...I think that it’s important to stress that this is money that could be used for actively preventing foreclosures. They could be using this money - a fraction of it - to keep people in their homes. They could be stimulating and rebuilding the fundamentals of the economy by investing in infrastructure, public works projects, a green-style New Deal - all of the investments that are so desperately needed. New technology, investing in the real economy and getting away from this casino economy. And because they want to throw all this money at Wall Street, that is money that will not be available for those real investments...

...they all knew it. They all knew it and they were making money as fast as they could based on their belief that they would get bailed out. Because it is entirely consistent with the Bush administration over the past 7 years. One of the other big lies floating around is this is somehow a departure from the way the Bush administration usually does business. It’s not a departure; it’s just a change in the direction of the flow. This is what they have been doing for 7 years: transferring public money, public wealth, into the hands of private crony contractors. And now as their final act they are taking the bad debts of the corporate sector and transferring them to the taxpayer. There is no aberration here; there is no big surprise. This is entirely consistent with everything they’ve done...

...the Shock Doctrine is a political strategy that the Republican Right has been perfecting over the past 35 years to use for various different kinds of shocks. They could be wars, natural disasters, economic crises, anything that sends a society into a state of shock to push through what economists call “Economic Shock Therapy” - rapid-fire, pro-corporate policies that they couldn’t get through if people weren’t in a state of fear and panic. This is a move that the Bush administration is very fond of; they did it after 9/11, privatized the War on Terror. We are seeing the Shock Doctrine in action right now with the exploiting of people’s fear trying to deepen that fear (we saw that with Bush’s address) to ram through unprecedented corporate giveaways which will later be used to rationalize cuts to social programs and more privatization and deregulation in the name of getting the economy back on track after they’ve screwed it up...

...it’s really important for people to understand that this bailout is as bad tomorrow as it was today. The only thing that has changed is its bipartisanship. A couple of fig leaves have been put in front of it to make it a little more presentable, but the core of this deal is totally corrupt. It is a bad plan. The only people this plan is good for is Wall Street. There is no guarantee that it is going to fix the problem that it is supposedly going to fix, but one thing we do know is that it is a bomb that will explode on U.S. taxpayers because of this massive debt that has been incurred. I mean, this $700 billion is twice as large as the projected deficit for this year, so this is an incredible burden. These bad debts were described as sticks of dynamite in these companies that the government is taking out of their hands. Well, they’re not just taking them out of their hands because now the dynamite is now in Washington and it’s going to explode and then it will be used against whichever administration. If Obama wins, then this will be the dynamite to say that he can’t forward his health plan...

...the other thing I think we need to stress is the extraordinary level of responsibility in the Bush Administration in allowing this crisis to get to the point that it got to, which was not just predictable but predicted. Alan Greenspan was saying a year ago that there was a housing bubble, and what bubbles do is they burst because they are filled with hot air. Everyone knows it. This was entirely predicted, and they end up with a two and a half page - barely two and a half page - plan with one idea, which is to turn the U.S. government into the world’s biggest trash can. Take all of this trash and give it to the taxpayers. That is their only idea, their only preparation...

One thing I think is important is to resist this bipartisanship. At this point this is not a moment that the priority is bipartisanship; the priority is intelligence. The priority is in getting to the root of this problem. The financial sector has abused the trust of the American people. There’s a couple of other points I want to stress. This idea of John McCain scapegoating greedy CEOs is obviously a joke because he is flanked by some of the greediest CEOs in the world. But the real thing is you can’t be shocked by the fact that CEOs want to make as much money as they possibly can. That’s like being shocked that movie stars want to be famous and that politicians want power. This is what corporations are built to do, this is what CEOs are built to do and it’s the role of government to regulate them...

"I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry -- and he has his hand on the nuclear button' -- and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

-- H.R. Haldeman's 1978 The Ends of Power.

¶ 8:08 AM