Over time.

Yes, the Bush Administration is rolling to a close – sprinting to the finish line, as Junior has said – and they seem remarkably unfazed by a record of failure unsurpassed in modern presidential history. Just this past week Bush took the stage at the global economic summit in Washington and defended “free market” capitalism, “free” trade, and related virtues so dramatically discredited of late, warning his fellow national leaders not to depart too drastically from the neoliberal order concocted by Washington and implemented by the I.M.F. and World Bank. I was not in the room, but I imagine there were a few grimaces, maybe a laugh or two, and perhaps a lot of inattention during Bush’s remarks. Honestly, who is going to listen to the captain of the titanic as he lectures everyone on marine safety? How many of those people have one of those “Bush’s Last Day” countdown clocks on their desks? (Or wish they had one?)

Irony department: As Bush argued for hewing to the I.M.F./World Bank line, the I.M.F. released a report that was critical of the United States’ massive trade deficit… criticism which, of course, the U.S. can blithely ignore, in as much as we are an extremely wealthy nation and accept orders from no one. For the poorer nations, well, there are ways of making them cooperate, and any departure from the neoliberal order can bring consequences, often grave ones. This sounds like a double standard, but as Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out many times, it’s actually a very consistent single standard – wealth enjoys privileges. The “Washington Consensus” and the international institutions that enforce it were created by America and its rich international partners expressly to benefit themselves. Who will respect this system now that it has crippled its creators in much the same way as it has its subjects in the developing world?

It does seem as though people are becoming openly contemptuous of the administration’s financial team, in particular, in the closing months. Even ordinarily reserved public broadcasting was giving Treasury Secretary Paulson what passes for a hard time this past week, with somewhat prickly questioning coming from the likes of Robert Siegel and Jim Lehrer, for chrissake. Paulson and his assistant secretary Neel Kashkari have both been grilled by Congress (again, in a somewhat less incisive fashion than in previous decades, but nevertheless). Everybody is taking swings at them because public faith in the administration is so abysmally low… and with good reason. It’s pretty easy to shoot holes in the $700 billion bailout plan(s), which seems to be evolving by the minute. What amazes me is that, with states facing something like $100 billion in red ink, they don’t seem to show any impetus towards sending some of that money back to state legislatures just to shore up essential services. I mean, if we’re spending like sailors to get the economy going again, shouldn’t we at least consider a state government bailout? I’ve yet to hear it suggested by anyone other than economist Robert Pollin. (Would that Obama would make him treasury secretary…)