How likely are such moves for Obama?

Given his own far more extensive funding and other connections to Freddie and Frannie than McCain's, isn't that nearly inconceivable?

And given that any Federal takeover of financial institutions would be branded as "socialism" by the Republicans, isn't that nearly inconceivable for Obama as well?

Hillary's HOLC proposal is what will work.  These guys included commercial properties in this plan, this was not something that was on the table.  

No relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, but huge relief for the managers of these institutions who are walking away with millions.

The Shock Doctrine indeed.

Others have said elsewhere -- money for education, college loans, health care, housing for Katrina victims, social security -- all way too expensive for Republicans (and many Democrats); trillions for Iraq & for unregulated Wall Street titans -- no problem, because, gosh, it's a crisis.

1. No Healthcare.
   
2.  No plans for incentives for alternative energy.
   
3.  Existing social programs will be cut.
   
4.  Finance industry, a broken industry, will continue to be propped with artificial ploys.  
   

If the cataclysmic events in the financial markets over the past week have revealed anything, it is the complete subservience of every branch of the US government and both major political parties to the banks and the biggest capitalist interests. Behind the façade of American democracy lies a dictatorship of finance capital that, under conditions of crisis, exerts its power directly and nakedly. ...

Obama and the Democrats are full partners in this system. Behind all of the Democratic candidate's rhetoric about Wall Street not "minding the store" and how "CEOs got greedy," his campaign enjoys ample support from finance capital, and his administration would, no less than the Republicans, represent its fundamental interests.

The Obama campaign has raised close to $10 million from the Wall Street investment houses, nearly 50 percent more than the amount they have given to Republican McCain. Three senior executives at the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers raised more than $1.5 million for the Democrat. ...

I was particularily struck by the fact that 'financials" now make up to as much as 25 % of our GNP.

more.....
Bill Moyer's Journal

Phillips explains that these are the fruits of what he calls the "financialization" of the United States: the decline of manufacturing and the rise of finance as the central driver of the nation's GDP. It is not a change Phillips believes happened by chance:

    You had essentially a financial sector that let's say was sort of neck and neck with manufacturing back in the late 1980s. But they got control in a lot of ways, in the agenda. Finance has been bailed out. I mean, everybody thinks this is horrible now what we're seeing in terms of bailouts. Even a lot of the people who do it think it's bad.

    This has been going on since the beginning of the 1980s. [...] Finance has been preferred as the sector that got government support. Manufacturing slides, nobody helps. Finance has a problem, Federal Reserve to the rescue. Treasury to the rescue. Subsidies this, that, and the other.

    So bit by bit, they got bigger. And the other reason they got bigger was because this became a country that was further and further in debt. Consumerism was just pushed to the nth degree. People were given the sense that they had to buy everything and they had to borrow to do it increasingly.

    But we've seen the central component of the rise of the financial sector is the rise of the debt industry. Mortgage, credit cards, all these gimmicks that Wall Street sells-- just all kinds of products. And, of course, the products are laying an egg all over the world right now.

If "lead" means offering a bunch of meaningless words about protecting "the people" and punishing those who caused this disaster, but which have no affect whatsoever on the outcome, then yea, Obama will be leading this week. (note, Obama's coming "leadership", though meaningless will still be better than the vacuous psycho-babble of Big Liar John mccain - at least Obama will be lucid.)

My guess:
No, he won't.
If he follows his well established pattern, he'll come down equally on both sides. He'll blame Bush and McCain, and support the bailout.

Frankly, I don't see what else he can do.

But, to expect leadership from a guy who has shown no signs of leadership is not realistic.

And - the bottom line -
What difference would it make to Obama supporters if he, once again, finds a way to simply vote "present"? FISA made no difference. Choosing Biden made no difference. Nothing he says or does makes a difference. So what's in it for him to "lead"?

Obama needs to make sure that this bailout doesn't prevent him as President from exercising policy control over Treasury and Fed (any more than he would be restricted under today's regs and laws).

republicans have been working for 28 years to cripple the ability of the government to spend money on average citizens. First reagan tried it with tax cuts and ballooning the military budget, but it wasn't enough. Then bush went at it by giving Clinton's surplus to the rich with tax cuts and using 9/11 to inflate the defense budget to $700 billion per year, but again it wasn't quite enough and Americans have soured on starting another war, which is the best way to flush money into the sewer pockets of republicans.

If we, as taxpayers, are supposed to bailout a bunch of companies that made idiotic choices, we must get something in return.

If Obama focuses on this side of the issue, as Hillary did the other day, he'll be seen as a leader and easily win this election.

I read it and now feel a tad better. Now to the sunshie.

Not that Obama would dare support this.

Or, maybe on a double dare?

This is a real crisis.  Thoughtful action is needed.  This isn't the time to be railing against Bush and Co.  Particularly since the Dems have a significant minority stake in the blame.

America's Own Kleptocracy.

But it is Friday, September 19, that will go down as a turning point in American history. The White House committed at least half a trillion dollars more to re-inflate real estate prices in an attempt to support the market value junk mortgages - mortgages issued far beyond the ability of debtors to pay and far above the going market price of the collateral being pledged.

These billions of dollars were devoted to keeping a dream alive - the accounting fictions written down by companies that had entered an unreal world based on false accounting that nearly everyone in the financial sector knew to be fake. But they played along with buying and selling packaged mortgage junk because that was where the money was. Even after markets collapse, fund managers who steered clear were blamed for not playing the game while it was going. I have friends on Wall Street who were fired for not matching the returns that their compatriots were making. And the biggest returns were to be made in trading in the economy's largest financial asset - mortgage debt.

Ooofff.

Overnight, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have radically changed the character of American capitalism. It is nothing less than a coup d'êtat for the class that FDR called "banksters." What has happened in the past two weeks threatens to change the coming century - irreversibly, if they can get away with it. This is the largest and most inequitable transfer of wealth since the land giveaways to the railroad barons during the Civil War era.

SNIP

...does this really mean that the only solution is to re-inflate the real estate market? The Paulson-Bernanke plan is to enable the banks to sell off the homes of five million home mortgage debtors faced with default or foreclosure this year! Homeowners with "exploding adjustable-rate mortgages" will lose their homes, but the Fed will pump enough credit into the mortgage-lending agencies to enable new buyers to go deeply enough into debt to take the junk mortgages off the hands of the gamblers who presently own them. Time for another financial and real estate bubble to bail out the junk mortgage lenders and packagers.

Hudson had been Kucinich's econ adviser, btw.

We currently see a credit-freeze because nobody wants to lend to anybody as it is impossible to know how much credit insurance the other party has written or how much it depends on their validity. You do not lend to anyone who might already be bust.

That is the situation we are in and it shows why the Paulson plan is utter cr*p and nothing but a huge robbery.

The Paulson plan would not help at the bottom of the inverted pyramid, the housing market, and not at the top, in the CDS market.

Paulson knows that the crash of the CDS market is inevitable. His plan is an attempt to let the taxpayer pay for the stabilization of the middle of the pyramid in the hope that the big crash will come only after the election (and in the hope that the loot might help Paulson's beloved Goldman Sachs to survive.)

There is only way to avert the crash.

Declare all CDS contracts, worldwide, as null and void. There is precedence for this:

"During the Great Depression, many debt contracts were indexed to gold. So when the dollar convertibility into gold was suspended, the value of that debt soared, threatening the survival of many institutions. The Roosevelt Administration declared the clause invalid, de facto forcing debt forgiveness. Furthermore, the Supreme Court maintained this decision."

The maze of the value and ownership of $65+ trillion of financial credit insurance contracts has frozen the credit markets. Nobody is lending to anybody else because the value of the counterparty is in doubt.
...
A $700 billion bailout can not save a unregulated $70 trillion CDS market that is under severe stress.

This may be the nut that must be cracked. Do out Congress Critters understand this, see this problem??

Oh, Bernhard also supports HOLC. Send in the HOLC! (pronounced Hulk, like the action character)

He strongly suggests American citizens should call their Congress Critters. ASAP.

...behind closed doors, Paulson describes the plan differently. He explicitly says that it will buy assets at above market prices (although he still claims that they are undervalued) because the holders won't sell at market prices. (My emphasis. And whassup with that last bit? "Nice little economy you got there. You wouldn't want anything to happen to it now, would you? Wall St is now blackmailing the US govt? Do what we want or we'll go out of business and take your whole economy with us?

I don't think that our leadership has been very good during this negotiation (or really, during any showdowns with this administration) at forcing the administration to own their position. If Paulson wants this plan, then he needs to sell it to the public, and if he sells a different plan to the public (the nonsense buying-at-market-price plan) then we should pass that.

We're depressed and angry, frustrated at the way the Dem leadership keeps caving and enabling; it must be terrible to be a progressive-minded staffer and see all this going on first hand.

Anglachel also has a statement from Hillary and a letter purportedly written by a member of Congress listing what the Dems should really be going for.

This post is kinda scary, titled The Mother of All No-Docs:

...Paulson wants the US taxpayers to make a loan to Wall Street. It seems that the big financial firms are underwater on the investments they made.

They don't want to provide actual balance sheets, just self-reported assets which may or may not exist. They want to borrow the full value with no collateral down. Oh, and none of that pesky insurance against their defaults. They don't have any proof of income, and their employers can't really be reached. In fact, it's not clear they have any employment at the moment.

We're talking major league NINJA loans here. Oh, and it appears to be a 0% interest loan, too.

Update has some links which seem to indicate the Dems are going to go along to get along:

And Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd, the dynamic duo that helped bring us GLBA in the first place, are pushing hard to prevent any kind of oversight, restructions or even a faint promise of ROI for this massive transfer of wealth: