The economic bailout of Wall Street investment banks proposed by the Bush administration is only three pages long. If you click here to read it, you’ll have done more than John McCain apparently had before proposing a “suspension” of Friday’s scheduled presidential debate.
The bail-out proposal is the anti-Patriot act in its brevity, but the rush to push it through in a climate of fear and some of the wording reveals similarities. Most frightening is the clause that reads, “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.”
The Secretary would be Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, nicknamed “Mr. Risk” in a BusinessWeek article in 2006 when he ascended to his Cabinet position after a stint as CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the firms being bailed out with the $700,000,000,000 proposal.
Oh, and by the way? That’s only $700 billion at one time, not a cap.
“He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in their pursuit of profits,” Michael Mandel wrote of Paulson at the time in BusinessWeek. In other words, he’s one of the guys who created the situation from which we now need to be rescued.
Aside from the lack of oversight urged in the proposal, another similarity to the Patriot Act is the unprecedented amount of authority granted to one administration official. Read More
