Massive Sneaky Tax Cut While Everybody was Distracted

We're just now learning that over a month ago, the Treasury Dept "issued a five-sentence notice" that (ironically) nobody noticed, which overturned 22-year-old tax law passed by Congress in order to help banks. Not all banks. Just banks merging with other banks.

Please note that we're continuously told we must supply billions of taxpayers' dollars that we don't actually have to save companies that are "too big to fail", and that this "notice" helps banks become too big to fail.

Please also note that the article states that "senior executives from the banking industry told top Treasury officials at the beginning of the year that Section 382 was bad for businesses because it was preventing mergers". While noting that, bear in mind these are the same people who were saying all kinds of things were 'bad for business' (most notably regulations of various kinds) while in reality it was these executives themselves who turned out to be bad for business.

So suddenly it's more attractive than ever for big, sick banks to eat up smaller, sicker banks. Deja vu, anyone? Isn't this basically what happened when the Great Depression began?

The Bush Administration has repeatedly demonstrated over the last 8 years the need for a new English word that describes a phenomenon not limited to the Bush Administration but exemplified by it repeatedly and with perfection. The definition of this word, whatever it turns out to be, is something like, "a situation in which the outcome of the work or decisions of experts is self-evidently worse than it would have been had that work or decision-making been done by any average, rational, sentient non-experts." I know what you're thinking: there's already a word for that. But while SNAFU applies perfectly in this context, it's not specific or generic enough to encapsulate the concept I'm shooting for.

If you created a dart board with alternating 'yes'/'no' values instead of numerical scores, and made decisions by having a chimpanzee throw darts at it after asking yes/no questions aloud, you would be at least 50% more successful in everything you do than the Bush Administration. It takes a unique combination of belligerence, ignorance, and assertiveness to fuck things up as explosively and repeatedly as those guys.