Obama has been promoting SB 1926 since the Ohio primaries, but even as recently as today at a GM Plant in Janesville Wisconsin he said:
For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America. I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years. This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety and homeland security; what will keep our environment clean and our economy strong. And we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead.”
SB 1926 is summarized as follows:
An independent agency of the Federal government administratively similar to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The "Bank" would have some strange banking powers: the ability to conduct hearings, issue subpoenas, obtain information from any other federal agency simply by asking (other agencies are required to comply), accept for funding any infrastructure project with a Federal price tag of $75 million or more (the list of possibilities goes on for two pages), unilateral authority to determine the appropriate Federal share of spending for every project accepted, to act as a centralized entity to provide financing for qualified infrastructure projects; to issue general purpose infrastructure bonds, and to provide direct subsidies to qualified infrastructure projects from amounts made available from the issuance of such bonds; to issue project-based infrastructure bonds for the financing of specific qualified infrastructure projects; to provide loan guarantees to State or local governments issuing debt to finance qualified infra
structure projects, under rules prescribed by the Board, in a manner similar to that described in chapter 6 of title 23, United States Code; to issue loans, at varying interest rates, including very low interest rates, to qualified project sponsors for qualified projects; to leverage resources and stimulate public and private investment in infrastructure; and to encourage States to create additional opportunities for the financing of infrastructure projects.
Here's what you didn't read:
- NO votes on these projects in Congress
- NO votes on these projects in the Senate
- NO opportunity for the President to concur or veto.
- NO opportunity for the Congress and Senate to sustain or override a veto.
- NO method for the "loans" to be paid back
This is simply the most ANTI-DEMOCRATIC proposed legislation that Principal and Policy is aware of.
Given that the Bank can issue debt in that name of the taxpayers, it is also likely unconstitutional given Article 1, Section 9 which states in part
No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
So the question is: Does Obama believe in Democracy or Not?
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