Senator Bob Bennett just got ousted in the Republican Primary in Utah and I couldn't be more pleased. It appears that he was ousted based on a single vote that he cast: the vote for House Resolution 1424, more commonly known as TARP.
Better yet, pretty much everybody who voted for TARP is now quaking in their boots. They are getting huge and real primary challenges, and if they get to the general election, they're going to have a lot of trouble because TARP isn't popular with either Republicans or Independents. Democrats aren't that big on it, but it's not that big of a factor for them.
Now, that's pretty harsh, I'll admit. Bennett was a career conservative. One of the most conservative members of the Senate. Is it right that a single vote should cost him his career? My answer is a resounding, "yes".
To understand, we have to go back and revisit the history a bit. The banks, through nothing more than their own genuine stupidity, caused themselves huge problems that came to a head sometime in 2008.
Hank Paulson went to congress and said that if congress didn't give the banks all the money in the universe, with no strings attached, that we would all die in the next great depression.
The people, almost unanimously, shut down the congressional switchboard screaming that they wanted NO BAILOUT. That Wall Street caused their own troubles. They should fix them, themselves. If they couldn't, then too bad. They need to be financially ruined for being so stupid.
HR 3997 was rejected.
Wall Street sent more lobbyists, Hank Paulson explained that fascism is the only form of government that works, and HR 1424 passed.
Now, that was bad enough. Honestly, if that were all Bennett and others had done, I'd probably have found it distasteful, but not unforgiveable.
What happened next outraged everybody. Wall Street didn't provide any liquidity, at all. None of that money got to Main Street. Unemployment shot up to 10%, where it is today.
The bankers and insurance executives who had just destroyed the US economy then went about awarding themselves multimillion dollar bonuses.
Congress did nothing.
Bottom line: congress threw main street under the bus so Wall Street wouldn't have to deal with a bumpy ride.
Small businesspeople, more than any other group I'm aware of, hate the bailouts.
We're a fiesty lot. You have to have a bit of a ballsy and independent streak to hang out your shingle in the first place. We play fair, we play by the rules.
We're not so naive as to believe that life is always fair. We deal with little injustices on a daily basis.
We also are sick to death of other people putting their hands on our money. Once you open a business, it's as though the entire world is now entitled to your money and they make demands on it every day.
Most of us have gone through tough times. We've done extreme things to save our businesses. We've loaded up our credit cards. We've sold off all our posessions.
Ultimately, we know that the price of running a business badly is that we may ultimately fail. We may ultimately face financial ruin that could take a decade or more to dig out of.
So, to see congress annihilate the American people, our sense of justice, our capitalist heritage just to benefit some stupid Wall Street morons who couldn't run a profitable business? It is infuriating.
So, when a congressman is stupid enough, as Bennett was, to claim that he voted for the bailout because businesses in his district demanded it? That strains credibility. Personally, I don't know a single small businessperson who thinks any of those Wall Street banks who needed TARP should be in business at all.
What about the argument that it was a terrible thing to do, but if we didn't, then we would have faced another great depression? Honestly, I think anybody who thinks that is too stupid to be allowed to own property.
Are there actually people so stupid in our country who think that the great depression would have been averted if we had made 1-year loans to 12 banks and bought 1 insurance company and 2 car companies?
This was never Great Depression II in the making. That was just a smokescreen used to ensure the success of No Banker Left Behind.
If there is a capitalist hell, George Bush, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Barack Obama and every legislator who voted for the bailout deserves to be there, forever. What they did was unforgivable. Losing office is the least that should happen to them.
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