Follow the money, pt 2

Posted below is an interview with Dennis Kucinich on Democracy Now! about the Wall Street bailout. He's talking about the version that failed to pass in the House on Monday. From everything I've read so far, the new version that passed in the Senate yesterday isn't any better, although it is 400-some pages long and includes somewhere around $150,000,000,000 ($150 billion) in tax cuts (but not for you or me) in addition to the $700,000,000,000 ($700 billion) in cash that they expect us to pay with our un-cut tax dollars. Grrrrrr....

Among other things, Kucinich says:

"It seems to me there's a possibility that this crisis has a little bit of manufacture to it."

Anyone surprised? Here are some other excerpts:

"It has provisions in it where it talks about helping homeowners, but when you read the fine print, you see it has language like 'may' instead of 'shall' and 'encouraging' instead of 'mandating' help for the millions of homeowners who are worried right now about whether they're going to lose their home. There's no help for them in this."

"I reject the underlying premise that we needed this bill... We haven't looked at any alternatives..."

"Well, what we have is a transfer of wealth, actually. It's a continuation of a transfer of wealth. This whole government has become nothing more than a big machine that transfers the wealth upwards with our tax policies, our energy policies, with this fiscal policies, with the war. All the wealth of the country goes from the pockets of the people into the hands of a few. This is a very dangerous moment. You know, it's the biggest amount of injection of capital by the government in a single time since the New Deal. And frankly, there is no trickle down here. There's just rewarding bad behavior."

"There's 400 economists and three Nobel Prize-winning economists who have said, 'Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing? Why are you rushing this?' You know, this thing doesn't smell right, frankly."

"Goldman Sachs is struggling to survive. And, you know, their former chief is now the head of the US Treasury. He's in a position to be able to direct assets in a way that would help enhance his own financial standing. I mean, that's a clear conflict of interest. And, you know, that's something that needs to be said."

The biggest theft in the history of our country, that's what I say, and both Obama and McCain support it. We need to look at the basic premise of bailing out Wall Street before we decide how we're going to do it. As I understand it, in Britain, the government is nationalizing failing banks and, in the process, is acquiring both the good and the bad debt, unlike the proposal here, where the government will only be purchasing bad debt. Hmmm....

Read the full transcript here or watch video:

What he said...

I was listening to Wisconsin Public Radio today and aside from a little bit about the Olympics, all they talked about was the Democratic convention, which was no surprise. Oddly, they didn't say anything . "Hillary did what she had to do..." or "Mark Warner's speech was boring," and "all the speeches were boring..." "Hillary said this..." "what will Bill Clinton say tonight..." "did Hillary do enough..." "Joe Biden will probably liven things up...". They went on and on about how uninspiring all the speeches were. Not once did they even mention Dennis Kucinich, who I though made a great speech. Not once. Par for the course for the stupid media, I guess. They decide who we get to listen to. They decide for us that the convention was uninspiring without letting us hear the most inspiring speech so far. They decide for us who is a valid candidate and who is an also-ran. Uff da.

You've probably already seen this or posted it on your own blog, but if you were a person who got all your news from television, radio or the newspaper, (which clearly is not the case) you might not even be aware that Kucinich exists. He says it all in this speech, and I enjoyed watching him hop around. Too bad he's not the nominee, but I guess the media decided for us that he wasn't an option before the primaries even started.