Prisonship Internal Memo to Congressional Dems

Memo to Dems: This is Leverage.

Dear Dems,

So, like many of you, I had a hard time turning away from beautiful geniuses like Jim Cramer (swoon) and (my life-pundit) Erin Burnett* as this last week came in with a "laissez-faire" Lehman collapse and went out with an AIG bailout, only to culminate in what Krugman et. al. are rightly (and ironically) referring to as "socialism" in our financial sector.

(Parenthetically, if you're wondering "what the eff does all of this mean, and who the hell can explain it to me?" you'd do well to check out: Jorge on the nuts and bolts of the housing market bubbles, CDOs and how we got here; Krugman on the meat of the Paulson proposal and how it "works" to solve even just the market-related problems at hand; Dean Baker, as usual, with a blueprint for a bailout that might improve things for actual fucking people; and, as pertains to the thrust of this memo, Bob Kuttner on what the Dems could do if they "strapped some balls on their dick," to use the colorful and masculinist phrase once overheard passing from the lips of my 9th grade history teacher.)

Anyway, Dear Dems,

I learned a lot about leverage in my former work as a union researcher. (It's an even-numbered year, so I will assume you remember what unions are.) In my old line, leverage was everything - you never knew where you'd find it, but you knew you'd know it if you saw it. Sometimes it's a matter of public record. Sometimes it's a matter of dumpster-diving. Sometimes it's a matter of building power and rope-a-doping your opponent into revealing her own weaknesses, then building more power in the light of that self-diagnosis, then winning.

This time's one of those times. I've studied and studied and crapped myself thinkin' on the meaning of leverage, its rhythms and habitats and metamorphoses....but I've rarely seen it show itself so plainly. Democrats, you hold a lot of power in your hands this week. And knowing you as I do, I expect nothing less than a warm-hearted, polite and ineffectual surrender.

Does "taking one for the team" always have to be synonymous with losing? Before your very eyes, not just the sitting GOP but the very legacy of Reaganism has shown its "less government in business, more business in government" ass to be a social disease, in need of an unprecedented dose of welfare. While it's understandable (to me, anyway) that our Democratic nominee for president affects something like moderation- and makes all the bullshit bipartisan calls for pragmatism of which it will be the job of people like me and the OGs to disabuse him in January - your job is to make sure that socialism does not come to Wall Street without strings.

There should be more government in business. Now is the time to trim away any compensation for the shareholders and executives we're bailing out, and to erect a wall between houses of finance and government agencies where now there's a revolving-door. For god's sake"White-collar" crimes can be as violent as any other...violent-er, even, when one in seven of our damn bridges are unsound and all our dimes are spread across Iraq and the inter-ether of Over the Counter markets. (fwiw - I will regret not living to see an Attorney General Edwards "assume the position" and enact the purge that gets us to pre-post-neoliberalism.)

There should be less business in government. The idea that, having purchased these "toxic" assets for a sum of $700 billion, we will parcel them out in $50 billion slabs and have currently functioning private financial houses resell them is obscene, insane, incestuous, and it repeats the lie of Reaganism. BHO spoke eloquently of a need to "make government cool again," a neat phrase that in many ways evokes the political and cultural stakes involved in the massive, necessary political project of undoing a 30-year ass-kicking of the many by the few. Our purpose is not served by outdoing the GOP at treating citizens like shareholders. Our purpose is served only by showing that government can and should function within a democratic polity as an agent of (downward) redistribution, and that Democratic government's version of redistribution is a lot more inclusive and a lot less violent than the alternative.

Anywho, summing up:

1. Good News! This week you have the chance to undo all of your past sins. You can work off the debt accrued by your failure to stop an evil, imperialist war by declaring the end of finance capitalism as we know it.
   
2. Bad News! We both know you'll be doing no such thing.
   
3. Don't worry, I'll probably end up voting for all y'all anyway. See you on the teevee!
   

(footnote: * Yeah, it'd seem that my MSNBC addiction is giving way to a CNBC fetish - can you blame me, with a duo like this as the Kiki Dee and Elton John/Gram and Emmylou/Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw for my shut-in vie de brain-diharrea?)