Published on Saturday, March 7, 2009
Excerpts from:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/07
The Bottomless Bailout
by
Ralph Nader
It is relatively easy to announce hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate rescue programs here and hundreds of billions of dollars of guarantees of corporate recklessness there and trillions of dollars of assorted stimulus, loan availabilities and foreclosure prevention initiatives in all directions. Now comes the rubber hitting the road.
Where are the skilled people to be hired by the federal agencies?the administrators, field implementers, auditors, financial whizzes
able to understand the complexity of greed and over-reach; the inspectors, prosecutors and contract negotiators to name a few categories?
In other words,
how are a hurried President Obama and his deputies going to rapidly build up the infrastructure of the federal government itself to advance all these ?public works? efficiently and to avoid expenditure disasters amidst a potential orgy of waste, fraud and abuse by the coast to coast recipients?
So many of the federal government?s functions have been contracted out to corporations and consulting firms under Clinton and the Bushes that there is a serious dearth of skilled civil servants. Moreover, Obama has indicated he wants this work done by an accountable government and not by Halliburton-type outside contractors at greater expense to taxpayers.
Besides rebuilding the federal workforce and finding out what is going on inside casino capitalism begging for bailouts,
the Obama Administration is wading into an administrative nightmare that could run through trillions of mis-directed dollars and not turn around a deep Recession plunging toward Depression.
So, during the next Congressional hearings featuring government witnesses from the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the securities, insurance and banking regulatory agencies,
the Senators should start with four direct questions:
1. Just what is it that you do NOT understand about what is going on inside this widening Wall Street mess?
2. Why don?t you understand what you need to know?
3. How are you going to use your powers to achieve such understanding?
4. Finally, if these corporations like AIG are too big to fail, too secret to fail and overwhelmingly global in structure and operations, why aren?t you asking other governments to pitch in with their own rescue packages and tell you what they know?
As one solid small town banker in Indiana put it recently: ?If these big companies are too big to fail, then they?re too big.?
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.
