Watching Pelosi on CNN yesterday while I was at a care facility, I couldn’t help but think of the impotence of politicians faced with very difficult, systematic, inherited woes. Here they were preaching the virtues of restraint, industrial imagination, and green thinking, while wagging the occasional supervisory finger. Not a word on the contradiction involved in throwing an admittedly preliminary down payment of 14 billion dollars at the auto industry and calling management and unions (!) to a sort of Canossa light, while buying something like 3 trillion dollars worth of bad or dubious paper with little supervision that I can see. One would think you should get a seat or two on the boards of banks with this kind of “investment”. But no, just vague promises of self-discipline. Not a word either on the international operations of GM, Ford or Chrysler. I would like to know more about them. Is the GM group doing well in Asia for instance, and are its investors (called Cerberus and other cute-hellish things out of the past, a bit like our missile programs) able to make profits abroad while limiting their exposure nationally, thanks to their friends in the house and the senate? Will past servants (!) of the state get seats on these boards? Yes they will, for services rendered…

As for the 3 trillion dollars, I can foresee it will become securitized (!) into 300 little trillions, because that’s what it is, money creation. We’ll be saved from the king who wants to settle his accounts, but for how long?