Rescue the Rescue: “Cash and fetal.”

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Rescue the Rescue
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 30, 2008

I was channel surfing on Monday, following the stock market’s nearly 800-point collapse, when a commentator on CNBC caught my attention. He was being asked to give advice to viewers as to what were the best positions to be in to ride out the market storm. Without missing a beat, he answered: “Cash and fetal.”

I’m in both — because I know an unprecedented moment when I see one. I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package. But this moment is the scariest of all for me because the previous three were all driven by real or potential attacks on the U.S. system by outsiders. This time, we are doing it to ourselves. This time, it’s our own failure to regulate our own financial system and to legislate the proper remedy that is doing us in.

I’ve always believed that America’s government was a unique political system — one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it.

This is dangerous. We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls. I appreciate the popular anger against Wall Street, but you can’t deal with this crisis this way....

Well, you say, “I don’t own any stocks — let those greedy monsters on Wall Street suffer.” You may not own any stocks, but your pension fund owned some Lehman Brothers commercial paper and your regional bank held subprime mortgage bonds, which is why you were able to refinance your house two years ago. And your local airport was insured by A.I.G., and your local municipality sold municipal bonds on Wall Street to finance your street’s new sewer system, and your local car company depended on the credit markets to finance your auto loan — and now that the credit market has dried up, Wachovia bank went bust and your neighbor lost her secretarial job there.

We’re all connected. As others have pointed out, you can’t save Main Street and punish Wall Street anymore than you can be in a rowboat with someone you hate and think that the leak in the bottom of the boat at his end is not going to sink you, too....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01friedman.html?hp

[jflood1016]

1. Great Article n/m

[antigop]

2. Oh, good grief,Tom! Aren't you Mr. Globalization?

Maybe people could afford to stay in their homes if THEY HADN'T LOST THEIR JOBS DUE TO OUTSOURCING.

Nice try, Tom. Nice try.

[bhikkhu]

3. Friedman sounds like a con man peddling fear

...Armageddon will arrive if we don't pass this bailout. No, you don't need to know what will happen with the money, just what will happen if you don't hand it over.

[ixion]

4. Fraidy Cat Friedman, carrying the water for his overlords, I see

he is truly a lame excuse for a human being, and a world-class moron.