A Children's Treasury Of Wacky Depressing Clips From Today's Geithner-Bernanke Hearing
Earlier we showed Barney Frank yelling at the goddamn Code Pink hippies on multiple occasions, but what else happened during this latest 94-hour grandstanding spectacle of a House Financial Services Committee hearing? Why the economy got saved, of course! Ha ha. (Kill us.) America's C-SPAN watchers did, however, get to see such luminaries as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Maxine Waters confuse and/or irritate the hell out of Geithner and Bernanke (mostly Geithner -- he scowls!) Plus there was this crazy guy from Illinois whom Bernanke shot down during a rare burst of self-confidence. Hooray for Congress! Burn it!
Here is California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, a real muckraker if ever there were. She spends a few minutes asking if various government people used to work for Goldman Sachs (one of whom, Geithner's chief of staff, she refers to as Geithner's "CEO," and Geithner's all like wtf?) Finally she reaches the big question, which is about whether Goldman Sachs secretly decides every decision about money. You know, she's asking if he and others used their government positions to give cash to a bank with which they had personal ties -- just like Maxine Waters did!
Hey look, Dr. Congressman Ron Paul showed up too. Hooray for sadness! Like every other time he ever gets to speak in public, he first must spend four (4) minutes outlining the basics of his economic philosophy before demanding that everyone run around naked in the free market.
How the crikey fuck did Michele Bachmann land a seat on the Financial Services Committee? Doesn't she actively want to overthrow the government anyway, making her a hypocrite for working in the government? Anyway, here she spends the first minute or so visibly annoying Tim Geithner by asking how the Constitution allows the Treasury to do what it does. Geithner responds (paraphrasing), "Congress passed a law to allow us to do these things." You know, whatsitcalled... ARTICLE I, SECTION I? This exact back and forth goes on for several more rounds. Then she asks both Bernanke and Geithner if they will "categorically renounce" a new "global currency" that China has been teasing recently. They both are like uhh, obviously? And then it's a few more questions until Barney Frank finally tells Bachmann to shut the fuck up.
Here's how Illinois Republican Rep. Donald Manzullo likes to "grill" folks:
MANZULLO: Explain money.
BERNANKE: Well you have to consider the uhh caveats--
MANZULLO: WHY CAN'T I GET A YES OR NO ANSWER HERE? EVERYONE IS POOR.
Donald Manzullo is kind of a dingus, you see. And after demanding YES OR NO answers from everyone for a minute or so, he asks Ben Bernanke why this is so hard, and Bernanke MANS UP and says, "Because it's a poorly posed question." That's the soft-spoken economist's way of telling someone to go die of cancer, alone.