The Red Brick Times

After listening to pundit after pundit on three major news shows last night (day of the big DOW drop) my synopsis is as follows:

1) Lots of house members are up for reelection soon.
2) They don't care about the state of the country, only about being reelected.
3) The voters in their home districts are plenty pissed off about the proposed bailout and may not take passage of same too kindly.
4) These voters don't understand anything, are way stupid, and should just shut the fuck up and do what their betters tell them to.

Here's an alternative view by a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University (who was one of 166 academic economists who signed a letter to congressional leaders last week opposing the government bailout plan). Why wasn't this view given just a smidgen of time on any news show last night? Beats me.

My personal take: The neocons have spent eight years raping the US Treasury for the benefit of corporate lobbyists and the ultra-rich in ways too numerous to mention. This bailout plan is their parting gift to what Bush calls "my base".

(P.S. Dear Banking Lobbyists, I'll be happy to fall in line and remove this post for certain... y'know... "considerations?".)
Posted 5:40 AM by whatley (1) comments

       Comments:

Jeffrey Miron says some things that feel right, that reflect the way most of us have to live. If you can't make it, you suffer, and there is no one out there to make it all better. The newly appointed head of Freddie will be paid 900K per year to do a job that no one is confident can be done. I would take that position for one year and then retire in shame and failure (with the bonus buy out) to happily reflect on my sins and grow vegetables. But the specter of abandoning the promise of home ownership to anybody who really, really wants it badly (regardless of ability to pay)undercuts our desire to equalize the economic and social center of our country. We have always decried those who shrugged off poverty by saying "they must deserve it". Do we now have to admit that equality, at least in housing, is truly beyond reach? What's next, differential census taking, like in Thom Jefferson's day when the 13 slave states that entered the union did so under the stipulation that five Afro-Americans would count as three Caucasians for census and electioneering purposes?
This is the latest crisis in the USA's experimental revolutionary government. How we transmute this determines whether we evolve or continue with the cycles of boom and bust and over control begun with FDR after 1929.

# posted by  Andy : September 30, 2008 6:45 AM
 
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