Bailout Nation — The Crime Scene

While some have been comforted by the bailout that hasn’t particularly stabilized much other than the ability for banks to take over other banks and to maintain their pay and bonus structures.  In today’s Washington Post, we learn that the Treasury actively enabled even more looting:

The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration’s request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.

But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.

The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.

“Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.”

This is SOP for BushCo — to use real crisis to get in place another piece of ideology, especially ideology that is important to one of their favored interest groups. And the fact that there is a Constitution that doesn’t allow them to be a law unto themselves is just a speedbump along the way.

It is completely despicable and no one is surprised anymore that these people do not care about the rule of law. But the complete opportunism of BushCo was a damn good reason to take a little more time to know — word for word — what the Congress was being asked to buy into. And as for the Congressional Dems? How about this:

Some legal experts said these under-the-radar objections mirror the objections to the congressional resolution authorizing the war in Iraq.

“It’s just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system,” said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. “We’re left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?”

Do these people ever learn from anything?