Here’s an email that is going around:

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret
business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of
America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large
transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in
this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS,
who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a
Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking
deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank
check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly
transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are
constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should
look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin
so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and
college fund account numbers and those of your children and
grandchildren to [email protected] so that we may transfer
your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information,
I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be
used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury

Henry Paulson

All the changes made to the original bailout bill are meaningless. Their only point is to provide political cover to the representatives who vote for it. See Congressional Charade: Changes in Bailout Bill Cosmetic, and Everyone Knows That. What’s astonishing to me is the lemming like way the Congressional Republicans are following Bush and Paulson off a cliff. I truly believe now that this coming election is the end of the Republican Party.

From his latest speech:

“There is no nice way to say this, so I will be blunt: Our credit markets had contracted a hideous STD—a securitization transmitted disease—for which lowering the funds rate to negative real levels seemed to me to be not only an ineffective treatment, but a palliative and maybe even a stimulus that would only encourage further mischief.”

See more from his speech at Naked Capitalism.

Both New Gingrich and Paul Krugman are against this ridiculous bailout. That should be enough to demonstrate that it is a bad idea, but I still think it’s going to pass. The congressional leadership of both parties are too deeply entwined with the financial industry to prevent it. The only amusing part of this crisis is reading the naive commentary from the left who apparently believe that the Democrats are less involved than the Republicans in this corruption. At this point, the differences between the Republicans and Democrats are as irrelevant to the main issues of the day as the differences between the Aristocrats and the Populares were during the late years of the Roman Republic. And we all know how that story ended.

UPDATE: Obama saying he may keep Paulson on, has apparently woken up at least one of his supporters to the kind of change he is offering. see here.

I’m not a fan of John Derbyshire, but his column entitled The Election From Hell pretty much sums up how I feel.

So, Glenn Greenwald, having apparently been in a stupor all his life, has just noticed that U.S. government policies don’t reflect the opinions of the majority of the U.S. people. As an example, he cites U.S policy towards Israel. However, he could have chosen immigration, taxation, or pretty much any other issue. Why he is surprised, I don’t know. First, in a republic, the government will never accurately reflect the direct will of the people. That’s inherent in the design of the system of representation. Secondly, he misses the fact that what is important is not opinion, but commitment. Commitment means that you give money, organize and vote around an opinion. And it is commitment that moves policy, not opinion. Most people have opinions on many issues, but they have commitment towards far fewer.

If Greenwald would bother to do some reading, he would find that his startling new discovery about the power of small, committed groups of people to mold policy was first made about 3,000 years ago. More recently, about 200 years ago, this power was a major concern of the founding fathers of the U.S. when they designed our government. Indeed, James Madison wrote an entire essay on the problem of these “factions,’ which he defined as:

“a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

I’d suggest Greenwald read this essay, but he’s probably too busy blogging about his startling new discovery of how the checks and balances of the U.S. governmental system makes real change hard.

UPDATE: Major mess-up, I wrote Reynolds instead of Greenwald when I originally wrote this piece. Thanks Dag for pointing out my mistake.

Normally, I don’t comment on Sullivan, because he is so philosophically incoherent, but I can’t resist this one time. In Misreading Obama, he makes the common mistake of thinking nostalgia is conservatism. Obama’s idealization of village markets is as bad as the 19th century critics of British industrialization who used to go on about the joys of English village life. Nostalgia is a longing for an ideal that never was. Conservatism is a reluctance to make cultural changes that have uncertain outcomes. True, a lot of conservatives suffer from nostalgia, but that doesn’t make them identical.

If you are ever inclined to ignore government corruption, just think about these poor parents in China. Their children were killed in shoddily constructed schools during the recent earthquake, and they have no chance of getting any justice.

If you really want to understand this year’s election, read this piece in the London Review of Books by David Runciman. As Runciman points out, the election has essentially broken down by demographics. This is no surprise, because that is how politics always works. The number of people who vote on reason is amazingly small. Moreover, everyone is suspicious of the few people who do so, because they appear to have no group loyalty. I’d get depressed, but there’s no point.