The Power of "No"!

By Dave Lindorff

The Congressional switchboard is jammed. You can get through, but it
takes a dedicated finger on the redial button of your phone. Operators
at the Capitol say it's been that way for a week now, as Americans
across the country have been flooding their Congressional delegations
with phone calls (and emails) urging them to vote "No" on the
Bush/Paulson Wall Street bailout.

That today is no exception, after Democratic Party leaders (and both
major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama)
bought into the plan after adding some window-dressing measures
designed to make it look more palatable. This shows that the public is
not fooled.

People see clearly that this is a trillion-dollar giveaway to the
very people who have been hollowing out and destroying the US economy
for over a decade or more by convincing both parties to let them do
whatever they want to get rich, free of any kind of significant
oversight or regulation.

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written
of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the
financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting
the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands.
Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form
of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which
will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed
too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably
lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz
says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a
major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this
trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank
failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking
$1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage
is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that
will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar
collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of
huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in
dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that
Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life
thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise
dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding,
interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the
economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress
joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter
to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to
get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public
gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's
nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public
is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are
being sold a bill of goods.

If you haven't made an effort to call your two senators and your
representative to demand that they vote "No" on this bailout, do it now
(the number is 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121), and don't give up when
you get a busy signal. That's a sign that you are not alone. Just keep
hitting "redial" until you get through. At that point, get the
operator, before switching you, to give you direct numbers for your
three members of Congress, so you can bypass the main switchboard
number after that.

Unlike the 2002 rush to war against Iraq, this latest bum's rush can still be stopped.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net