About ten minutes after the House of Representatives rejected the Administration’s plan to bail out the Secretary of the Treasury’s cronies to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars Monday afternoon, the telephone on my desk rang. It was Spenderson, from the White House, requesting a meeting, ASAP.
What could I do? I had Gretchen tell the Angolan attaché scheduled to visit me at five that, due to circumstances beyond my control, he would have to meet me at my office around six p.m. instead. Fortunately, he had spent Sunday night enjoying Washington’s fabled night life, and, in fact, hadn’t even gotten out of bed when she called him at four to let him know. Ah, for the life of an African diplomat, all blood diamonds, Mercedes coupes, brut champagne and blonde escorts in Versace and Prada.
Given what had just happened, of course, Spenderson was a nervous wreck. He pulled a pack of English Ovals from his coat and lit one up without even looking for an ashtray, much less asking if he could smoke.
“Tough luck, old boy,” I consoled as he twitched like an epileptic in mid-fit on the couch by the window. “Looks like even the impending collapse of the American economy isn’t enough to get House Democrats and Republicans to work together in a bipartisan manner.”
“[Expletive] you, Collins,” he spat, shivering like a puppy dowsed in cold rain. “As of forty-five minutes ago, it’s official. If the United States of America doesn’t pay the Paulson Gang’s ransom, they’re gonna [expletive] everyone up the [expletive] with no [expletive] Vaseline.”
“They’ve been doing that for the last eight years,” I observed. “Who would notice the difference?”
Spenderson held up the middle finger of his right hand. “Yeah, right! What’s the difference between this and an axe handle?”
“You always did make your points,” I slyly complimented, “with a certain histrionic flair.”
“And you’re the last resort of every pathetic Peter-Principle moron in Washington!”
“Thank God for that,” I frankly told him. “What does this one want?”
“Damn it, Collins, I didn’t come here to be gratuitously insulted,” he muttered, fuming.
“Of course not,” I agreed, “you no doubt get enough of that at EOP.”
“Not funny,” he griped.
“Not to you, maybe,” I allowed. “But you and I both know that the African diplomat I bumped out of this slot on my schedule pays in gold, whereas, you are probably going to invent some kind of excuse not to pay me at all.”
“How dare you suggest that?” Spenderson folded his arms across his chest, defensive.
“You mean,” I asked, eyeing him skeptically, “you’re not going to pick my brain and then stiff me, like you did last time?”
“No, no,” he protested, blushing bright red, “that was a simple… misunderstanding… you know, a clerical error. Here…” Spenderson handed me a Manila envelope. “Go ahead, open it… count what’s inside.”
I did. It was more than enough to cover both appointments, in small, unmarked bills.
“Well,” I allowed, “that’s more like it. How can I help you?”
“The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell seven hundred and seventy-seven points today – one point two trillion dollars vanished! Poof! Three billion dollars a minute! Gone!” Spenderson wailed.
“My condolences to your 401(k),” I replied as I locked the envelope of cash in my desk. “I suppose that means you won’t be able to retire when your boss leaves office in January?”
“No, no,” he protested, “I mean, what the hell can the Administration do now?”
“Oh.” I sat back in my plush leather swivel chair and thought for a moment. “Hmmm. How about you get the Senate to pass it? After all, if the bailout passes the Senate, it will be much more difficult for the House to reject the Administration’s solution.”
“We already thought of that,” Spenderson moaned, “and the word is – today anyway – that the Senate won’t budge on the package until the House passes it.”
“Okay, then,” I continued, “how about you re-write the Wall Street bailout so the House Republicans will vote for it?”
“I’m not sure we can,” Spenderson lamented. “They’re all scared [expletive]-less that if they vote to give The Titans of the Universe a get-out-of-jail-free card the voters will crucify them in November.”
“Oh, come now,” I gently chided. “I’m sure the voters would consider crucifixion going a bit too far. Drawing and quartering, on the other hand…”
“Who cares? Either way, they’re dead!”
“Point taken,” I conceded. “You really can’t blame them, I guess. Unlike George W. Bush, they have something to lose in the next election, and a lame duck just can’t get the necessary leverage to twist arms on Capitol Hill. How about the business lobby? Could they bring more of their influence to bear?”
“More than they have already?” Spenderson shook his head doubtfully. “Everybody from the United States Chamber of Commerce to the National Association of Realtors have thrown every last four-star dinner, campaign contribution, bag of cocaine and thousand-dollar-an-hour whore they have at those guys, and it’s all been like tossing Jello at a tile wall.”
“Tough crowd,” I mused, taking a nicely chilled bottle of Ramlosa water from the little fridge next to my desk. “Any chance of getting the Democrats to stop kicking them while they’re down? I hear Pelosi shot her mouth off real good just before the vote and made a lot of Republicans hopping mad. Could George perhaps call her up and ask, pretty, pretty please, Ms. Speaker of the House, put a sock in it?”
“He already has,” Spenderson muttered in disgust. “She told him to go pluck his magic twanger because he knows this whole mess is his fault. She even repeated that stuff, you know, about how it’s George’s ‘right-wing ideology of anything goes, no supervision, no discipline, no regulation,’ that got the country into this.”
“Oh yeah,” I concurred, “when Ms. Pelosi gets hold of a good phrase, she’s like a hound dog with bone – just keeps going on and on with it.”
“Any chance,” I inquired, as I put two glasses on my desk, “of somebody patching up what Pelosi has torn asunder?”
“Well,” Spenderson noted, shaking his head, “you’ve been here working all day, so you probably haven’t heard everything that’s happened, but Barney Frank tried that. He asked for the names of the twelve Republicans who screwed up the vote and offered to ‘go talk uncharacteristically nice to them.’”
“So – no dice on that?” I raised my eyebrows slightly as I poured the Ramlosa water.
“When we told the twelve Republican representatives about Barney’s offer,” Spenderson grumbled, “nine of them thought he was propositioning them.”
“Well, actually, I doubt any of those twelve Republicans is Barney’s type,” I surmised. “Sounds a bit homophobic to me.”
“A bit?” Spenderson scowled as I handed him a sparkling glass of cold mineral water. “Are you kidding? Homophobia is written into the Republican Party platform!”
“Oh, right,” I admitted contritely. “I’d forgotten about that.” “Okay,” I pondered, sipping my Ramlosa, “how about re-writing the bailout so the American people like it?”
“Huh?” Spenderson stared at me blankly.
“We have to face the facts,” I reiterated, “if the Senate won’t set a good example for the House, and it’s impossible to re-write the proposal so the Republican members of Congress like it, and the House Democratic leadership won’t stop playing politics with the issue, and Republican members of Congress won’t let Barney Frank near enough to apologize for the way the Democrats are behaving, then why not re-write the Wall Street rescue proposal so the American people like it?”
Spenderson continued to stare, a blank expression on his face. “The American people?”
“Yeah – you know, the citizens, the taxpayers – the voters.”
“Oh, yeah, them,” Spenderson breathed, ever so lightly. “What about them?”
“Why,” I inquired carefully, “doesn’t the Administration change what its financial rescue plan says so that it has things in it that the American people like?”
Spenderson stewed about what was obviously a rhetorical question much too long, leading me to believe he was going to answer it, which he did. “Because the Bush Administration doesn’t give a flying [expletive] about the American people. We didn’t need them in 2000 and we didn’t need them in 2004; because we stole both elections and you don’t need the people if you can force the ones in key districts to vote on Diebold machines.”
“Ah… yeah, technically,” I carefully agreed, “on a national level, you are undeniably correct. But not every Republican in the House can employ that strategy in his or her congressional district.”
“You mean,” Spenderson exclaimed, “that they can’t get Diebold voting machines imposed in key Democrat-controlled precincts so they win no matter what?” Spenderson shook his head, sadly. “Those poor bastards. So, what you’re saying is, even though we folks at the White House don’t have to concern ourselves with what the voters want, because of the local nature of their office representation, our unfortunate Republican colleagues in the House can’t steal their elections fair and square the way national Republican candidates do?”
“Precisely.”
“Oh, right, and so,” Spenderson pressed on, “that means we folks at the White House need to consider what the American people want when we write stuff like seven hundred billion dollar financial market bailout packages, because after we write them, we still have to get the House of Representatives to pass them, and those folks in the House aren’t necessarily guaranteed to win their elections like George is.”
“Now,” I encouraged, “you’re getting the idea – and because Congress has to turn the President’s proposals into bills and pass them into laws, when you’ve got something like this Wall Street bailout plan cooking, you have to get Congress on board.”
“Damn nuisance,” Spenderson fretted.
“Maybe, but that’s the way it works, you know – it’s right there in the United States Constitution.”
“Oh – that thing again,” Spenderson bitterly complained. “I tell you, Collins, whenever we try to get anything done in this town, that [expletive] United States Constitution comes along and makes our lives a total [expletive], you know?”
“Maybe the Founding Fathers intended it that way,” I cautiously suggested.
“Hell,” Spenderson spat, “if that’s really what those [expletives] wanted, all I can say is [expletive] them! Why can’t we just throw the [expletive] United States Constitution in the [expletive] trash and let George save the economy?”
“Because, if George did that, it’s a fairly good bet that Congress would impeach him.”
“What,” Spenderson interjected, “with, like four [expletive] months left in his term? Besides, he runs the Army, right?”
“Yes, but,” I returned, subtly attempting to steer him away from thoughts of an armed presidential coup, “ah, why don’t we just take the United States Constitution as a given and work from there?”
“Oh, all right,” Spenderson grudgingly groused, “I suppose so; for the moment, anyway.”
“Good,” I responded raising my glass of mineral water in the gesture of a toast, “we’ll agree, for the moment, that having the President order the Department of Defense to take over the country is off the table. So, let’s consider what changes to the current financial recovery plan might make the American people feel better about having their congressional representatives vote for it. Now, we both know that the banking system needs between seven hundred billion and one point four trillion dollars injected into it in order to stave off a complete collapse of the American economy. The first thing the American people are worried about is that the Government will be giving that money to the same people who messed everything up to begin with. So, why not a provision that everybody above a certain level in all those failed banks has to hit the road and be replaced by, say, economics and finance professors from the academic community, who would serve in those posts at their current salaries for limited terms until other, qualified individuals could be hired to take over those banks?”
“It would never work,” Spenderson objected. “Egghead professors aren’t greedy or devious enough to run a bank successfully. Why, the Japanese and European bankers would eat them for lunch, for Christ’s sake! No way!”
“All right,” I ventured along, “how about including tough additional provisions in the new law that would define exactly which financial instruments are legal to trade and requiring that Congress approve any new ones? That way, we could limit finance markets to a defined set of products, such as common and preferred stocks, bonds, commercial loans, and so forth, and effectively outlaw the practice of hiring astrophysicists and theoretical mathematicians to invent derivative instruments so complicated, nobody realizes that they are worthless until it’s too late?”
“And stifle the creativity of the banking community?” Spenderson roared.
“I’m not so sure,” I speculated, “that the average American wants creative bankers. I mean, do you want your doctor to be creative? No, you want him to be competent at doing what all the other doctors do, right? There’s a word for creative doctors – they’re called quacks, and they’ve been outlawed.”
“It’s not the same,” Spenderson argued, “you sound like you’re talking apples and oranges here.”
“Okay,” I averred, “let’s move on then. How about this – banks need money to lend, and that’s the reason Paulson and his cronies want the seven hundred billion dollars, right?”
Spenderson considered my question for a long moment, knitting his brow. Finally, he relaxed and, for the first time since he arrived, cracked a small but genuine smile. “Yeah, that’s really the bottom line, isn’t it? If all the banks in America had that seven hundred billion dollars right now, they could start lending money again, and the American economy would start chugging right along again, like the Little Engine that Could.”
“Correct,” I confirmed. “So, why not just put that seven hundred billion dollars in the citizens’ bank accounts?”
“What?” Spenderson’s smile quickly faded. “You mean, divy the seven hundred billion bucks up and give it to the American people?”
“Sure. Why not split the seven hundred billion dollars up among three hundred million Americans, and put a couple of grand in everybody’s bank account. Then the banks would have the seven hundred billion dollars they need, right there in their customers’ accounts, right? You’ve got to admit, it’s a proposal of which most Americans would be likely to approve.”
Spenderson leaned over my desk, squinting suspiciously. “You some kind of Communist or something? Those people never did a damn thing to deserve that money!”
“Paulson and his buddies never did a damn thing to deserve it, either,” I pointed out.
“But they’re bankers,” Spenderson replied, a bit ticked off, if the truth be known. “Bankers deserve to get money, whether they do anything for it or not!”
“Very well,” I relented. “How about this: the President nationalizes the Girl Scouts of America and ships them off to become prostitutes in high-priced brothels in Europe, Asia and various petrodollar playgrounds like Brunei and the UAE. They get to keep, say, five percent of the money, and the rest goes to raise that seven hundred billion dollars.”
“Brilliant!” Spenderson shouted, nearly jumping out of his seat. “Collins, you’re a God-damned [expletive] genius, that’s what the [expletive] you are!”
“A modest proposal,” I responded, “to be sure. And there’s ample historical precedent – the Roman emperor Caligula turned the Imperial Palace into a brothel and forced his relatives to service the rich until the royal family’s debts were paid. It’s the same principle.”
“I love it,” Spenderson whooped. “We won’t have to raise taxes and disappoint the Republican political base, and we won’t have to trash the dollar selling seven hundred billion bucks worth of T-bills, either! Can we really do that?”
“Well,” I theorized, “those young ladies joined the Girl Scouts, just like their older sisters, perhaps, joined the National Guard, didn’t they?”
“Yeah! That’s right, they did!”
“And where’s Big Sis right now?”
“Fighting ragheads in Iraq!”
“And, thanks to Stop Loss, she’s going to stay there until the Iraqis learn to love democracy, Israel, blue jeans and Coca-Cola, isn’t she?”
“You bet your socks she is, brother!”
“Same principle.”
“Yeeehah!” Spenderson yelled in joy as he stood up and shook my hand. “Now there’s an idea worth taking back to the Bush White House!”
“Indubitably,” I vouched, “most indubitably, indeed.”