Six Degrees of Separation

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Everybody is talking about the bailout - there is a deal, there is not a deal. The current administration contends that they had NO IDEA that this was going to happen. "Everyone who is anyone" needs to make the photo op at the White House.

Some are talking about McCancel's interjection of politics into the legislative process, despite the fact that he still hasn't read all 3 pages of the proposal. Others are talking about whether a bailout is even a good idea.

I have something else.

Do you know who that is in the photograph? That happens to be John Erlichman; it's actually his mug shot. If you're young, Erlichman was one of the Nixon boys who brought you Watergate, the break-in. (Watergate, the hotel, is the current home of Liddy Dole, but I digress.) Want to guess who was a staff assistant to Erlichman in 1972 to 1973 having come from being staff assistant to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972? We'll come back to that.

First, let's look at whether or not anyone knew about the problems with the market prior to last week. And we come to Eliot Spitzer. He and a number of other Attorneys General started acting against predatory lending several years ago. He had a recap-type article in the Washington Post earlier this year. It's an interesting connection to what the Bush administration would and would not do. I'm not willing to start wearing a tin foil hat, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but approximately 24 days after that article was published, Eliot Spitzer was brought down by a Federal sting involving a hooker. I'm just saying.

So back to six degrees of separation. The guy who worked for Rumsfeld, and then Erlichman? None other than the guy who wants total control with no oversight of $700 billion -- yup, Hank Paulson. Again, just because someone has close to 40 years of ties to the neo-con Bushies, worked for that great criminal enterprise known as the Nixon administration ("Just a dog named Checkers!"), and then spent most of his career at Goldman-Sachs .... again, I'm just saying....

Update from Matt: Washington Mutual has failed, and been sold at a fire sale to JPMorgan Chase. It is the largest failure of a bank, by far, in US history.