Sex & Politics

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.

And those 32 words are tucked away in Section 8 of the bailout plan that Paulson and the President are pushing so hard.

Right.

So the question now is: Who are they are trying to bailout?

Robert Kutner explains why this unprecedented power grab is so..well…unprecedented…in an article for American Prospect via Huffington Post:

The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street’s dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson — a provision that evokes the Bush administration’s suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. […]

The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.

This “bailout” seems to be less and less about saving the economy and more about saving the asses of Paulsons buddies (he’s a former Sachs man) and about covering the asses of Paulson and Crew who may have been up to shady shenanigans that were directly responsible for the meltdown to begin with.

Dodd’s plan at the very least puts accountability and oversight over the implementation of the bailout and makes the US shareholders in any company that seeks funds. Or simply put…offers some protections for the taxpayer.

In it’s current form the bailout is a definite No-Go.

Let’s see if the Democrats have the balls to let this initiative fail and (at the very least) implement a (better) plan of their own.