"Emergency" Fatigue

Congress (and that means the American People) has been asked to save the financial speculators from their own follies, with the warning that if we don’t do something NOW, the sky will fall. When it was families getting caught up in the pursuit of the American dream, the chorus was "They should have known better." But now, after years of denial, the financial Wunderkind of Wall Street are getting buried in their own collapsing house of cards, and we’re all being told that they couldn’t possibly have seen it coming, and now we have an full-scale emergency on our hands.

Well, regardless of the cause, the "cure," as currently proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson, is downright toxic. The proposed bailout bill being pondered by Congress includes the following statement, known as "Section 8":

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency" (emphasis mine).

What they are saying is that this is such a dire emergency that there’s no time to think about it, just trust us, pass the bill, give us unlimited power, write the check, and don't worry, because we'll do the right thing. They are screaming that there’s a Mac truck drifting into our lane, and we need to SWERVE SHARPLY NOW to the right in order to avoid it.

The only problem is that on the right, there is a 750 billion-foot cliff, with no shoulder, no guard rail, and no way but down. And I have a serious problem with the person at the wheel. Let’s take a look at his "driving record."

The Bush Administration did not heed the warning of the August 6, 2001, PDB, and a month later we were all stunned by 9/11. In response, Bush demanded "emergency" action, giving him broad "emergency" powers, and said that this had to be done in an "emergency" time frame. No time to ask questions, or to ponder the Constitutional questions and the long term consequences - just trust us, and pass the damned bill! So we had the PATRIOT Act rammed through Congress, giving tremendous, and likely unConstitutional, powers to the Executive Branch. In retrospect, however, it appears that this attack could likely have prevented, or at least mitigated, using intelligence and law that existed at the time - if the Administration had been paying attention. But never mind that. In the heat of the moment, we handed over the keys to the Constitution, and now that the dust has settled we have imprisonment without charges, extraordinary renditions, surveillance on US citizens, and God knows what else, because we also have an unprecedented level of government secrecy.

Then the Bush Administration assured us that their intelligence showed that Saddam Hussain posed an imminent threat to the US, and they needed "emergency" powers to launch an attack on Iraq - just trust us, we know what we're doing. We now know (and many of us knew at the time) that this was either a lie or incompetence. ("Nope, no weapons under here....") But again, the damage had been done.

The Bush Administration has funded this "Oops" war largely with "emergency" spending measures. It’s been over five years now. Any guise of "emergency" should be well-penetrated by now. I guess the emergency is that the war did not pay for itself with oil revenues, as they assured us it would. Again, "oops."

Now the same gang that has gotten it wrong on these other occasions is saying that the economy will collapse without an "emergency" bailout of Wall Street. It is way past time for cooler heads to prevail. These people have consistently screwed up on national security and military matters, and then they have screwed up the "emergency" responses. Now that they have put the economy in the dumper by enacting their dream of deregulation, they are asking us one more time to trust them as to what "emergency" measures will fix it. The message is by now a familiar one: No time to build in oversight. No time to think about it. Just pass the damn bill!

Been there, done that. It’s time to stop responding to their hysteria. Tell your congressional delegation to say "Thanks, but no thanks" on Paulson’s bailout plan. Tell them you’re tired of picking up the pieces of this Administration’s "emergencies." Tell them that after failure upon failure, they have not earned the blind, unquestioning, no-oversight trust they are again asking for. It’s time for Congress to think of consequences, for us and for our great-great-grandchildren. We need oversight if we are going to hand over $750 Billion (and I say "if" because I’m not convinced yet that we should give them a single dime).

Let’s calm down, take a deep breath, and while we’re trying to figure a way out of this hole let’s at least STOP DIGGING!