Construction Bonds Revisited

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


CONSTRUCTION BONDS REVISITED….This is not exactly a critical issue, but over at Washington Wire Easha Anand takes a stab at defending Sarah Palin’s contention that the AIG bailout was necessary because of its involvement with “construction bonds,” concluding that “Palin’s answer wasn’t as outrageous as some have claimed.”

You can read the entire post for yourself, but once you cut through the clutter there’s not much there. Like me, Anand believes that Palin was referring to surety bonds on construction projects, but it turns out that (a) only government projects require surety bonds, (b) AIG is the 14th largest provider of surety bonds in the U.S., amounting to a paltry $79 million out of an industry total of $5.3 billion, (c) there are about ten other companies that can underwrite even the biggest surety bonds, and (d) surety bonds are written by AIG’s regulated commercial subsidiaries, which were in no danger of default and are guaranteed by state funds anyway. In other words, surety bonds played no part whatsoever in the decision to bail out AIG. Palin just pulled them out of nowhere because she happened to be familiar with them from her tenure as mayor and governor.

Basically, I figure that presidential candidates can toss out three kinds of comments during a crisis like this:

  1. Intelligent comments that actually address the issue at hand (which you may or may not agree with, of course).

  2. Random bromides designed to fill up airtime.

  3. Stupid things.

Comments in category 1 are rare, especially in a crisis like this one that has extremely arcane and technical causes. However, Obama’s remarks today about the subprime meltdown, maintaining the flow of credit, ensuring liquidity in capital markets, and helping homeowners in trouble, qualifies. He’s at least talking about the right things. John McCain’s comments about the “casino culture” on Wall Street fall into category 2, as does Joe Biden’s complaint about tax cuts for the wealthy. Both are basically harmless political posturing.

But then we have category three, which includes stuff like McCain saying he wants to fire Chris Cox and Sarah Palin claiming that AIG needed to be bailed out because of “construction bonds.” These are just actively dumb comments that do nothing but make life more difficult for the folks trying to work on solutions. If they can’t do better than that, they should just keep quiet.

UPDATE: Of course, I guess there’s also a category 4: bromides so halting and clueless that they just scare the hell out of everyone. As Ezra says about Palin’s disjointed reaction, “Meanwhile, McCain’s response made Palin’s commentary look like a model of analytical clarity.” Scary stuff.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate