David Cay Johnston is a great reporter, and in an interview with Glenn Greenwald a few days before the vote, talks about just how credulous the coverage of the bailout has been:

GG: What are your views on that issue at the moment? Is the government claim about that exaggerated? Do we have time to craft alternative solutions, or is it as immediate and dire as the warnings suggest?

DJ: Let me deal with some pieces. First of all, there are other things the government can do to make sure that credit keeps flowing. We just have the government essentially guarantee all money market funds. Or we could rapidly expand other guarantees of banking. There are a number of steps the government can take and they haven’t been taken. There will be a contraction in credit no matter what we do. Wall St. has assets that must deflate - there is no escaping that, and the pain is going to cost. And borrowing more money to pay off badly borrowed money, is a bizarre policy.

Secondly, there’s a new study out by two economists with the International Monetary Fund. IMF policy. They published a study, in which they study 42 banking crises around the world over the last 37 years. And they concluded essentially this: bail-outs don’t usually work; they often make things worse; and they are fundamentally a transfer of wealth from everybody to bankers and their customers. So, Congress should be saying, is there something else we can do in the short run to sort of patch this over and keep going forward? They’re not asking that question. They’re not even discussing that question.

And, do you see reporters on TV saying, excuse me, have you discussed other solutions to this, have you discussed if there’s something short-term we could do ‘till we sort this out? There’s a basic question reporters should be asking. Does the Treasury Department have a list of all the banks in the country, and what they say are the face value of their illiquid assets? That would tell us real quickly if there’s a problem concentrated in a handful of banks, or is it spread all over.

GG: Now, all of that relates to what we were just talking about, which is the way that this panic mode of this impending doom drowns out every meaningful question, including the question of, even if you’ve become convinced that doom is around the corner, will this plan actually solve things, or even make them better? is there a chance they can make things worse?

The reason why those questions haven’t been asked is because, from the beginning, even Congress, when they held their vaunted hearing, only heard from people, as I think you’ve suggested, who advocate the Paulson plan. There were the Bush officials there, from the Fed, who believe in this plan, and we never have heard about the prospect that other plans could potentially, less draconian plans could actually work better.

And I want to ask you about this, in relation to that point, which is: obviously, one of the things we’re doing in enacting this plan is vesting great discretion in the Treasury Secretary - less discretion than he originally demanded, but still vast discretion - who, for a long time, until very recently, was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and you’ve said there are some questions, vital questions that any rational person ought to be asking, let alone a good journalist, about how the whole Goldman Sachs connection is playing into what has happened over the last 10 days to two weeks. What are those questions, and how do they impact your assessment to whether this bail-out plan is a good idea?

DJ: Well, who is the leading company inventing and promoting these toxic products, and getting people into them? Goldman Sachs, and it was at the time that Henry Paulson was running Goldman Sachs that this was going on. So, even if you assume his heart is pure and all he is doing here is what he thinks is the best thing to do for the republic, you have to look at where he came from.

Now, they allowed a Goldman competitor to fail, Lehman, the only firm that they said they would nothing for. Then, they decided to rescue AIG, the insurance company, on the too big to fail theory — who owes Goldman $20B, half its net worth? AIG. And who is the only non-government person in the room, according to The New York Times, when they made that decision? The current chairman of Goldman.

With the Secretary will now be imbued with the power to buy assets - he doesn’t have to have auctions; he doesn’t have to pay the lowest possible price. He can even buy assets from foreign governments and foreign central banks, so we’re going to have American taxpayers bailing out Dutch banks and Luxembourg banks. There’s no question being raised about, hey, these guys all were running huge off-shore operations, to not pay taxes in the US; they didn’t run to the government of Bermuda and the Cayman Islands for help; they ran to the government whose system they abused. Why aren’t we saying a condition of getting in the bailout is, you will, within five years, repatriate all your assets and pay taxes on them from the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. No-one’s even mentioned that except me. And one tax lawyer that I know.

In buying assets, the Secretary does not have to buy a single asset from Goldman to rescue Goldman. All he has to do is buy assets from parties who, if they defaulted, would bring Goldman down. We ought to have a requirement that the counter-party be disclosed in every one of these cases so we make sure this isn’t a bail-out of Goldman by its former chairman. Those are the kind of fundamental integrity questions that aren’t on the table, and by the way, that oversight board - it has five members. One of them is the Treasury Secretary, who supposed to oversee his own operations; but there’s no inspector general.