The Strange Death of Planet Dilbert

A breakthrough agreement to create a giant US government-sponsored vehicle to take on toxic assets in the financial system looked possible on Thursday night as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and top lawmakers convened a dramatic meeting to discuss the financial crisis. The US Treasury said the meeting discussed a "comprehensive approach to address the illiquid assets on bank balance sheets that are at the underlying source of the current stresses in our financial institutions and financial markets." The Treasury added that Mr Paulson and Mr Bernanke were “exploring all options, legislative and administrative, and expect to work through the weekend with Congressional leaders to finalise a way forward”. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said the administration had not yet presented a detailed proposal but congressional leaders looked forward to receiving one “in a matter of hours not days”.

Thus the Financial Times , an organisation that undoubtedly still has a future. So, in all probability, do "our financial institutions and financial markets" more broadly, although when you meet such cowpokers-first-class for Lord Mammon as these talkin’ that kind of talk, you spontaneously begin to worry about your wallet just a little. (Don’t you?)

That is if you still live in the former Real World. If you have emigrated to Planet Dilbert, however, you react more militantly and extremely and along the following lines:

In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad. “I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.” (...) “For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example,” said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission. “They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States, negates its fundamental principles in its behavior.” Mr. Monti said that past financial crises in Asia, Russia and Mexico brought government to the fore, “but this is the first time it’s in the heart of capitalism, which is enormously more damaging in terms of the credibility of the market economy.”

Aunt Nitsy is no shallow dilbertarian, of course, but unfortunately the Nostradamus of WTKK-FM 96.9 Boston does not do transcripts. He has not even updated his blog since the morning after Commanderissimo J. Sidney McCain addressed the Party of Big Management in convention assembled, Friday 5 September 2008. Nostradamo dei Severini is by no means unavailable for comment, he still spouts off on the air like Old Faithful, but ever since the 319th final crisis of late capitalism got under weigh, he has apparently avoided puttin’ anythin’ in writin’. A sound and prudent course, possibly.

On Wednesday afternoon, 17 September 2008, the signorino expounded and denounced essentially the Paulson-Bernanke scheme as set forth above, attributin’ it, however, above all to Congressman Frank of the Massachusetts Fourth. That morning the NYTC had reported that

[a]s the Bush administration has lurched from pillar to post in the financial crisis, some lawmakers and experts were considering a longer-term legislative solution that would create a new agency to dispose of the mortgage-related assets at the core of Wall Street’s woes. (...) In Congress, the idea that is gaining traction centers on the creation of a new agency that would buy troubled assets from hobbled companies. The idea was floated on Tuesday by Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who heads the House Financial Services Committee. Among those signaling that it merited serious consideration were Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The signorini and señoritos do not accord ideas floated by persons of that description serious consideration, they just point their e-fingers and hoot. But even as long ago as Wednesday morning there were signs of darker things to come, since my ellipsis conceals the names of neocomrades P. A. Volker and A. Greenspan. ‘Doctor’ Greenspan, as every nonwombschoolboy knows, was a card-carryin’ Dilbertarian at one time, a member of the late Miss Rand of Petrograd’s very select conventicle. Perhaps we had better have the omitted sentence in full, however, to avoid unfairness to the accused:

Proponents of a more systematic government role to help relieve financial institutions of their toxic securities range from Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary under President Clinton, to former Federal Reserve chairmen Paul A. Volcker and Alan Greenspan.

Former President Summers has acquired a large followin’ at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh, though considering that his fan clubs have never emitted a peep that I recall about his economics, there is no need to drag his name and Alma Mater’s through this particular mud. Neocomrade Volker has not touched the dilbertarian pitch to be defiled, and may therefore serve as a sort of mineshaft canary from the dei Severini perspective: if the abominable Barney can persuade even samfundets støtter like P. Volker to turn Bolshie, then the End is not just Nigh, it has actually arrived!

But maybe there is hope? The Democrat Party fiends wanted "a new agency to dispose of mortgage-related assets," where the respectables and the Randlord only wanted "a more systematic government role to help relieve financial institutions of their toxic securities." That, however, was forty-eight hours ago; perhaps the ideological dike that separates a ‘rôle’ (which sounds temporary) from an ‘agency’ (which doesn’t) has eroded in the interim? Now that Big Party neocomrades H. Paulson and B. Bernancke are panickin’ too, it appears that the unum necessarium is "a giant US government-sponsored VEHICLE." [1]

Whether that V-word was carefully ‘crafted’ compromise language or only some no-’count journalist’s random stab at the thesaurus does not appear. Vehicles are permanent structures, usually, yet one does not often abide in them 24/7, making them in a certain sense temporary also. So ‘vehicle’ could have been a deliberate artefact of committee, though Father Zeus alone knows whether it actually was.

Still, "a stinkfruit by any other name would smell...." Planet Dilbert and its signorini and its señoritos are not, by and large, to be fooled by mere nomenclature. Though patrons of wombschoolin’ for the lower orders, they just happen to have been educated at Eton and Harrow themselves. Or anyway, they have been instructed at Vassar College.

Nitsy adds, in her Black Friday story, not the Gray Wednesday one, that

Congressional leaders had initially appeared unclear about what role they would play in the rapid-fire decisions being made. Leaders of both parties had complained about a lack of hard information flowing from the administration. House Republicans even canceled a closed-door party session Thursday morning after the administration refused to provide an official to brief them on the administration’s emerging policies. (...) But whether a legislative consensus could be found remained an open question, and members of Mr. Bush’s own party were among those who were most critical of the increasing federal intervention in private markets.

The tail end there is a bit of a curiosity, as if one had expected the Party of Grant and Hoover to enthuse about increasing federal intervention in private markets. What colour is the sky at noon on a cloudless day where Mr. Edmund L. Andrews lives?

More important is the bigmanagerial technique of George XLIII, who doesn’t want even his best friends and ideobuddies to take a peek at his hand or qibbits about emergent tactics and operationals and strategies. Viceroy Richard Bruce Cheney could easily be a key figure at this jucture: if RBC can manage either (1) to show that the present crisis is somehow a matter of foreign and aggression policy, or (2) to transfer "increasing federal intervention in private markets" to the Office of the Viceroy, then Big Management need never let anybody have a peek at its cards at all. [2] Like the apostles of GOP self-servicin’ always say, every crisis is an opportunity. Master Dubya is no doubt merely behavin’ like that proverbial deer caught in the headlights -- the 566/640 Yalie lad has nothin’ to hide but the absence of anythin’ to hide, especially in that space between his ears -- but this is no reason why the adults of Dynasty and Party and Ideology cannot take action in the name of their Boy.

My point du jour, then, Mr. Bones, is that any action taken will almost certainly be regarded as fort mauvais by the denizens of Planet Dilbert. Even a mere ‘rôle’ would be no more welcome to them than a garlic frappe to Count Dracula. If we do the exponents of Political Capitalism the favor of assuming that they actually believe their own tripe and baloney, we can only expect them to bark and bellow ¡Fiat libertas, ruat cœlum! The sky is safe enough, however, since Political Capitalists can number no more than ten or fifteen percent of the militant extremist Republican Party, and the latter itself is somewhat less than half of half of the Heimatland Gottes ingesamt. And even the fifteen percent figure needs a certain amount of deflating, because Political Capitalism includes the cupboard loves of Little Management ("small business") as well as the ideological attitudinizin’s of the Friends of Freddy Von Hayek.

Little Management may well emerge as the worst screwees of all. As Nostradamo dei Severini has pointed out, the deadbeats that borrowed all that home mortgage money they can never pay back have us fiends of the Democrat Party to look to, whilst the Big Managers proper, the GOP geniuses who made the bad loans, are, as usual, firmly in the saddle of the Party of Grant and Hoover. Whatever rôle or vehicle or agency emerges is bound to "preserve, protect and defend" those two groups, the chief clients of the patrons (or, in the Grant-Hoover case, the chief patrons of the clients) who will be the principals at the compromise table. But who will speak up for the petty commercial interests of Myra Babbit from Zenith TX? Probably nobody effective. Nobody effective, plus or minus Governess S. Putin (sp?) of Alaska.

The AEIdeologues can speak up for themselves, of course, and won’t their caterwaulin’ be a pleasure to listen to! Especially when one can find a transcript, and peruse it quickly and silently.

Planet Dilbert is not really gonnta ‘die’ of this seizure, though. In one sense, Dilbert is deathless: no amount of discrepancy with Plane Earth can ever shut the real faith-crazies up. And the mere hangers-on and weaker sistern are mostly fallen by the wayside already, havin’ dropped off the Nozick-Rand-Friedman-Hayek bandwagon on or about 11 September 2001, when it suddenly became not just possible, but easy and convenient, to get the same -- or better! -- hormone satisfactions from Kiddie Krusadin’.


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[1] Hmm. Would thee say, Mr. Bones, that Noah's Ark was a ‘vehicle’?


[2] More exactly: RBC's attack attorneys could maintain that the Fedguv Constitution does not require any such disclosures, foreign affairs bein’ strictly the prerogative of the Executive branch, and viceregal jurisdiction extraconstitutional and unaccountable altogether.