It's rather remarkable, once you add it all up.The lowest rated Congress in history (is it still at 10% approval?) working in tandem with the lowest rated president in history is spending the largest amounts of money ever seen in history.
The Daily Beast has it in a phrase: the Never-ending Bailout. Indeed what it is.
This effort is helmed (would you believe it) by a Princeton economist and a private banker. I heard they ladled out $800 million in the soup kitchen yesterday.
Here we have an academic who has spent his life nodding blankly in the faculty lounge or on Fed boards during breaks from his higher calling: promoting failed, nonsensical models of how economies work. Meanwhile, his colleague at Treasury spent his entire career as a salesman at Goldman Sachs. Peddling product and as he says, taking care of the customers (who are now comin' a beggin').
You say you want economic insight? How about expertise administering untold trillions in handouts? I give you a salesman running Treasury. This fellow, if he learned anything about economics at all, did so accidentally over lunch. He gathered mere crumbs of that same drivel spooned out by the Bernankes of the world - a tiny portion of droppings left by the Great Army of Pleasantly Respectable Incompetents.
You can laugh at it all, as they do over at LOL Fed (the picture above is from that site), but the corollary to scorn would, in a normal polity, be constitutional crisis. We deserve one at this point.
And here it gets interesting.
In the truly extraordinary arrangements made to hand out staggering amounts of cash with an absolute minimum of strings attached, the humblest citizen understands that a constitutional milestone has been passed, that one phase of constitutional history has eneded and another has begun.
Here we would do well to consult the late Carl Schmitt who taught us that actual sovereignty rests with that individual or agency able to declare rule by exception. Unfortunately, the LOL team at the head of the Fed and Treasury are ruling by exception.The good news is that Congress exercised the power before delegating it to the LOL team and it stands poised to take it back, after additional oceans of cash have been squandered.
Even at 10%, Congress remains an embodiment of We the People - of the people's sovereignty. A next step in the process, and who knows what the trigger may be, could conceivably be popular sovereignty asserting itself against Congress and other elected institutions. Not just in Icelandic-style rioting to fire failed politicians, but as it was imagined in early state government making. There, the people reserved to themselves to make whatever changes were needed to the constitution or government by whatever process pleased them, whenever it pleased them, whether or not it was reflected in the foundational laws.
As Christian Fritz points out in American Sovereigns, these early Americans viewed sovereignty as immune to rule-making or constitution drafting. As a lawyer once told me, "You can't sign away your rights."
After the LOL team has spent away two or three generations' worth of tax income -say in another week or two - maybe we should sign away their rights while asserting our own.
This spells fret time for movement conservatives who, to defend themselves from liberal government, have erroneously enshrined the Constitution above the Declaration.
Every assertion of popular sovereignty will thus represent a constitutional crisis; and yet the current situation demands dicsussion of whether the Constitution can be used to end the "never-ending bailout."
The trick is to decide how to assert our collective sovereignty in this crisis. Here, 50 years of conservative thought and polemic have failed us and we start with little more than an Icelandic template.
