Payback

Hat Tip: But, I Am A Liberal!

Says "Sarko the American:"

Those responsible for the global financial crisis should be punished, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, calling for more world leaders to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

"Today millions of people around the world are fearful of losing their nest eggs, their apartments, their savings in banks," Sarkozy said at a dinner Monday where he was awarded the Elie Wiesel Foundation's Humanitarian Award.

"We must provide them with clear answers. Who is responsible for this disaster. That those responsible will be held accountable and punished and that we government leaders will assume our responsibilities," he said without specifying those responsible.

"If we don't speak clearly, we won't create a stable world," he said in front of more than 800 guests including many French and American business leaders.

"Maybe the most helpful thing that could be done today is if world leaders accepted the seriousness of the situation and spoke frankly on these topics about which one should not compromise," said Sarkozy.

The French president has been largely silent since the financial crisis struck Wall Street last week, but was expected to touch on the subject in his speech before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

He plans to speak about instilling morals into capitalism by focusing more on development than speculation, aides to Sarkozy said.

The French president spoke on Monday with Tim Geithner, president of the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about the 700-billion-dollar bailout the US Treasury has proposed to Congress to rescue the US financial system. 

I agree.  If we let these crooks go free, we're doing Americans and the world a huge injustice.  And if Congress goes through with a no-strings-attached bail-out, they should be held to the fire as well.

NeoConstant has an opinion piece up from the free-market perspective, but Kain sounds unsure:

But my struggle comes down to this: Can we successfuly weather a change away from Government interference?  Business seems only too happy to ask Government to step out of their way, while at the same time expecting a hand-out, favorable policies, subsidies, and eventually bail-outs.  In other words, Big Business seems to want to have its cake and eat it, too.  They want the Government out of the way (or in a “support” role) until their scams run amock and then they come running to the Government–and to the taxpayers–to give them their corporate welfare check to the tune of, this time, $700 billion dollars.

I would have to say "no."  We can't weather it.  The days of free-market capitalism are dead or dying.  This doesn't mean we can't have to utterly socialize, but we can't keep going like this.  We just can't.  We need more regulations, or at least safeguards, not fewer.  Obviously there was some element of this spawned by the wrong regulations.  Perhaps a few banks were forced into giving bad loans by the Community Reinvestment Act that Ron Paul decries.

But I say this was a climate of greed and too few oversights were in place to disrupt it.

McCain "flailing"

First the mistake that is Palin. And I say this not as a critic of her domestic agenda, which I disagree with, nor her familial flaws, which I can (I suppose) relate to. No, I say Palin was a flawed choice because she has not one ounce of foreign policy knowledge or experience.

So that's the first mistake--or at least the first one that is likely to haunt McCain from now on until November. Forget the seven houses. Forget the rest. Palin is going to be the achilles heel here, and if you don't believe me, just watch the polls--and especially her popularity, as it droops, falters, and then finally...collapses.

Joe Klein writes that McCain is "flailing" now in what is increasingly appearing to be a campaign beyond his control. (The title of Klein's article is "Incoherence" which I think is fitting). For every gain he made with Palin, even the trade-off allowing him to move back toward the center, toward a "populist" approach, he has taken harder hits due to the country's apprehension over Palin's inexperience. Of course, Obama has very little experience himself, but the country has had time to listen to him speak, debate--they've read his policies. They know and understand, at least on a reasonable level, what to expect. Or at least, they think they do.

Palin is an open question.

Of course, McCain isn't helping the matter at all.

Writes Klein:

First, the economic fundamentals are sound. Then we're in a major crisis. He talks about the excessive compensation that CEOs receive, but continues to have Carly Fiorina ($100 million for her failed stewardship of Hewlett Packard) as an economic spokesperson. He wants to have a vigorous new regulatory regime patrolling Wall Street--even though he has always opposed such a regime and his pal Phi Gramm was the guy in charge of dynamiting the regulations--and yet he is running this ad, warning against excessive federal power.

Could this be due to the fact that McCain has almost no sense of the economy whatsoever? Or perhaps he has strayed too far from his moderate economics of the past, in which he favored regulation, opposed irresponsible tax cuts, and is now just pandering full steam ahead to please the conservative base? In fact, I'd say a great deal of the fiscal conservatives are likely scared off as much by McCain as by Obama. The very rich may enjoy the notion of not repealing the Bush tax cuts, but many in the middle class worry his health care plan would be a disaster.

Middle-range estimates suggest that initially this change will have little impact on the number of uninsured people, although within five years this number will likely grow as the value of the tax credit falls relative to rising health care costs. Moving toward a relatively unregulated nongroup market will tend to raise costs, reduce the generosity of benefits, and leave people with fewer consumer protections.

Conservatives must be feeling the pinch. Michelle Malkin has once again resorted to blasting Michelle Obama. Apparently she feels it's somehow inappropriate or "mean" to make jabs at Palin. Well, I would be surprised to see her point out her own team's jabs the other direction, since she's quite the queen of bad-mouthing herself.

Of course, therein lies her charm.

I still think McCain has strong defense credentials. But other than that, his proposed policies are lousy. His tax policies and health care plan are certain to be a disaster. If he thinks less regulation is the answer to the current crisis, and yet supports the bailouts we've recently seen, then he truly did mean what he said when he confessed to not knowing a thing about economics.

So don't believe him, ladies and gentlemen, when he says the fundamentals of the economics are strong. They may not be as doom and gloom as many in the media would have you believe--but strong is a stretch.