We need to remember that we have heard all this before (and from many of the same agribusinesses): a solution to world hunger, more efficient agriculture, new plants for new challenges. It didn't work in the 1960s and '70s and it won't work now. Because as Bartlett and Steele made plain in a recent Vanity Fair article about Monsanto (and as the industry's own actions have made plain) it isn't about better agriculture. It's not about ending hunger. The drive to promote GMOs is about furthering corporate power and control over absolutely critical food production.

REMEMBER: They have a product to sell, and they don't care at all how many lies they have to tell to close the deal.

ANSWER:

NOISE

while all of this is true, the conclusion that Paulson came to-- that the bailout must be done NOW, done his way, with no oversight- is not true. We have the time to carefully consider the nature of this action. In fact I would assert that the best way to assure a total meltdown is to continue our ad hoc, hurried, ill considered decision making.

I'm much less willing to give these guys a break. If they were honest, bush wouldn't have appointed them. If they didn't have massive conflicts of interest, bush wouldn't have appointed them. Otherwise, they would have made the whole crew of jokers look bad by comparison....

while all that Mr. Leonard says may be true, the Paulson analysis mischaracterizes the foundation of our present crisis and so the large scale bailout he proposes as a solution will be nothing of the kind. The source of this crisis is to be found in the real economy, not the financial sector. Why is it that so many people had to mine the equity in their homes with subprime and adjustable rate mortgages anyway? It was the deindustrialization of the nation, the stagnation of wages in the face of skyrocketing efficiency increases that laid the foundation of our present crisis. So the solution is to be FOUND primarily in the real economy.

Treasury Secretary Paulson's testimony before Congress yesterday could have been a Comedy Central show.

The first big laugh: he opposes ruling out golden parachutes for CEOs that crash their companies and require taxpayer bailouts because it would be punitive.

It's not punishment. It's common sense. If I take my truck into the shop for a valve job and the mechanic botches it so bad that the engine explodes, I don't go and give him a bonus! Same with CEO severance packages. Don't reward those who, through incompetence, criminality or bad luck, have come close to crashing the economy. Why this is even a question is beyond me.

My second big laugh was Paulson’s opposition to taxpayers getting anything out of our trillion dollar investment. He claimed it would discourage companies’ involvement in the bailout. Any CEO or government official who says- “If I don’t get a Get Out of Bankruptcy Free card, I’ll crash the economy”- should be jailed for blackmail. If they don’t want to treat the US taxpayer like any other investor and give us some stake in the company, if they want this bailout free of charge, then let them try and weather this storm by themselves. F 'em!

Bernanke and Paulson should have no credibility on economic issues, in my opinion. They were asleep at the regulatory wheel as this disaster set itself up. They made laissez-faire (or rather lazy fairy) apologies for the criminals who made off with the bank here, and now they try and set themselves up as experts in the problem? They work for people who up until last week were saying that the economy was fundamentally sound and they made not a whimper of disagreement? And now they are claiming there's an economic disaster brewing that demands immediate action!? They should have been laughed out of the room yesterday. They deserve nothing more.

(As far as the claims of being an academic economist without a dog in the fight, a friend of mine, who teaches economics, is fond of saying that economics is the most intellectually dishonest discipline in the modern academy. I argue that biopsychiatry gives it a good run for the money on that issue, but the point is you don't get to be an established economist in a first tier university without being totally invested in the kleptocratic status quo. Again, nothing these fools say should be taken seriously.)

"Still, Johnston's overarching point is absolutely right. For better or worse, yesterday's vote was the rarest event in our political culture: ordinary Americans from all across the political spectrum actually exerting influence over how our Government functions, and trumping the concerted, unified efforts of the entire ruling class to ensure that their desires, as usual, would be ignored."

I'm not so sure. From what I heard, the GOP opposition, which was central to the failure of the bill, was based on the fact that the compromise wasn't SUFFICIENTLY subservient to the interests of Wall St.

It may be a month from an election, but I doubt THIS cat has changed its spots.

leave it to a historian,James Livingston, someone other than an economist, to shed some real light on our present moment.

The idea that the imbalance between increased productivity and decreasing real wages over time leads to huge capital pools that create massive instability in their rush to find places for productive investment..... that's more than a leftist critique of the status quo. That's more than a parallel between now and 1930. It also happens to be true. And that is why Paulson's Pig won't do a damn thing but slow the disaster down and give his Wall St. friends time to make the mess worse.

The source of the crisis is in the real economy and that's where the solution is.