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An open letter to Rep. Cantor: On bailouts, betrayals and balony
Dear Congressman Cantor:
I have in hand today your letter of October 22, in response to my protest to you about your support for King Henry Paulson’s $750 billion bailout bill to save the nation’s biggest banks from the financial disaster they created.
As a conservative who used to think that the Republican Party stood for something, I am disappointed in your response. It is creative, but not credible. After voting against the clearly stated wishes of most of your constituents, you might have simply thrown yourself upon the mercy of the voters and pleaded temporary insanity–but I suppose that would have been too honest for a politician to try.
Instead, you have presented me with a series of hilarious excuses for supporting Paulson’s plan to reward the incompetents and malfeasants who got rich while creating a mountain of toxic debt that threatened to collapse the banking system.
You wrote that while you didn’t support the original bill as written by King Henry, “I ended up voting for the measure after I worked to make sure that the bill did not reward Wall Street for bad risks.” Excuse me, but have you noticed that the first $125 billion paid out by Paulson has gone to the nine largest banks–including his old firm, Goldman Sachs–that created this mess? If this is not a reward to the bandits, what is it?
“Instead, I voted for the bill to keep local banks open, so your money will be protected.” Excuse me again, but our local banks were not threatened and my money there was safely protected by FDIC insurance. Those banks, like Rappahannock National Bank and thousands of other community banks, did not engage in the risky lending practices that made casinos out of the mega-banks now receiving King Henry’s rewards. It is not the local community banks that are lined up at the Treasury’s bailout window–it’s King Henry’s old buddies.
Your next claim is a real thigh-slapper. “The bill was aimed at protecting retirement accounts to prevent you from losing the savings you have worked so hard to build.” That statement is ridiculous on two counts.
First, there was no such protection in the bill you passed, and none would have been possible without repealing the laws of free markets. (The Soviet Union tried this for 70-plus years, and you know how well that worked.) Secondly, even if you insist there is such protection in the bill, it is manifest that it has utterly failed. Since the bill passed a month ago, the stock market has been in free-fall, and my retirement accounts have been hammered.
Would you like to see my IRA statements? I can show you losses ranging from 25% to 45%, with much of that coming after your illusory “protections” were passed. How gullible do you think your constituents are?
The next paragraph of your letter is simply incredible. “During debate over the bill, I worked hard to make sure the bill contained an ironclad guarantee that American taxpayers will be made whole when the program under the bill expires.”
Ironclad guarantee? There isn’t even a tissue-clad guarantee that the taxpayers will recoup this $750 billion in bailouts, and even King Henry would not make such a claim. There’s no more than a hope–and a distant one at that–that some of the money will be repaid to the taxpayers.
The blank check that you gave to the Treasury is now being used for an entirely different purpose than that for which it was requested. King Henry said the Treasury would use the funds to buy up bad loans from wobbly banks. Instead, the first $250 billion was used to partly nationalize the banks by purchasing part-ownership through preferred shares–an idea King Henry actually opposed when testifying before Congress passed the bill.
Now we have insurance companies lining up at the Treasury for their turn at the bailout trough, and Detroit’s auto makers won’t be far behind. Who would have thought that a Republican administration, and a so-called conservative like you, would have brought us this warmed-over batch of socialism, which privatizes the rewards of capitalism and socializes the risks and the losses?
You have made King Henry the de facto czar of the American economy, but maybe you forgot that his reign expires next January 20. Then all the powers you handed over to the Treasury Secretary–to manipulate the banking system, to determine winners and losers in the game of pseudo-capitalism, to decide who will receive the next installments in the bailout racket, and to expand the bailouts to bankrupt states and cities, do-good organizations and “community organizers’ (can you spell ACORN?) will fall to the next administration.
Odds are that you will have empowered Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, President Obama and their allies in the unions, big cities, Hollywood and other liberal bastions to wield these powerful tools of reward and punishment in whatever ways they deem fit. Somehow, I doubt you will like the results.
Republicans in Congress once represented a conservative philosophy of limited government, restrained spending, responsible budgeting and allowing free markets to allocate capital, reward sound business practices and punish excessive risk-taking. But your support of this new state of Corporate Socialism indicates that you’ve lost faith in conservative principles.
We don’t need two parties that promote big government, centralized power in Washington, and rewards for the largest election campaign contributors. The Democrats play that role perfectly well. In the past eight years, many Republicans in Washington like you have forgotten what conservative means, and have left conservatives like me with no one to vote for.
If you survive Election Day’s likely Democratic tidal wave, I hope you and your decimated band of Republican colleagues in Congress will come to understand that the only path out of the political wilderness is to return to the conservative principles that gave the Republican party its reason to exist.
Sincerely,
James P. Gannon,
Flint Hill, Virginia
Rep. Eric Cantor represents Virginia’s 7th Congressional District and is Chief Deputy Republican Whip. James P. Gannon is a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, editor of The Des Moines Register, and current publisher of The Rappahannock Voice–RappVoice.com.
-- James P. GannonComments
Comment from nolp
Time: October 29, 2008, 12:35 pm
Having been completely frustrated with letters from Cantor’s office over the years - do they even read them or simply send out the prepared letter that is on top? - I would love to hear what if anything he has to say to you. Alas, living in the nether reaches of his impossibly gerrymandered district, you may have a long wait.
Frustrated in Huntly, Nol Putnam
Comment from Dave K
Time: October 30, 2008, 9:00 am
In-Viguerie-ating! Thanks for telling it like it is. Perhaps there is hope for a vibrant Conservative Party?
–Dave Kerr
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