Geithner's "power grab."

Read about it here.

Here's the summary:

The crisis surrounding the American International Group was a near-tragedy that underlines the need for broad new government authority to regulate or even take control of financial institutions other than banks, the government’s top fiscal officials told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Geithner claims that if this power existed back in September, current measures such as endless bailouts and seven-figure bonuses for mentally-questionable financial fuck-ups would not have happened.

He clearly doesn't remember who was President back in September.

But in a way, he has a point. Right now, the two big options are "do nothing and hope it doesn't all fall to shit" or "throw tons of money at it and hope it doesn't all fall to shit."

Or, as Barney Frank put it:

Mr. Frank said the different fates of Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. illustrate the need for options beyond the “all or nothing” approach. “One was the Lehman Brothers example, where they were allowed totally to fail and there was no help to any of the creditors,” Mr. Frank said. “The other is the A.I.G. example, where there was help for all of the creditors. Neither one is what we should be doing going forward.”

I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly brimming with consumer confidence.

So, we have Geithner asking for power that could feasibly have helped last year but probably wouldn't have helped because Bush only succeeds at failure. This sort of enhanced power that he's asking for could seemingly put grown-ups in charge of failing institutions. Maybe this would prevent endless bailouts on our dime for the shitbags who screwed everything up and frankly, I am willing to extend a little faith Obama's way. I'm not thrilled with it, but anyone can see that these bailouts are doing nothing except letting the gamblers off the hook while we owe the money to the casino.

Geithner doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but this is all way the hell over my head. All I know is that middle America and the poor are getting beast-fucked while the people who made it happen are getting off the hook. So far.

It's tough to find comedy or a light side in situations like this. I mean, with so many people losing their homes, their savings, not knowing how they can make ends meet or survive, it's nearly impossible to find anything to laugh about in situations such as--

But Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican minority leader, said the new authority would be “an unprecedented grab of power,” Reuters reported.

Thank the gods for Republicans and their supreme dedication to hypocrisy.