AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by one of the senators who will be voting on the legislation, the Independent senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders। But we turn now to two other guests.... Dean Baker, let’s start with you. Explain the legislation that is being introduced.
DEAN BAKER: Well, essentially, what the President has asked for is a $700 billion blank check. He wants Congress to hand over $700 billion to Henry Paulson to use to buy, you know, bad originally mortgage-backed securities. There’s apparently an effort by the financial community to broaden that, but basically he would have a blank check to bail out Wall Street.
And let me just make one point that everyone should be very, very clear on. This was not an accident, in the sense that this is like a hurricane. This was a totally predictable event. So when President Bush or Henry Paulson say, you know, we have to come to the rescue, it is because of their incompetence, because people who understood the economy—and putting myself among those, but there are others—we were warning about this a long, long time ago. This was a totally predictable event that brought us here.
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