"This crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties" says William Greider

[Better Believe It]

Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
By William Greider
The Nation
September 19, 2008

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses--many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks."

Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough--using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.

Please read the rest of the article which spells out what William Greider believes the government should do to end this economic crisis at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/greider

[glowing]

1. good.. get the crooks that are crooks out!!!!

[Wilber_Stool]

2. If we did that

there would be nobody left to run the government.

[nancyr]

3. Nobody is anyway.

[Karenina]

4. . .

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. An outcome much to be hoped for.

[kenny blankenship]

6. I can't believe that there isn't blood in the streets already

if people only knew...

[midnight]

7. I would love to be able to hear what Eliot Spitzer was investigating

last winter while he was engaged in a private life that raised eyebrows because it involved sex, and not the kind with his wife.

[LaurenG]

8. I predict it will cripple the republican party for years; as it should. nt