What were they thinking?

September 29th, 2008 at 03:38pm Linda Grist Cunningham

What was the U.S. House of Representatives thinking today as it voted against the $700 billion financial stabilization plan? Clearly, they were not thinking about your 401k, your job or your struggling company. Nope, instead of educating their constituents on what this whole thing really means, the Congressmen who voted against the bill were thinking of their own cushy careers.

Careers in which they get the best of all medical plans, great retirement benefits, connections to the world’s richest and most powerful (in case they want to work a bit or write a book after leaving office), and the overall wherewithal to live decently in two places, home and D.C. Not for them the worries about whether their employer will go belly up, their jobs disappear, their medical insurance sky rocket or vanish. Not for them the worries about how to pay the bills after retiring (they get a pension; something non-government employees said farewell to years ago.).

Nope, they were just thinking about getting back home to campaign to keep those cushy jobs. Heaven forbid, they lose a seat in Congress; they might actually have to find a far less secure posting back home.

The representatives who voted against this bill need to get their fannies back to D.C. and back to work. They need to squarely face their constituents and teach them the mathematics of what did happen and what’s about to happen. Don’t like this plan? Get another done — and fast. I do not want to see Don Manzullo’s face here in the district until he and his buddies in the House and Senate figure out how to keep the plug in the dike long enough for the financial markets and companies to stabilize — and that is likely to be 10 years.

This is NOT about handing a check over to a bunch of thieves, though there are plenty of thieves and dumb-cluck boards of directors out there who created this mess. The financial stabilization plan (I refuse to call it a bailout) is all that stands between the much celebrated and cliched Main Street and another Great Depression. Do I sound like the sky is falling? I mean to.

Anyone who thinks there’s an easy way out of this isn’t paying attention. Anyone who thinks this is the time for revenge, retribution, finger-pointing and punishment is wasting energy. Can I pick holes in the bill? Yep. Am I sure it’s the best it could be? Nope. Am I dead certain we need it? You bet.

Without implementation of a strong plan, within weeks, if not days, the regular guy — that’s you and I — can expect to see: few or no new home equity loans, which for some means farewell to  paying the bills for higher education; stringent to the point of being impossible down payments and documentation for mortgages; higher credit card rates and lower limits; and, very likely, escalating unemployment.

We need this shakeout. We do. Our love affair with “now” made sure everyone could have a house, a couple of cars, a Wii and unlimited credit cards. We’re paying the price for “irrational exuberance,”  as Alan Greenspan once called it. But that correction was already in play. Now, rather than a horrifically bumpy, frightening ride to the bottom, we are staring crash and burn in the face.

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives rolled the dice and bet your house, your job and your 401k on a gamble that things really aren’t so bad, on a gamble that someone will white-knight this implosion. All so its members could go home and campaign for another term. We lost.

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