his is really getting tired. In the name of facilitating a free-market economy at all costs, the American government, with this current 700 billion (or is that 850?) dollar and counting bailout of financial services corporations, has again decided to absorb the debt incurred by irresponsible private entities and various financial services concerns. They are too big to fail because the government has allowed them to become that way. While we’re not questioning the necessity of the federal government’s emergency action, everyone should be concerned about how it should oversee the marketplace, and correct the systemically dysfunctional political culture that made this crisis inevitable.
Considering the fact that the feds have been deregulating the marketplace like crazy for the past few years, and all-too-willing to cut taxes for the wealthy and large corporate entities, what the feds really have been doing is essentially privatising wealth and profit from market while socialising its debt. (It’s also incredibly absurd that John McCain's campaign handlers, rather disingenuously, are blaming less-than-one-term-Senator Barack Obama for this mess, which the direct result of decades of reckless deregulation engineered by both Democratic and Republican politicians like McCain himself and his former senior economic adviser and campaign co-chair Phil Gramm, to allow the corporations to run rampant.)
Don’t Americans think it’s somehow ironic that Republican and so-called 'centrist' Democratic politicians, the perennial Wall-Street lapdogs who always complain about tax-and-spend big government liberals, are the ones who really do the most damage to the national debt with their moronic wars, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and deregulatory frenzy that led to this latest round of deficit-busting bailouts?
Have they already forgotten the S & L debacle, or even Enron from just a few months ago? Why would Americans continue to vote for the same old economic policies offered ad nauseam by the likes of John McCain, the George Bushes, Ronald Reagan, and almost the entirety of the Republican party? (Or for that matter, to an only slightly-lesser extent, for neo-liberal policies served up by the likes of Clinton and his former Treasury head Lawrence Summers?) Americans have been here before, and considering the amount that the taxpayers would have to fork out, they will remain here for generations to come.
ncidentally, David Sedaris of all people commented on the utter inexplicability of the undecided voter in an article in the 27 October issue of the New Yorker:
