Midway through the second period of our global economic collapse, how’s the home team doing? Conventional wisdom says the Wall Street crowd is whiny and petulant. President Obama is well-meaning but maybe a little too cautious. Europe is too disorganized and too eager to shift the blame instead of taking action.
And then….there’s the Congress of the United States. Michelle Bachmann, taking a page out of the Bircher playbook circa 1963, wants to make sure the Chinese don’t foist a one-world currency on us while we’re down. Don Manzullo is so relentlessly clueless that even the normally imperturbable Ben Bernanke can’t pretend to understand him. And LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is watching television:
On C-SPAN I found the perfect thing: The House Financial Services Committee was grilling Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke about the AIG rescue.
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) grumbled about “socialized medicine,” as though he had wandered into the wrong committee room. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) obsessed about the “small group of Wall Street types who are making decisions,” especially Goldman Sachs & Co., which she described in terms James Bond uses to describe SPECTRE.
Their colleagues, meanwhile, emitted what the writer David Foster Wallace might have described as “recombinant strings of dead cliches” about undeserved bonus payments, U.S. taxpayer money paying off foreign banks and the mushrooming of that new American art form, the bailout.
They showed, in sum, that they have no understanding of the roots or remedies for the financial crisis, and — more to the point — no great desire to understand. They left me convinced that if we are to have a productive investigation of the financial meltdown, it must be taken away from posturing lawmakers.
Hiltzik’s solution is a fantasy lineup of investigators to shove Congress out of the way and figure out what really happened. A friend who works on Wall Street ended an email cautiously supportive of Geithner’s toxic waste plan with this: “One last thought — could we possibly send Congress into recessuntil this is all over? They are killing us….” My solution is — what? I don’t have one. Enjoy the show, folks.
