Hillary Clinton v. Bernie Sanders: Who can put a chicken in your pot?

"A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in every Garage?" [Herbert Hoover campaign, 1928]

The Republican Party candidate of 1928 had good intentions. Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer best known for organizing the civilian food relief efforts for Europe during and after World War I. He had a reputation for honesty, which was important given the scandal-ridden administrations of the Roaring Twenties.

His campaign slogan was "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Cars were still somewhat new and many people did not own one. Having a meat dish once a week was also still beyond many American families. This was despite the generally upbeat economy of the 1920s.

We all know how that worked out. In 1929 Herbert became President Hoover, and late in 1929 the stock market crashed. Then the economy crashed. Then the banks crashed. Then we had the New Deal, but the economy did not really recover until 1939, when war in Europe created demand that got America's factories rolling again. By 1946 most of the world's factories outside the U.S. had been destroyed, insuring American economic prosperity and dominance for decades to follow.

Now Democrats are being asked to choose between Bernie Sanders, a career politician from Vermont, and Hillary Clinton, who needs no introduction. [Links are to their campaign web sites, in case you don't already get as many email solicitations for donations as you would like]

Today most Americans can afford a chicken once a week, even if they are using Food Stamps. Most Americans who need a car have a car.

But the idea stands: everyone wants more. The welfare people want more welfare, the workers want higher pay, the middle class business people want more than they have, right on up to the highly discontented billionaire class.

But let's just worry about the lower middle class on down, the small business owners and assistant managers, lower ranking professionals and bureaucrats, the hourly workers, freelancers, and the economically marginal.

Lets call whatever Hillary and Bernie are promising a chicken. Who is most likely to put a chicken in your pot?

Consider that the Republican candidates have an ancient recipe for boiled chicken: lower taxes and lower services. A proven recipe for some people having billions of chickens and some having none.

Whoever is President, whether it is Hillary or Bernie (or O'Malley or a new face), will face a Congress that has plenty of Republicans in it.

That chicken will have to be fought over. So, who do you want fighting for your chicken?

Right now the left wing of the Democratic Party clearly wants Bernie. His campaign speeches promise much. He promises to tax the rich to pay for everything. But when you look at his record as a politician, it is almost devoid of accomplishments. He mostly boasts of voting against things he does not like.

If Bernie is President he will try to wrestle the whole chicken from the Republicans.

Hillary, on the other hand, will give the wrestling match some thought. She we get as much chicken for us as she can. Maybe half the chicken, maybe most of the chicken, maybe just a leg. But if Hillary is elected, we will at least get some chicken.

Bernie won't get us so much as a feather. What he will be best at is criticizing Hillary for not getting the whole chicken.

That is why he is so appealing to angry leftists. They've been living on anger so long, they've forgotten what chicken tastes like.

President Hoover, Depression, and the Fiscal Cliff

According to William Manchester, writing in The Glory and the Dream, our typical beliefs about Herbert Hoover need some expansion. After nearly a decade of post World War I prosperity in the 1920s, which the Republican Party was happy to take credit for, Herbert Hoover won the Republican Party nomination for President in 1928. He was considered to be liberal best known for his role in supervising food relief efforts to Europe during the war; he was berated by Republican business leaders and right-wing politicians.

In 1929 the stock market crashed, and in 1930 the U.S. economy went down hill. Hoover, who was in many ways a very smart guy, simply did not understand what was happening. He thought American commerce would bounce back, and he had a lot of economists to back that view. He thought the problem was mainly one of psychology: "He himself had chosen the word "Depression" because it sounded less frightening than "panic" or "crisis.""

Despite President Hoover's hard work, happy talk, and genuine efforts to revive the economy, things got worse each year, and in particular in the election year of 1932. Later, from the 1940s to the end of the century, economists mostly agreed about what caused the Great Depression. Since the turn of the century much of economic "science" has become mere politics again. The Fiscal Cliff talks in particular are long on rhetoric and short on genuine understanding of our current predicament. I've written about aspects in earlier blog posts, and have seen some fairly good explanations from the like of Robert Reich and others. But Manchester's description is both short and telling, so I am going to reproduce it at length here, from pages 36 and 37 [I added some paragraph breaks to make it easier to read]:

"The real blame lay in the false underpinnings of the Coolidge-Hoover "New Era" prosperity. Seen in perspective, the Depression appears to have been the last convulsion of the industrial revolution, creating a hiatus before the technological revolution. In the aftermath of the World War, the techniques of mass production combined to increase the efficiency per man-hour by over 40 percent. This enormous output of goods clearly required a corresponding increase of consumer buying power—that is, higher wages. But the worker's income in the 1920s did not rise with his productivity. In the golden year of 1929, Brookings economists calculated that to supply the barest necessities a family would need an income of $2000 a year—more than 60% of American families were earning.

"In short, the ability to buy did not keep abreast of the volume of goods being turned out. It was part of the foolishness of the time to argue that the surge in production was no problem, that "a good salesman can sell anything." In practice this meant that while the rich (and many who weren't rich) were speculating in stocks, zealous salesmen were encouraging a kind of mass speculation. Customers of limited means were being persuaded to take products anyhow, the exchange being accomplished by an overextension of credit.

"The stock market, honeycombed with credit in the form of broker's loans, crashed of its own weight, calling into account the million so little deals consummated by commercial travelers who had sold anything and everything to people lacking the means to pay for it. The panic followed, and the country couldn't cope with it. The last extended economic crisis had been in 1893; since then America had become so industrialized that a massive return to the farm was impossible.

"There was a certain rough justice in Herbert Hoover's ascent to the Presidency on the eve of the catastrophe, for as Secretary of Commerce he had been fascinated with productivity and indifferent to the dangerous lack of buying power. Long after he left the White House, he realized what had happened and wrote: "A margin of some thousands ... got too much of the productive pie for the services they performed ... Another margin of some 20% got too little."

So old Hoover, when he had time to sit back and calmly analyze what had happened, came to an understanding diametrically opposed to most Republican businessmen and politicians today. The Rich took more than their share of pie, the workers got less than their share, and the economy came tumbling down.

What goes around comes around, but today there are some significant differences from 1932. There was almost no national debt in 1929, and despite some depression-driven annual deficits, not much in 1932 either. But computer technology has put all kinds of people out of work, while the monetary benefits of it have accumulated in the hands of a tiny number of people.

Last year's Republican rhetoric was that serious national deficit reduction would be good for the economy. When they saw that the only way to achieve that was to raise taxes and cut the military deficit, they changed their tune to singing "the fiscal cliff is bad for you."

What is needed to save the economy is redistribution of wealth. You don't actually need a socialist government to achieve that. If profitable companies would just pay their workers more, the free market system would probably work out, and a better economy would produce more tax dollars. But Steve Jobs (now a capitalist deity) hoarded his money and paid his workers in American stores (and Chinese factories) starvation wages, the same as they would have gotten working the hamburger machines at any fast food joint. Multiply the same behavior by perhaps 2000 large corporations, and a bunch of "small" greedy business guys, and ice that cake with Wall Street shenanigans, and you have our current serious problems.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, is taking a "let them eat cake" position. He wants to keep the "middle class" tax cuts, while restoring the pre-Bush tax rates for the rich. Thus angering a minimal number of voters with tax rises. But those who have jobs now, and especially those who kept jobs during the Great Recession, have benefited from low tax rates while millions lost their homes, or have been mostly unemployed, or are still hoping for any kind of job.

The employed middle class can pay more taxes, and should not gripe about it. Some of that money might be used for deficit reduction, but some should go to hiring the people that are needed to make society and the economy work in the long run. I'd like to see the IRS expanded to make sure there is less tax dodging. I'd like to see the Department of Labor actually help working people get unionized and bargain for higher wages and benefits. And I'd like the Republicans to read the section of the Constitution that says "Congress shall have power to ... establish Post Offices and post Roads;" in other words, the Post Office should get direct federal subsidies with priority over the many expenditures now made for items that are not even mentioned in the Constitution.

There is no cliff. The economy would get better right away if Republican business people would stop praying to Jesus for tax cuts, sold their government bonds, and invested in their work forces. [See Where Have All the Capitalists Gone?]

To the extent a fiscal cliff needs to be avoided, all we need to do is limit spending cuts to the military budget. Watch the "compromise" in which Democrats agree to not cutting the defense budget, and instead create more misery for the people who made the mistake of voting for them.

One last Herbert Hoover note: the U.S. had done well by lending a lot of money to European belligerents during World War I. Hoover allowed for repayment to be suspended, which helped keep world commerce running.

And which nation's economy did best from 1929 to the beginning of World War II? Russia's, then part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. American historians and economists have a way of forgetting that fact, and everything we learned from the Great Depression.

Where are the Jobs?

Yesterday a friend called up, highly distressed. Her last short term job had been as a census worker in 2010, and her jobless benefits ran out this May. She is about to become homeless, although that probably means she will start couch surfing, not living in the street. I know she has not been diligent looking for work. Like some of my acquaintances, she enjoys a prolonged, taxpayer-funded vacation from the stress of work. Nevertheless, she has done some looking, and if jobs were more plentiful here is California, she would probably being going to work on Monday instead of facing an eviction notice.

Multiply that by about 14 million, and you have a nation filled with capable people who are not employed. The lucky ones are getting unemployment compensation. State benefits typically last six months; the Federal government extends that to a full two years during times of high unemployment.

There is no one cause of unemployment, but there are a few key factors at play. There are two big holes in the economy right now. One is construction, with its attendant employment of realtors and of workers that produce products that normally go into building like wood, cement, glass, and metal.

The other is government, particularly state and local governments. Ever since the economy turned up from the depths of the recession, private employers have been hiring, if not as quickly as we would like. June brought another wave of layoff notices for public employees like teachers, bureaucrats, and police. The net has been very few jobs.

In 2008 the Republicans and Democrats united briefly to save Wall Street, the banking system, and the big American automobile manufacturers. That done, they fell to quarrelling. The Republicans quarrel among themselves, Tea Party people against the old school. Almost no one listens to Barack Obama, whose lack of leadership qualities were disguised by his rhetorical abilities until he actually became President.

But high unemployment is not Barack Obama's fault. It is not anybody's fault. It evolved over time, and our politics have not yet evolved to the point where we can deal with the new reality.

Let's start by putting on our thinking caps. Why not use the money that is paid out in unemployment to pay people to do real work? In the most appalling cases, public school teachers are laid off, so they can sit on their butts for two years while the few remaining teachers take on ever more students. Can you spell S-T-U-P-I-D? But the same is true in the private sector. Some people get worked to death during a depression and almost wish they had been lucky enough to be aid off.

The problem is that our economic rules and regulations, and even business culture, are "fighting the last war." That is, they were designed to fix problems that might be the same on the surface, but that have different causes than in the past. So the fixes don't work any more, at least not as well as they should. We are feeding leaded gasoline to cars designed for unleaded, then acting surprised when the engines die.

Most of the programs we now have to deal with recessions and unemployment were initiated during the Great Depression (with bipartisan support, I might add. Go look at the Congressional Record if you don't believe me). Some pre-date that, like the Federal Reserve System. The Great Depression itself had no one cause; it was the perfect storm of changes in the global economy and American culture and politics. Hoover did not have the tools in place to deal with it, and even the New Deal did not work well. If Hitler had not started World War II (causing everyone to start ordering arms and grain from the U.S.), the Depression might have lasted even longer than it did.

Some people thought that war spending was the ticket, after that experience. The problem is that while the U.S. benefited economically from the war, the economies of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China and Japan were essentially destroyed. The U.S. make out best when other nations fight. Other nations make out best when they remain neutral and the U.S. fights the evil villain of the decade. The only defense spending that really helps the U.S. economy is when it is just a fig leaf for civilian spending, like the Federal Defense Highway System. Built to move tanks around the nation quickly and make road contractors rich, that defense effort is now what we call Interstate Highways.

Some people think China is to blame (two decades ago they said the same about Japan). As late as 1750 China had the world's largest economy, then it was ripped to shreds by the Great Powers (including the U.S.) and had a third world economy by 1950 when the Communists took over. I don't see how we can honestly blame China for unemployment in the U.S. In fact, if not for China buying U.S. products, we would have even more unemployment. China would buy more products if we produced them. We don't produce more products because over 10% of our workforce are loafing when they'd be willing to work if they were offered a job and their unemployment checks were cut off.

Unemployment insurance was designed to provide temporary relief to workers, allowing them to find new jobs and stay productive. During recessions it also answers as a counter-cyclical measure, keeping demand up until the business cycle gets going again. It is not a jobs program. We had no real jobs programs during the Great Recession. Some extra money was spent on infrastructure, but infrastructure work is highly mechanized and the money goes for cement and diesel fuel for bulldozers and cranes. Only a fraction is used to hire workers.

Aside from government stupidity, which is ageless and unlikely to change, the root cause of joblessness is inefficient allocation of capital, which is a function of capitalist stupidity. Let me be clear: American capitalists are rapidly becoming world class idiots, and I don't just mean Donald Trump. Not all of them are dysfunctional, there is a spectrum, but a significant proportion of our capitalist class are seriously screwing things up for all of us.

There have always been some stupid capitalists, in particular heirs to capital have a way of regressing towards not being much smarter than the average joe. Over time that sort of ordinary ineptitude sorts itself out, as their heirs of the Carnegies and Fords lose their dough to the up and coming Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs.

Nevertheless, the American capitalist class as a whole has seriously ossified during the last 30 years. They want sure things; they are risk averse. Hiring people for existing businesses is a risk. Starting a new business is very risky. Sure there are people who still do that, like venture capital firms, but they are the exception.

Government could do something about joblessness, but won't. It isn't that the Republicans are standing in the way of the Democrats. Ever since George McGovern failed to get elected President the Democrats have been quite capable of standing in their own way.

The good news is that we are still at the beginning of an economic up cycle. As the economy improves, our capitalists will feel safer, and want to use their money to make more money, rather than just hoarding it. To do that, they will have to hire more store clerks, maybe even begin making housing loans again, and paying workers to repair homes so people can move back into them.

If the capitalists were really smart, they would fire their $10 million + a year corporate CEOs and hire equally competent, probably more competent men at a fraction of the cost. The fact that they can't be bothered to do that shows just how bad they have become at allocating capital.

Obama's Luck Runs Out

Fishtailing is a good way to describe the American body politic these days. The Democrats only got in back in 1996, and here it is in 2010 and they are on the outs again, at least in the House of Representatives. Our grand Constitution ensures that clean sweeps are nearly impossible by having only one-third of Senators elected every 2 years, and of course Barack Obama has two more years guaranteed.

Unfortunately we can't toss out lobbyists every two years. The same lot of bloodsuckers is there in Washington (and in State capitals) no matter who is President or which party controls Congress.

Obama is beginning to remind me of Herbert Hoover, and certainly reminds me of the ancient Greek adage that you don't know whether a man has had a lucky or unlucky life until he is buried. Herbert Hoover was a great guy and swept the nation in his Presidential bid in 1928. He had served less than a year in office when the stock market crashed. The Democrats won the House of Representatives in 1930 after roughly the first year of the Great Depression, except that no one knew in 1930 that anything was much wrong beyond a rather sharp drop off in the business cycle. Everyone thought the economy would start back up in 1931.

By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, blame for the Great Depression had firmly stuck to Hoover and the Republican Party. As far as I can tell, nothing they did caused the Depression and nothing they could have done could have prevented it. Even though the economy did not get much better under Roosevelt during his first term in office, most people failed to shift blame from Hoover to Roosevelt. World War II ended the Great Depression, not Roosevelt or the New Deal. I like some of the provisions of the New Deal, and some were helpful to people at the time, but it is false to give it credit for ending the depression.

Obama's timing, like Hoovers, was just bad. By the time Obama was elected in late 2008 the economy was falling apart. George W. Bush was not to blame; he did not create the housing bubble. Keep in mind that most American's don't follow politics or economics closely. It takes time for reality to sink in. Reality was real clear for all but the most obtuse by mid-2009, but by then Obama was President. Also, he made big promises to get elected, and some fools believed him.

Federal money that could have been used to create temporary jobs for people had to be used for banking and auto-industry bailouts. Those bailouts probably did save us from a depression-style crash, but the average voter doesn't worry about what might of happened. They know what happened: if they did not lose their job, people they know did. And almost everyone had their hours of work cut back in 2009, and so felt poorer. Small businesses in particular were driven to the wall.

Another difference between Roosevelt and the 1934 Democratic Party and Obama and the 2010 Democratic Party is that there was no safety net to speak of in 1932. So between '32 and '34, people were just happy to be fed and sheltered. The safety nets were in place in 2008, so people wanted more. They wanted their jobs back.

The Republican Party has no solutions available. They want to cut the Federal budget, but they won't cut where the fat is: defense and homeland security spending. Cutting the federal budget means cutting jobs. Their idea of creating jobs is giving rich people tax breaks; job creation does not work that way, and tax breaks for anyone will just add to the federal deficit. The Tea Party and Republican ideology advocates do-nothing government. That may be a fine thing in some ways, but it does not create jobs.

But it probably does not matter. We are in an upswing of a business cycle, helped by robust demand from better-managed nations like China, India, and Brazil (all socialist, more or less). I doubt the Republicans in Congress will be able to do anything that would help or hurt the economy in a major way. But that won't keep them from taking credit for the improving economy. Of course, with Obama in the White House, he'll be working hard to take credit for the improving economy too. So maybe his luck will change again.

President Franklin Roosevelt's Iron Fist

In January 1929 Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have had little hope of becoming President. Herbert Hoover had just been elected President by a landslide. Despite the grip the Democratic Party had held on the Solid South since the civil war (maintained by denying African-Americans the right to vote), Hoover was so popular that he won several former Confederate states. He won the popular vote with 21,391,381 votes to Al Smith's 15,016,443.

Capitalism, however, came unraveled in 1929. The Depression led to a total reversal of fortunes. In 1932 Roosevelt, a former Governor of New York and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, took the Presidency with 22,821,857 votes to Hoover's 15,761,841.

Roosevelt is usually portrayed as the great American Good Guy President. He is credited with ending the Great Depression and winning World War II. If, however, you want to have a factual history and a sound knowledge of economics and politics, you have to consider whether everything Roosevelt ("FDR") did really was both effective and good.

In the short, sweet version of U.S. history, on December 9, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military attacked the Philippines, then a "commonwealth," under the "protection" of the United States of America. Douglas MacArthur was in charge of U.S. troops there. They lost after putting up heroic resistance, but General MacArthur was transferred to Australia. As the U.S. military geared up, sailors and troops led by MacArthur eventually retook the Philippines from Japan. The Japanese surrendered after their cities were firebombed or nuked. The takeaway is: don't mess with the good guys.

The Devil is in the details. Recall that the Filipinos did not have an election and voluntarily join the United States. They had their own Revolutionary War to throw out the Spaniards. Just when they were succeeding, the U.S. "bought" the Philippines from Spain, and proceeded to murder the George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons of the Philippines, and about 500,000 Filipino soldiers and civilians. [See Philippines Conquest] Resistance to U.S. rule continue right on up to World War II, but for the most part the richer Filipinos found they made out well pimping for the U.S. The U.S. even promised the Philippines eventual independence, so most Filipinos in favor of independence decided patience was the better part of valor.

MacArthur, who at other times acted like a military genius, acted like a complete idiot in defending against the Japanese invasion. Roosevelt told MacArthur to hold on, help was on the way. But Roosevelt was lying. He had no intention of sending any help in time to save the U.S. and Filipino soldiers fighting the Japanese on the now-infamous Bataan Peninsula.

President Manuel Quezon, head of the commonwealth, had already tried to get Roosevelt to allow the Philippines independence before the war started. When he realized that FDR was not sending help, he again, with the backing of his cabinet, demanded independence. Since the Japanese had promised independence, Quezon believed the Philippines could become a neutral state. But Roosevelt said no. Fight to the death for America, Roosevelt said. And so many American soldiers and their Filipino comrades fought to their death to no point. MacArthur and Quezon skipped out to Australia.

It seems to me that Roosevelt's Iron Fist landed a solid punch on an oppressed, colonial people. If you look too closely at the details, you can see that U.S. war propaganda was just that, propaganda. The U.S. did not stand for democracy and freedom. The government of the Philippines did declare independence during the war. When American troops came back with General MacArthur, the U.S. asserted that the Filipinos had not, in fact become independent.

You might argue that this is a gray area, but the U.S. policy towards other Asian nations in general confirms that the policy towards the Philippines was no exception. With Japanese help, the Vietnamese declared independence from the French, the Burmese independence from the British, and the Indonesians independence from the Dutch (the Netherlands). They did not allow for an independent Korea. The U.S. promised Korea independence, then changed its mind and set up a puppet government in South Korea.

All of this is well documented. The facts about the Philippines in this case come straight out of William Manchester's highly acclaimed American Caesar, but can be found in multiple sources.

The more I look at Roosevelt, the more I see just another American rascal of a politician. I'll be documenting this more, over time, on my President Franklin Roosevelt page.

George W. Bush, Herbert Hoover, and the Great Depression

George W. Bush has not been a very popular President. Many Republican Party members believe he has not done enough to push their religious agenda, or believe he has run up too big of a national deficit. Democratic Party members hate him because he is a Republican.


Now, on top of all that, there is the distinct possibility that George W. Bush will be tarred with an economic recession serious enough to be called a Depression. A serious recession may still be averted, but it is not unreasonable to contemplate Herbert Hoover at this time.


Hoover was Secretary of Commerce in the early 1920's and was elected President in 1928 by a landslide. He was an impressive guy. His background was humble. He became an engineer. Then while working in that capacity in China he was fated to deal with a humanitarian situation. After that he was frequently tapped to deal with large scale humanitarian food crises. He was probably the best-known humanitarian of his times. Because the Republican Party had become synonymous with economic prosperity in the 1920's and because he was personally popular, in the 1928 election Herbert Hoover carried every state in the Union except Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and 6 states in the Democrat-dominated racist Deep South.


When the stock market "crashed" in October 1929, no one thought that much about it. I once went back and read Wall Street Journal from that era, and no one said "Hey, this could be the start of a Great Depression." It was a market correction; everyone knew that stock prices were in a bubble, just like the Internet bubble that burst in 2001. Herbert Hoover did not burst the stock market bubble of 1929. George W. Bush did not burst the Internet bubble; he just happened to be President when enough people realized the party was over.


1930 was not a particularly bad year for the economy, just an ordinary recession year. So neither Hoover nor Congress did anything extraordinary. In the Congressional elections in the Fall of 1930 the Democratic Party did well, partly because of the recession and partly because the Republican Party had been in power for such a long time. The Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives, but the Republicans held on to the U. S. Senate.

As the economy worsened in 1931, Hoover tried to do more, including various kinds of aid for the unemployed and new public works projects, but Congress was not cooperating. Remember that they still did not know they were in anything but an ordinary recession. The Democrats in Congress were not New Deal Democrats. Many were segregationists from the South; many represented conservative business interests. The Democrats had little reason to cooperate with Hoover, and the most conservative Republicans, who saw Hoover as a flaming liberal, did not want to spend any taxpayer money on relief for those suffering from the recession.

In early 1932 the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was formed, but Congress underfunded it. It would later become the cornerstone of the New Deal.

In simplistic histories, especially those written by liberal academics, Hoover is said to have been a conservative, do nothing President. Certainly in the Presidential election of 1932 the Democrats and Franklin Delano Roosevelt blamed the nation's economic troubles on the Republicans and Herbert Hoover. That is what partisan politicians do.

Will we see history repeat itself this year? Apparently the public at large is really mad about the plan to restore the credit markets. The Press and certain politicians have characterized it as a bailout of Wall Street. I am not for giving money to the rich, but I don't see restoring credit markets as a giveaway program.

Many institutions are in place now that were not there when the Great Depression got underway in late 1932. We have Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, both of which allow many people to spend money during recessions.

The main negative difference, and where the danger lies, is that in 1928 the U.S. had almost no national debt. Right now we have a national debt that makes me wonder at the folly of people who are buying U.S. Treasury bonds as if they are a truly safe haven in times of distress. Failure of the U.S. government to pay its obligations is no longer unthinkable.

So let's not go there. The crisis should be a lesson to all of us (and businesses in particular): don't get into debt you can't do without. We have seen again that the adage, "A banker is a guy who will lend you an umbrella when it is sunny and ask for it back when it is raining," is just the nature of things.

Like him or not (I don't) George W. Bush is President, and that means his administration is charged with dealing with the crisis. Sabotaging Bush in this situation, because he is disliked for other reasons, is appallingly stupid. In a few months he's history. Let's hope when a new President takes office the economy is still functioning.

If there is a serious recession getting underway, it will be interesting to watch the blame game. It is funny to see House Republicans pretend they are suddenly all against Wall Street, but then I guess that, too, is what politicians do.