Every hour of every day brings reams of fresh news reports and commentaries on the Wall Street crisis and the competing bailout proposals wending their way through Congress, but that doesn’t mean you can learn anything from most of them. David Cay Johnston, the great NYT reporter and author (Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich and Cheat Everybody Else; Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill) who has done more to illuminate the flim-flammery at the heart of the US tax code and Wall Street’s post-Reagan machinations, offered this warning to journalists yesterday:

In covering the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street don’t repeat the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act. Don’t assume that Congress must act instantly, as so many news stories state as if it was an immutable fact. Don’t assume there is a case just because officials say there is.

The coverage of the Paulson plan focuses on the edges, on the details. The focus should be on the premise. And be skeptical of what gullible Congressional leaders, most of them up before the voters in a few weeks, say after being given a closed-door meeting on supposed horrors.

The Administration has scared the markets and some key legislative leaders, but it has not laid out a coherent, specific and compelling need for this enormous proposal, which is the equivalent of a one-time 55 percent income tax surcharge. (Instead the money will be borrowed, so ask from whom and how this much can be raised so quickly if the credit markets are nearly seized up with fear.)

Ask this question — are the credit markets really about to seize up?

If they are then lots of business owners should be eager to tell how their bank is calling their 90-day revolving loans, rejecting new loans and demanding more cash on deposit. I called businessmen I know yesterday and not one of them reported such problems. Indeed, Citibank offered yesterday to lend me tens of thousands of dollars on my signature at 2.99 percent, well below the nearly 5 percent inflation rate. That offer came after I said no last week to a 4.99 percent loan.

Here are links to some of the most prescient and on-point analyses of the past several days, starting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s no-strings-attached bailout plan.

THE PAULSON PLAN

Text of the Paulson proposal

Glenn Greenwald, “The complete (though ever-changing) elite consensus about the financial collapse” (9/20)

Glenn Greenwald, “Growing right-wing opposition to the Paulson plan” (9/22)

Glenn Greenwald, “Interview with Notre Dame finance professor Richard Sheehan” (9/23)

William Greider, “Paulson bailout plan a historic swindle” (9/19)

Michael Hudson, “The Paulson-Bernanke bank bailout: Will the cure be worse than the disease?” (9/22)

Sean-Paul Kelley, “Text of the bailout is authoritarianism at its worst” (9/20)

Paul Krugman, “No Deal” (9/20)

Paul Krugman, “Balance Sheet Baloney” (9/23)

Robert Reich, “The bailout to end all bailouts” (9/23)

THE DODD PLAN

Text of the Dodd plan (PDF)

Bloomberg News, “Dodd proposes giving US equity stake for bad debt” (9/22)

TalkLeft, “Follow the Lobbyists: They Strongly Oppose the Dodd Bill” (9/23)

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES’ RESPONSES

NYT Caucus blog, “Obama Says Bailout Should Include 4 Conditions” (9/23)

WashPost Trail blog, “McCain Lays Out Bailout Principles” (9/23)

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Bill Allison/Sunlight Foundation, “Financial Bailout: Who’s minding the store?” (9/23)

Bill Allison/Sunlight Foundation, “Financial Bailout: Who does Dodd see at his fundraisers?” (9/23)

Bill Allison/Sunlight Foundation, “Financial Bailout: Who does Shelby see at his fundraisers?” (9/23)

Bill Allison/Sunlight Foundation, “Financial Bailout: Who does Bachus see at his fundraisers?” (9/24)

The Paulson plan: He gets $700 billion to dispense, you get the tab.

This week in the Schultz Report, we discuss the only issue that matters at the moment–the financial meltdown on Wall Street and the Paulson plan that’s currently being bum-rushed through Congress, which would give the US Treasury secretary absolutely unprecedented power to buy up bad debt with public dollars, and without any public oversight or future public benefit in the form of equity in the companies we’re bailing out.

David Schultz

“There’s really no precedent in American history for anything like this,” says Schultz. “You don’t say that we’re going to pass the largest bailout in American history, one of the largest financial commitments we’ve ever made, and say you’re going to rush it through in five days without any serious examination. We have too many stories in American history where huge bills have been pushed through and later we find out they’re full of problems for down the line.

“We’re seeing stories emerge already about a lot of Wall Street types, on top of the already huge bonanza here, who are lobbying heavily to get other debt of theirs that is not related to the subprime crisis thrown in here. This is turning into one of the great pieces of pork barrel legislation of all time. It’s going to help out the people who caused the problem, and do absolutely nothing to stem the problems of foreclosure and falling equity for homeowners.

“Compare this bailout to what Sweden did when its banks were in crisis back in the 1980s. They too did a bailout, to the tune of 3-4 percent of their GDP. Ours is about 5 percent. But one of the things Sweden did was to demand equity from the banks. It got assets in return. It also got shares in those banks that it was eventually able to sell off to recoup its investment. We’re getting nothing. The taxpayers are only getting the bill, along with no guarantees and no equity. And no restructuring of the banks.”

Regarding the “muted” response of the presidential campaigns to this epochal turn of events, Schultz notes, “One sort of expects McCain to be dumbfounded about what to do here. The economy is not his strong suit, and he’s admitted that. More importantly, the problems of this economy are in part a result of a massive deregulatory movement that’s been going on since the start of the Reagan era. John McCain has been there voting for all this deregulation. He’s stuck in the sense that he’s got a voting record that’s helped produce this kind of problem. And his response in the last few days–saying, for example, he’d have fired SEC chairman [Christopher] Cox for not acting fast enough–has been very tepid.

“Barack Obama is a little more surprising. He wasn’t there; he wasn’t voting for this stuff for the past 20 years. The economy was supposed to be one of his strengths. And on his webpage, he has some fairly harsh criticisms of the past 20 years. But he also isn’t making any serious proposals in terms of where to go in the future. He says he supports the bailout but would like to see some caps on salaries for executives. That’s kind of nice, but it doesn’t solve anything down the line. He has a golden opportunity to make some serious criticisms of the Republicans and McCain, and to open it up and make some arguments about what to do.

“McCain doesn’t have much of an opportunity here. But Obama does. And it’s surprising that the two candidates have both been so muted. On first blush, this ought to be an issue [the Democrats] are jumping on. But when you step back a little more, you need to understand where the Democrats are getting their money from. Barack Obama, for example, is far outraising John McCain in Wall Street contributions. To a large extent, Wall Street’s driving part of his campaign. I suspect if we were to go through and look at the political contributions coming to the Democrats–I’m speculating on this, but I think you’d see a lot more money coming in from banks and Wall Street. I think they’re being pressured by their constituencies to go in this direction also.

“I also think at this point, Congress–and it’s happened several times under the Bush administration–gets buffaloed. They just don’t exert the backbone, and instead feel like they’ve got to give in to the Bush administration and to the political urgency [of the moment] instead of taking a breath and saying, no, there’s a process here of vetting legislation and looking at counter-proposals. The best thing that could happen in the next few days is for the whole process to slow down, so that you can see more criticisms coming out from economists, both mainstream and non-mainstream, and more introspection about the proposals. That might build up political capital that the Democrats need to be able to criticize.

“But at this point, because they’ve been totally reactive in dealing with this crisis, and because of the political contributions, I think they’re just not in a position to act at this point. They’ve been caught by surprise in not having their own proposals to deal with this problem.”

Listen: David Schultz on the Paulson and Dodd bailout plans and the presidential candidates’ response to the Wall Street crisis (14:22)