No Questions Asked

Do you wonder why our country is in such a mess? Just look at Congress. Facing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, they couldn’t muster the strength to study the issues in a nonpartisan manner and find a resolution. Other nations have faced similar crisis, most recently Sweden. But did Congress consider how that country resolved the situtation? Nope. Instead, they put together a horrendous bailout package for Wall Street at the expense of taxpayers. It is filled with pork barrel projects.

Here’s what nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said about it:

Well, I think it remains a very bad bill. It is a disappointment, but not a surprise, that the administration came up with a bill that is again based on trickle-down economics. You throw enough money at Wall Street, and some of it will trickle down to the rest of the economy. It’s like a patient suffering from giving a massive blood transfusion while there’s internal bleeding; it doesn’t do anything about the basic source of the hemorrhaging, the foreclosure problem. But that having been said, it is better than doing nothing, and hopefully after the election, we can repair the very many mistakes in it.
But this particular way of getting it through, I have to say, really smells. They added—you know, the cost was already $700 billion. They added $150 billion of tax benefits. Some of these are really quite, quite amazing, the kinds of things that they put in: tax credit to American Samoan businesses—you mentioned a couple already in your talk—50 percent tax credit for some expenditures or maintaining railroad tracks, motor sports racetrack property given a seven-year recovery period. You can go down the list. What they did was basically old-fashioned, corrupt bribery. They found out—I was joking that they talked about a reverse auction for the—for buying the distressed assets; they had a reverse auction for buying congressmen, and they put in anything they needed to do to get the congressional support for a basically flawed bill.

The US Senate is due to vote on a civil nuclear deal between the India and US to end a three-decade ban on nuclear trade with India, reports say.

The US House of Representatives passed the agreement on Saturday. After the Senate’s final approval President George W Bush can sign it into law.

India says the deal with the US is vital for it to meet its rising civil energy demands.

But critics say the deal creates a dangerous precedent.

They say it effectively allows India to expand its nuclear power industry without requiring it to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as other nations must.

Under the terms of the accord, India would get access to US civilian nuclear technology and fuel.

‘Bipartisan support’

In return, Delhi would open its civilian nuclear facilities to inspection - but its nuclear weapons sites would remain off-limits.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she hoped the agreement will clear its last hurdle, saying that it had “strong bipartisan support”.

“I certainly hope it can get done, because it would be a landmark agreement for India and the US,” she was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.