Let's just crown him king and get it over with

Old news by now, but it's taken me this long to even try and get my head around this headline.

Tab for financial bailout: $700,000,000,000

Then again, Bush was all over the place yesterday, assuring everyone the sky was falling and we're all going to hell in a handbasket if we don't pass his bailout bill. So I guess I haven't missed my chance to rant.

What's truly staggering about this plan isn't the price tag, frightening as that is. It's this little tidbit:

But the most distinctive -- and potentially most controversial -- element of the plan is the extent to which it would allow Treasury to act unilaterally: Its decisions could not be reviewed by any court or administrative body and, once the emergency legislation was approved, the administration could raise the $700 billion through government borrowing and would not be subject to Congress' traditional power of the purse.

That's right, we're going to give the Treasury Secretary a $700 BILLION blank check, with no controls or oversight whatsoever. And, lest that's not scary enough, check out this little tidbit:

"The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time." (emphasis mine)

"At any one time." I'm no economist, so maybe I'm misunderstanding that item, but it sounds to me it means that, say six months down the line, Treasury's burned through that first $700 billion, he can write another check for another $700 billion. And another. And another, and another, and another. Who's going to stop him, right?

Economics aside (as I mentioned, I don't pretend to have any deep grasp of economics, certainly not at this scale) let's get back to that lack of oversight. The power for Treasury to act unilaterally, without any review by ANY court or administrative body. Forgive the paranoia and panic here, but let's take a moment to look at that idea. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, this nonsense gets approved… and then, six month's down the line, Paulson's megalomania comes to the fore, he snaps under the pressure and begins to believe he really IS king. By the time Congress could even ACT to rescind whatever powers they've granted him, the damage would be long done and we're in a worse place (if possible) than we are today.

(One thing the 'Founding Fathers' understood well were the abuses that are possible when too much power is concentrated in one man's hands. That's why they BUILT all those checks and balances into our government, why the legislative, executive, and judicial have to work together to keep each branch in check. God, now I'm delving into remedial civics. )

But while I'm off the reservation, and indulging in paranoiac, sky IS falling, panic, is it okay NOW to start drawing those Fascist parallels? I know people got heat for comparing Bush's policies to Nazi Germany after 9/11, but if I'm remembering my World War II history lessons, one of the first acts the National Socialist German Workers' Party took after coming to power was to seize the banks, during a time of severe economic crisis in Germany. And this, after a long campaign of fear-mongering and sowing the seeds of racial intolerance (blaming all the problems Germany was experiencing on the Jews). DOES ANY OF THIS SOUND IN THE LEAST BIT FAMILIAR? Ever heard the phrase "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"?

OK, I'm back (and, for the record, no, I don't really believe we're on the verge of becoming the North American Socialist Republic). For someone that embraces hyperbole on a regular basis, that felt a little off the deep end, even for me. But there's a part of me that says, no matter how lunatic it may sound, stranger things have happened and it's better to scream to the rafters and be found wrong, than to stay silent and find out you were right. (Not that anyone's paying attention to my rants, but still…).

Having gone off the reservation there, let me state that I don't believe Congress is lunatic enough to pass this bailout as it stands, and the reports I've seen support that assumption. Of course, that stems as much from Congressional self-interest as anything… Senators are no more willing to relinquish power than any other politician, so I find it unlikely that they'd even consider granting Treasury their request, simply because it weakens Congress. But I hope there's more than simple self-interest there, and it stems as much from a realization that this is a BAD IDEA that can't be allowed to happen. I can hope, can't I?

What I find fascinating, once I get past the horror, is the real politics behind this. Bush is pushing this as the only solution that can be considered, and they've fed us such a diet of fear for the past 8 years, that we're set up to believe it. We must fear the terrorists, so we allow the Patriot Act to stand, again and again (an Act that could not possibly be more misleadingly, ironically named). Now we're facing an economic crisis and we're told that if we don't do what the President tells us, we're in for imminent collapse. And we must, out of fear, apparently accept this. ("Land of the free, home of the brave"? Who'd have ever thought that phrase would end up dripping with irony.)

The only question I'm left with is whether this is another part of Dick Cheney's drive to strengthen what he perceives as weakness in the executive branch (based on a grudge he's been harboring for 30 f'ing years, thank you) or if it's more a matter of "we win either way": either "Congress passes the bill, we get the power we want and can continue to act unilaterally for the foreseeable future. Or Congress doesn't pass it, then every Republican running against an incumbent Democrat gets to say 'The President SENT a bill to Congress, but my opponent voted against it!' And all that fear we've been feeding people will make them vote for our candidate!"

Needless to say, my trust in the notion that the Bush White House has anything resembling the Nation's best interests at heart is at an all time low. And THAT, my friends, is saying something.