"This is not a financial crisis... but a constitutional moment..."

From Stirling Newberry: (my highlights)

Let us speak of rights and reason. Of rights we have to begin from the final humiliation against a free people a proposal to grant dictatorial powers to an outgoing administration. In effect, the ability to hide all of the financial wrong doing of the last 8 years. However, what is important now is a solution. What we need now, is reason in action, as we already have reason to act... It would give Paulson not only the power to buy assets, but put terms in place which would make legal investigation of those arrangements impossible, and these contracts could not be questioned in a court of law. It is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Protect America Act, and war spending votes all rolled into one. Having seen that it cannot assume the unitary executive since the Supreme Court rejected it, they are now turning to Article III to get a trembling Congress to accept it. There is a crisis, but there is no catastrophe. Even when the physical nexus of the financial world was directly attacked, there was no need for this kind of unlimited spending power. The outlines of that solution are beginning to be accepted. It is a simpler, and broader, solution than has yet penetrated the minds of the interiors of power, because it is not about how to pay for a clean up within a functioning system, but how to change the system itself. This is not a financial crisis in the end, as the Paulson Proposal shows, but a constitutional moment, where the very mandate of government is in play. Paulson wants the tax payer to be the fool of last resort, the group of people stupid enough to buy things that no one else on the planet is stupid enough to buy. We have reached the currency crisis which the election of 2000 implied would come. If we do not solve it now, it will only recur, in a worse form, soon enough. The gut reaction on the Paulson proposal is a resounding Hell No. The word reviled is not to strong...