About That Bailout...

I try very hard to be a fair-minded person, and I won’t just sign on to (or reject) a particular idea simply because that idea was generated by, for instance, one political party or another. So when, yesterday, I watched in fascination as a near-to-completion deal on the Wall Street bailout got scuttled by House Republicans eager to float a plan of their own, I didn’t get too worked up about it. After all, I don’t like the idea of $700 billion being just handed over, any more than anyone else does. It’s a rotten solution to a rotten problem that only has rotten solutions. So if the House Republicans had a better idea, then hell yes, let’s slow down that train and give their idea a fair hearing.

Trouble is, details are very sketchy and all I ever learned about their plan is that it involves, essentially, insuring the Wall Street financial firms against their losses from at-risk mortgages, rather than the government simply buying those mortgages from them in toto. It sounds like it would be a variant on the FDIC structure, which has worked spectacularly well since the Depression.

Case in point: the failure of Washington Mutual, the nation’s sixth largest bank, today--before the FDIC, the rumors of WaMu’s impending demise would have, without question, led to a run on that bank by thousands of its depositors. But with the FDIC, people felt secure that their money wouldn’t vanish, so they kept their cool and although the bank has failed, the awful consequences of a bank run were avoided. A very good thing.

On the surface, then, this idea of a new insurance program sounds pretty good. With government-backed insurance standing behind all those mortgages, Wall Street firms would feel they are on firmer ground, and could begin extending credit again, which is of course the engine that fuels the rest of the economy. It sounds fantastic, actually—the government doesn’t just hand over money willy-nilly, money is only spent when an individual account fails, thus spreading out over years, probably, any government responsibility for these bad mortgages.

But think about it a little harder, and suddenly it becomes clear that this is in fact a terrible deal, and here’s why: it rewards Wall Street for its bad behavior, fails to curb the shenanigans that got us into this mess in the first place, and in the end still costs the government unknown billions of dollars with no chance of recouping any of that money.

See, the FDIC isn’t actually a good example because it isn’t an analogous situation. The FDIC insures depositors, not the banks themselves, and as I understand it, House Republicans would like to insure the Wall Street firms against their losses, not the individual families whose mortgages are at risk. Thus, Wall Street is rewarded for doing awful things to our economy, and with no penalty, there’s no reason for them to stop doing those awful things to our economy. Sure, the government wouldn’t be handing out a $700 million blank check, which sounds great to irate taxpayers, but the thing that people are really angry about--the manipulation of the system on Wall Street and the idea of rewards to the very people doing the manipulating—would be ignored.

And since the government would be insuring rather than buying those mortgages, there would be no ownership of anything. Wall Street gets to keep the profits from those mortgages that are successfully paid off, while government incurs the expenses of the mortgages that fail. And with no way to tell how much money would have to be spent to insure all those mortgages, in the end it could be $70 billion or $700 billion or even more, with no eventual upside to taxpayers at all.

Plus, and worst of all: one of the attractions of the idea of the government acquiring those at-risk mortgages is that the government can afford to be more patient with mortgage-holders. In other words, they won’t be in the same kind of quarter-to-quarter rush to show profits, and can work with mortgage-holders to try and ensure that they don’t get kicked out of their homes. Keeping thousands of people from being shoved to the curb, and allowing them to perhaps pay their mortgages a little more slowly, for a little less money per month, means fewer defaults, therefore much less loss for the system to absorb--not to mention fewer homeless people who used to be productive homeowners.

Spectacular profits for the Wall Street robber barons. Uncountable billions of dollars in added debt for the federal government. No help whatsoever to struggling homeowners, and a giant sucking black hole in our economy that never gets fixed. The very definition of a bad deal and, once again, we see that politicians claiming to represent the desires of their angry constituents are in fact working very hard to make sure that those constituents get royally screwed.

Going Viral

Not quite six days ago, Marc Rosenbush and I put a video up on YouTube, and launched a companion website. The video was of course the one embedded a couple posts below, about the entirely mythical candidacy of Michael Palin for President, and the website is of course called Michael Palin for President.

Last time I looked, our silly little satire has been viewed 103,000 times. And counting.

This is, I suspect, fueled chiefly by two things: (1) we brought the funny, mostly thanks to selecting good clips of Michael Palin being funny, although I think the fact that there is a point being made doesn't hurt; and (2) the more I learn about Sarah Palin, the less I like her, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Comments (over a hundred of them) have been about 90% positive, which could mean that the video really works well, or that the people bothering to comment are mostly members of the choir. Endless variations of comments like "The only Palin I'd vote for! Vote for the other one and we WILL get the Spanish Inquisition!" But of course there has been the other side heard from as well. Examplars of considered political discourse such as "If you have a child, I hope he dies in a car fire!" (That, by the way, was the only part I could repeat here without violating FCC decency standards.)

I have to say, it's been a lot of fun. Making an actual movie is such a long process, months and years of effort. But Marc and I put this video together in eleven hours last Monday, and over a hundred thousand people have seen it since. That's almost certainly people more people than saw me in my entire theatrical career, over the course of years.

At the same time, I'm starting to feel a certain sense of responsibility. I mean sure, the Constitution bars a British citizen like Michael Palin from becoming President of the United States, but enforcement of the Constitution has been a bit slippery for a while now, so maybe this little joke is something I should take a bit more seriously.

Because, as one YouTube commenter put it, "His cabinet would no doubt be an interesting bunch." And I don't think that, as a general rule, we need new government departments--but a Ministry of Silly Walks would be an admirable use of taxpayer money.

Who's with me?

P.S. Just found out that the Pythons' official website is now featuring our video. Speaking as a lifelong Python geek, that is just too cool.

Second Verse, Same as the First

Sure, I’ll admit it: I fell asleep during Senator McCain’s speech last night.

I mean I tried, I really did. I would pause the TiVo, get up and check e-mail, grab a drink, then sit back down, and a couple minutes later there I’d be, nodding off again. Pause, stand, calisthenics, acupuncture, walking across hot coals, sit, and sleep.

Which doesn’t mean it was a bad speech; but if he wanted to contrast his style with Obama’s, he definitely accomplished his goal.

Still. I heard enough to get a decent impression of what he was on about, plus of course there has been plenty of summarization and analysis since then. So with the Republican National Convention now over (and the hundreds arrested soon to be released, we hope), a few thoughts.

Almost without exception, every speech I heard was obsessed with the notion of character, specifically John McCain’s character. We heard the Hanoi Hilton story every single time; we heard the line “I’d rather lose an election than a war” every single time, including from McCain himself. McCain, everyone insisted, has been tested in ways few other Americans have ever been tested, and he stood his ground, passed that most horrific of tests without blinking.

(By the way, the New York Times had a startling portrait of Senator McCain on yesterday’s front page, which you should be able to find here.)

The Republicans love to do this, they love to make elections entirely about character. “McCain has already been tested, we know he has the character to be President.” But eight years ago, that election too was about character, according to the Republicans: “George W. Bush is a man of upright moral character who will restore dignity to the White House.”

And you know, I am still favorably impressed with President Bush’s upright moral character. (Sure he lied us into a war and has an unfortunate fondness for torture and other outright betrayals of civil rights; but as a family man he’s terrrrrific!) But in the end, Mr. Bush was incompetent, and we have all suffered the innumerable consequences of his incompetence. Now Bill Clinton, he definitely suffered (and suffers) some character flaws--but you can't really say that he was incompetent. The results of his stewardship of the nation are too plain.

So I just can’t bring myself to care too much about McCain’s candidacy if he bases his qualifications on his character. Certainly I admire his character, enormously--I don’t for a second imagine that I’d have measured up half as well under those conditions in Hanoi. But competence does matter, and judgment. Now you can’t win an election purely on competence, as Michael Dukakis proved years ago. But judgment matters too, and about the only time any Republicans spoke about McCain’s judgment was when they talked about the surge.

(I have a question about the surge. Is there any possibility that the insurgents, and the rebels, and the Sunni thises and Shi’a thatses, have realized that if they just lie low for a while, the Americans will go away and then they can fight it out unimpaired? I mean, that’s what I would do.)

But here’s the thing. “I would rather lose an election than a war.” Upright, forthright, unbendable, unbowed John McCain. But I would submit that the selection of the person who will be, as the phrase has it, a heartbeat away from the presidency, that matters just as much as the war question. Particularly when you’ve got a 72 year old candidate who’s been through hell and back, and has this recurring cancer problem.

And when he made that selection, reports agree that he really wanted either Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. Both of whom are experienced men with qualifications up the wahoo, and while I have political issues with both, I don’t doubt their essential fitness to do the job. If the question of who might succeed the President bears any weight, either of those would have been admirable choices. Plus they were the two closest to McCain’s heart, the guys he really truly wanted for the job.

But neither of them was acceptable to the hardcore right-wingers who have recently succeeded in shaping a rather frightening party platform (a PDF is available here), and so McCain went with Governor Palin, whose fitness to be President I am not alone in doubting. In short: when tested on a crucial question, McCain went with the political choice rather than stand his ground.

As I say. The Republicans have made this character argument before, George W. Bush being their most recent example, and now they’re following exactly the same playbook all over again. It was also fascinating to watch on Tuesday, when President Bush spoke and was roundly praised and applauded; then only a short while later, other speakers got up to talk about how things have been going badly for the last eight years and how McCain will set the ship right again, and the delegates applauded and cheered that, too. And have you seen Lieberman’s 2006 speech in fulsome praise of, yes, Barack Obama?

To hell with character. Give me somebody who can do the damn job, paired with a running mate who can also do the job. Is it so much to ask?

The Wrong Palin

For your viewing pleasure: