In order to pass the Bill, Wall Street declared that unless they received $700 billion in unmarked bills, the Dow would drop by 4,000 points and blood would flow in the streets. The passage of the Bill will have little positive economic effect, and the fall and winter will be bad times for our economy. But in the coming weeks, Wall Street will justify the Bill by saying that we averted those very same calamities they had predicted during their successful effort to create panic, and pass the Bill".
Sherman Statement on Bailout Passage - October 3, 2008
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) Statement on Bailout Amendment -- 10/02/2008
Why No Outrage?
"The American people are famously slow to anger, but they are outdoing themselves in long suffering today. In the wake of the 'greatest failure of ratings and risk management ever,' to quote the considered judgment of the mortgage-research department of UBS, Wall Street wears a political bullseye. Yet the politicians take no pot shots.
"Barack Obama, the silver-tongued herald of change, forgettably told a crowd in Madison, Wis., some months back, that he will 'listen to Main Street, not just to Wall Street.' John McCain, the angrier of the two presumptive presidential contenders, has staked out a principled position against greed and obscene profits but has gone no further to call the errant bankers and brokers to account.
"The most blistering attack on the ancient target of American populism was served up last October by the then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, William Poole. 'We are going to take it out of the hides of Wall Street,' muttered Mr. Poole into an open microphone, apparently much to his own chagrin.
"If by 'we,' Mr. Poole meant his employer, he was off the mark, for the Fed has burnished Wall Street's hide more than skinned it. The shareholders of Bear Stearns were ruined, it's true, but Wall Street called the loss a bargain in view of the risks that an insolvent Bear would have presented to the derivatives-laced financial system. To facilitate the rescue of that system, the Fed has sacrificed the quality of its own balance sheet. In June 2007, Treasury securities constituted 92% of the Fed's earning assets. Nowadays, they amount to just 54%. In their place are, among other things, loans to the nation's banks and brokerage firms, the very institutions whose share prices have been in a tailspin. Such lending has risen from no part of the Fed's assets on the eve of the crisis to 22% today. Once upon a time, economists taught that a currency draws its strength from the balance sheet of the central bank that issues it. I expect that this doctrine, which went out with the gold standard, will have its day again.
"Wall Street is off the political agenda in 2008 for reasons we may only guess about. Possibly, in this time of widespread public participation in the stock market, 'Wall Street' is really 'Main Street.' Or maybe Wall Street, its old self, owns both major political parties and their candidates. Or, possibly, the $4.50 gasoline price has absorbed every available erg of populist anger, or -- yet another possibility -- today's financial failures are too complex to stick in everyman's craw."
Through history, outrageous financial behavior has been met with outrage. But today Wall Street's damaging recklessness has been met with near-silence, from a too-tolerant populace, argues James Grant
2008 Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader discusses the passage of the bailout bill. Waterbury, Connecticut - October 4, 2008
"The First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing 'unruly individuals,' and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.
"George Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the 'War on Terror,' the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.
"He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus -- habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial -- in the event of an 'insurrection.' With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters "insurgents" staging an 'insurrection' is strengthened".
"Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out 'Crowd Control'"
By Naomi Wolf, AlterNet. Posted October 8, 2008.
"A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. 'Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,' reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, 'the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.' Disturbingly, she writes that 'they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control' as well.
"The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced 'sea-smurf.' These 'sea-smurfs,' Cavallaro reports, have 'spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,' in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month 'dwell time'—time troops are required to spend to 'reset and regenerate after a deployment'—armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets.
"The Army Times piece includes a correction stating that the forces would not use nonlethal weaponry domestically. I called Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public-affairs officer for Northern Command. She told me that the overall mission was humanitarian, to save lives and help communities recover from catastrophic events. Nevertheless, the military forces would have weapons on-site, 'containerized,' she said—that is, stored in containers—including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that any decision to use weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary-of-defense level.
"The Army Times piece includes a correction stating that the forces would not use nonlethal weaponry domestically. I called Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public-affairs officer for Northern Command. She told me that the overall mission was humanitarian, to save lives and help communities recover from catastrophic events. Nevertheless, the military forces would have weapons on-site, 'containerized,' she said—that is, stored in containers—including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that any decision to use weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary-of-defense level.
"Talk of trouble on U.S. streets is omnipresent now, with the juxtaposition of Wall Street and Main Street. The financial crisis we face remains obscure to most people; titans of business and government officials assure us that the financial system is 'on the brink,' that a massive bailout is necessary, immediately, to prevent a disaster. Conservative and progressive members of Congress, at the insistence of constituents, blocked the initial plan. If the economy does collapse, if people can’t go down to the bank to withdraw their savings, or get cash from an ATM, there may be serious 'civil unrest,' and the 'sea-smurfs' may be called upon sooner than we imagine to assist with "crowd control'".
“Invasion of the Sea-Smurfs”
Amy Goodman, Oct 2, 2008
The Dark Bailout
"So, 'fed up with scrutiny from investors and regulators', in the last decade, big public companies have turned to private equity firms, among them the famously politically connected Carlyle. In 2005, Legendary Pictures was formed by a consortium of private equity firms, created to enter into an arrangement with Time Warner's Warner Bros. to make features. The first feature of this innovative private finance arrangement, Batman Begins, told the story - among other details of crime fighting and kaboom - of the virtuous taking of the public company, Wayne Enterprises, private. The film served as the heroic autobiography of the film's finance.
(Even the "democracy" of the stock exchange is too much democracy for capital.)"
"Going Private"
Le Colonel Chabert
"It is hardly surprising that [Frank] Miller's model of realism came to the fore in comics at the time when Reaganomics and Thatcherism were presenting themselves as the only solutions to America and Britain's ills. Reagan and Thatcher claimed to have 'delivered us from the 'fatal abstractions' inspired by the 'ideologies of the past'' (Badiou, 2005, 7). They had awoken us from the supposedly flawed, dangerously deluded dreams of collectivity and re-acquainted us with the 'essential truth' that individual human beings can only be motivated by their own animal interests.
"These propositions belong to an implicit ideological framework we can call Capitalist Realism. On the basis of a series of assumptions—human beings are irredeemably self-interested, (social) Justice can never be achieved—Capitalist Realism projects a vision of what is 'Possible'.
"For Alain Badiou, the rise to dominance of this restricted sense of possibility must be regarded as a period of 'Restoration'. As Badiou explained in an interview with Cabinet magazine, 'in France, "Restoration" refers to the period of the return of the King, in 1815, after the Revolution and Napoleon. We are in such a period. Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions' (Badiou, Cox, Whalen, 2001/02). According to Badiou, the ideological defence for these political configurations takes the form of a lowering of expectations.
"We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian—where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone—is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc." (ibid)
"Capitalism and liberal democracy are 'ideal' precisely in the sense that they are 'the best that one can expect', that is to say, the least worst. This chimes with Miller's rendition of the hero in The Dark Knight Returns and Year One: Batman may be authoritarian, violent and sadistic, but in a world of endemic corruption, he is the least worst option. (Indeed, such traits may turn out to be necessary in conditions of ubiquitous venality.) Just as Badiou suggests, in Miller's Gotham it is no longer possible to assume the existence of Good. Good has no positive presence—what Good there has to be defined by reference to a self-evident Evil which it is not. Good, that is to say, is the absence of an Evil whose existence is self-evident.
"The fascination of the latest cinema version of Batman, Batman Begins (directed by Christopher Nolan) consists in its mitigated return to the question of Good. The film still belongs to the .Restoration. to the degree that it is unable to imagine a possible beyond capitalism: as we shall see, it is a specific mode of capitalism—post-Fordist finance capital—that is demonised in Batman Begins, not capitalism per se. Yet the film leaves open the possibilitity of agency which Capitalist Realism forecloses".
"Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins" by Mark Fisher
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