Members of Congress are upset that the legislative branch has been frozen out of the process by the Bush regime's Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson.during this Wall Street financial catastrophe

 

However, there were enough warnings sounded by progressive economists and financial experts about the Bush regime's laissez faire, deregulation, no oversight of mortgage lenders and financial institutions, that a Democratic controlled Congress should have been proactive on this beginning last year. 

 

Instead Democratic leaders listened to the likes of Bob Rubin who was part of the problem.

 

As I wrote last November: "But Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill and other Dems inside the beltway, like Hillary Clinton, think Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, is a genius.  A genius for Wall Street but not necessarily for typical Americans.  

"As Robert Kuttner points out,  "...taking on the most powerful Democratic Party interest group of them all -- Wall Street -- is viewed as a sign of recklessness, unsoundness, demagoguery, and political suicide. A mark of Wall Street's ubiquitous power in defining the limits of the politically thinkable is that its power is hardly noticed. The personification of this power is Robert Rubin." 

 

And then in January, I posted this: "In addition, these so called senior Democrats seem to be freezing out labor leaders from initial hearings on the economic stimulus bill. 

 

"From Jeffrey Birnbaum at the Washington Post,  "But Leo W. Gerard, president of United Steelworkers International, said organized labor's concerns go well beyond a couple of hearings. "We have a problem in the Democratic Party," he said. "There's way too much influence from K Street lobbyists and Rubinistas" -- his term for Wall StreetDemocrats.

The Washington Post reports today: "Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed concern yesterday that they have had no control over when and how federal money has been used to curb the panic on Wall Street. While many have been convinced that the moves so far have been necessary to prevent a wider financial meltdown, they said they felt confined to the sidelines as power to make momentous decisions has been concentrated in very few hands.

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she has dispatched Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to determine whether Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke should retain authority to unilaterally bail out failing firms, as he did Tuesday with a loan of $85 billion to insurance giant American International Group.

"Paulson and Bernanke have taken the lead not only from lawmakers but from President Bush. Bush has left direct management of the crisis to them and other advisers, and has limited his public remarks on the economy. On Tuesday, he canceled plans to brief reporters after meeting with his economic advisers.

"Republicans and Democrats alike said the crisis is in part the result of insufficient government regulation on Wall Street. Frank and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, both plan hearings aimed at exposing regulatory failures and developing a new system for managing the bad assets of financial institutions collapsing under the burden of their investments in a plummeting housing market.

" 'No one in this democracy -- unelected -- should have $800 billion to dispense as he sees fit,' Frank said. 'It may be that there is so much bad debt out there clogging our system that we may have to have some intervention. But it shouldn't be the unilateral decision of the chairman of the Federal Reserve with the backing of the secretary of the Treasury.'

" 'They made very clear that they could give us no assurance that there wouldn't be other shoes that would drop,' said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. 'They also did not draw any bright line distinction in how they would handle things going forward.'

"Conrad said Paulson and Bernanke also could not say what the effect might be on the federal budget, which is already running up near-record deficits. Nor could they say what the ultimate cost to taxpayers might be.

"Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill stinks.  They're on the sidelines on this issue because they chose to be.  Democratic so called leaders are as deliberately negligent as they were with the nominal economic stimulus bill."

As I wrote last January about that Band-Aid economic stimulus bill: "Tax rebates are the centerpiece!  Are these people daft?... 

"Do Democratic leaders think that these measly rebates will help those people who are struggling to make mortgage or rent payments, almost unaffordable health care coverage payments for those fortunate enough to have health care, while also paying for the increasing cost of other necessities?  What planet are these Dems on? 

"Last week I wrote that Bush and his cronies caused this economic disaster and Democratic leaders on the Hill should not trust him to be part of the solution

"As usual, it seems the Democratic leadership forgot to get a backbone implant during their holiday vacations.  They are taking bad advice from their Wall Street Rubinista pals, and allowing Bush, his administration lackeys, and Republican Congressional loyalists to make this economic crisis even worse.

"This is not the way to begin overcoming the terrible consequences of Dubya's economic debacle.  It's a disappointing economic stimulus package made by a disappointing, frustrating, and weak Democratic leadership and a president who perpetrated this economic debacle on the country with the help of Congressional Republican Bushite lackeys."

I wrote this in January, also: "The House passed a so-called economic stimulus bill that doesn't and now the Senate is working on their version that's simply ice cream on a cow pie.

"The Senate Finance Committee added federal checks to low-income seniors and disabled veterans, extended unemployment benefits for 13 weeks, and added tax credit extension to alternatives energy sources, but then went ahead and included tax breaks for oil and gas exploration, appliance makers, and construction firms building houses in an already overbuilt market reports the Washington Post.

"If we keep giving big breaks tax breaks, aka corporate welfare, to big corporate business like gas and oil, in what is laughably known as free market capitalism, we might as well nationalize the energy industry.

"Pierre Tristam, editorial writer for the Daytona Beach News-Journal, addressed the fallacy of this stimulus package when he wrote, "There's something embarrassing -- economically, politically, morally -- about government "bansheeing" to give voters cash handouts disguised as economic stimulus. Does a couple with two kids, making $160,000, really deserve the same $900 as a single mother of one living on tips from her roadside diner job? Does a childless, single lawyer making $74,000 a year really need $600 from a federal government with a $163 billion deficit? 

"Tristam also asks why, with the skyrocketing cost of food, weren't food stamp benefits increased and why, with the high cost of oil, wasn't the home heating oil subsidy raised in this stimulus package?"

Jim Hightower talks about this inadequate White House-Congress stimulus that should have created jobs which would be one of the best stimuli possible.  As he says, "Now that all of this has led to a very real economic crumbling that even affects Wall Street, Democrats are scrambling to look like they're doing something, including meekly going along with Bush to provide more corporate tax cuts that will do zero to stimulate recovery. Where's their "little d" democratic impulse?"

Instead of getting tough with the greed and fraud of mortgage lenders and Wall Street and saying "enough" with the Bush regime's dangerous deregulation, no oversight anything goes, hands off corporate, Wall Street money making schemes, and protecting the American people, the Democratic leadership, fearing what they thought might be political suicide, stayed mute, spineless, and caved to Bush who helped cause this disaster.