By the time it gets to this, it's hard to view the writer as anything other than a quack.
Second, it did so just as the housing fraud and financial insanity which characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s nearly destroyed the U.S. dollar and left us with martial law.
Seconded. This seems like a way-too-dramatic writeup of private company which comes to the same conclusion folks have been coming to for a while, based on my 30 second Google search.
I guess it's relevant for musicians and Bain Capital, but he does come across as a hyper quack.
If the financial system had collapsed, and it very nearly did, that would not have been hyperbole.
I'm not happy with how the bailouts happened and bankers and others who engineered the disaster not only walked scot-free but made a killing on the situation, but increasingly I'm convinced we dodged an asteroid there.
I'm painfully aware of 2008, but the martial law piece is a stretch. It's like the folks who answer every question with "Let's get back on the gold standard."
At the very best it would have been uncharted territory. Given the civil unrest that's been seen in parts of the U.S. without overt financial system collapse, I really don't see it as a huge stretch.
What you're discussing is that the House (which under the constitution can set their own rules) decided to create a rule XIII(6)(a) that said that bills couldn't be passed by the House without a day to consider them except by a 2/3 vote. Later, the House changed that rule to waive the requirement to wait a day. Later still, they reinstated it.
Colloquially, the waiver of the rule is sometimes referred to as "martial law", in much the way that proposals to repeal or reform the filibuster rules in the senate are called the "nuclear option". The nuclear option does not involve nuclear weapons, and the so-called "martial law" rule in the senate does not involve martial law. It's not even related to martial law.
Martial law would be a suspension of civil liberties and an injection of military personnel over civilian authorities; it would also necessitate a repeal of habeas corpus and the posse comitatus act. What you're discussing is a minor (and long since reverted) rule change governing when and in what circumstances draft bills could be brought to a floor vote in the house.
The bottom line is this: The minority party in the house wanted to delay and debate the bailout bill. The house—which is charged with setting rules about delays and debate by majority vote-set rules which didn't allow the minority party to delay and debate as much as they wanted. Some members of the minority party, in a fit of hyperbole, analogized the rule change to martial law. It wasn't. It wasn't even sort of LIKE martial law.
TL;DR: You're so wrong, you didn't even understand c-span.
Second, it did so just as the housing fraud and financial insanity which characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s nearly destroyed the U.S. dollar and left us with martial law.