EDITORIALS : Quick, do nothing!
Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
AT THIS point it’s hard to decide
whether the continuing spectacle
that is the Congress of the United States is more of a tragedy or comedy. We vote for a tragicomedy. First the House of Representatives defeated the administration’s original plan to have the government step in and stop the economic meltdown by acquiring troubled assets that were bringing down one key financial institution after another. The vote was 228 to 205 to let the economy drift further into paralysis or let it go down the tubes, whichever comes first. Banks, investment houses, insurers, all had started to topple like dominoes in a growing row and the House’s response was to let ’em.
Refusing to lead, follow, or get out of the way, the House preferred to do nothing, and do it not particularly well. It was left to that authoritative financial journal—the Log Cabin Democrat of Conway, Ark. —to sum up the collective wisdom of Monday’s vote in a front-page headline that deserves some kind of award for both punch and brevity: D’oh ! Of course the vote came only after the requisite quotient of high popalorum and low popahirum about high finance that a populist frenzy demands. We’d have been content if the speaker of the House and the minority leader of same just knew how to count, mainly votes. Instead, they brought a vital proposal to the floor without being sure they had enough support to pass it. Ostensibly they were for it. Imagine the damage they could have done if they’d been against it.
In one of its periodic rages the American people, to judge by the tidal wave of angry letters, e-mails, wires and phone calls that flooded Congress early in the week, were mad as Hell and determined to take it out on themselves. So the well-named People’s House, in a profile in cowardice that should go down in history—way down—stood back and let them. Monday’s performance in the House, or rather non-performance, would have made Herbert Hoover look like a wild-eyed activist.
If this Congess’ approval rating (a mere 10 percent, last time we dared look ) could fall much lower, it probably would. And should. Compared to the Congress of the United States, George W. Bush, our much despised president, is wildly popular. And deserves to be; at least he’s been trying to get Congress to do something, pretty please, with tax breaks on top. Not a day seems to pass without his issuing an urgent appeal to Congress to act. It doesn’t, and fear mounts. It’s the kind of fear another president at another critical time said was the only thing we have to fear —“ nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. ” —Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4, 1933.
It’s not so much the basic economy as its financial superstructure that needs repair and maintenance. Instead, Congress dawdles, and public opinion is too busy hunting scapegoats to notice that the country’s Gross Domestic Product actually increased last year (2. 1 percent at the end of the second quarter ), and the productive capacity of American labor, capital and land remains high. But the people demanded (non ) action, and the House buckled, following every tremor of public opinion rather than leading and educating it. After all, this is no time for leadership; it’s an election year.
To quote the immortal Mencken, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Which was what happened as soon as Monday’s vote in the House was tallied. By the end of the day, the stock market had fallen almost 800 points, and the credit that the economy runs on went from being only frozen to evaporating into thin air. A kind of disastrous multiplier effect began to take effect as the Panic of ’ 08 gained even more steam: first confidence was lost in the financial system, then the political one.
AT THAT perilous point it began
to occur to all those mad-as-Hell
e-mailers that they might have been a tad hasty as they watched the value of their 401 (k ) s shrink, and began to think about where their next house / car / college / business loan was going to come from. The largely fictive distinction between Wall Street (Boo !) and Main Street (Hurrah !) dissolved as it dawned on folks that this is one economy. Dividing the two may make good campaign rhetoric, but not much sense. After bingeing on anger, juiced up with the requisite amount of ideology, The People began to sober up. The consequences of the House’s irresponsibility began to dawn. You could tell the tide had shifted when what was once routinely labeled a Bail-out began to be called, just as routinely, a Rescue. There’s a lot in a name, at least when it comes to garnering votes.
Now a second attempt is under way to pass basically the same bill, maybe improved a little (for example, by expanding federal insurance for bank deposits in order to raise capital and calm nerves ) and disimproved a lot (by adding oodles of pork and tax cuts ). Doubtless on the theory that the House will cease holding the American economy hostage if the ransom is high enough. Such a crisis is the health of lobbyists, for in the rush to do something, or just anything for goshsakes, nobody may notice what loopholes are being opened and federal freebies provided.
Wednesday night, with both presidential candidates on board, the Senate rode to the rescue 74 to 25. Now it’s on to the House. Again. Maybe this time the speaker will refrain from delivering a partisan provocation before the vote in her chamber, and a decisive number of Republican congressmen will refrain from being provoked by it. The second time may yet prove the charm. For as Winston Churchill once said, Americans can be relied on to do the right thing—after exhausting all other options.
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