It has been obvious for years that the government has become a government by and for the corporations, not the people. So when I read the part of the article that I put in bold above, it made me wonder: will this be the nail in the coffin of the Democrat and Republican duopoly? Will this be the end of a government that is no longer following the laws and limits set forth in the Constitution?

Governments all eventually fall, as history bears out and perhaps the fall of the US is overdue. I don't WANT to see it fail, but the current government is no longer fulfilling its original purpose of protecting its citizens' liberties and property. It has embarked on a program to do just the opposite as it erodes civil liberties and transfers the nation's wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

If our government continues with the bailout program, rescuing financiers from the results of bad decisions, will this be the wake up call of the citizens? Will this be the event that makes people rise up and take a stand against a government run amok, a government that isn't even trying to hide its transgressions anymore?

I sure hope so!

__________________


Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

There are two choices in the present, either don't bailout or do bailout. One should look at the effects of both actions.

If we don't bail them out, they go under and how will that effect the market? How will that effect the little guy? How will that effect millions of people's retirements?

If we do bail them out, how does that effect all of those, but also, how does it effect the value of the dollar, and then how does that (the change in the value of the dollar) effect those privious questions?

__________________
Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

It will not launch "a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion." The American sheeple are too stupid, blinded by the lies of the media and the Democrats and Republicans that there are no other choices available to them, and too apathetic with this silly "can't fight city hall" attitude.

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Instead of bailing out the bankers, bail out the little guy - the person with the retirement account or the IRA or the college fund invested with these bankers.

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

That is a good idea, though it will be extremely difficult and expensive to try to track all of that to make sure that everyone gets bailed out and to prevent anyone from taking advantage of it.

Though while the banks are going under because of bad loans, they are still very full of good loans to hard working individuals and small businesses. So if all the bad loans take them down, they take all the honest people and small businesses with them.

Though I would have prefered that the government buy out all the good loans and let the company sink with it's bad loans.

But we need to remember that this money is not just being pissed away. These are assets (not very good ones, but assets nevertheless), of which on many of them, we will be able to collect some or all of the money owed, thus reducing to total cost (though I think we should hire professionals to take care of it, rahter than congressmen).

__________________
Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

It doesn't take much to find out who is invested with these bankers.

But it's the hard-working individuals and small businesses I would bail out (or, rather, have the bankers pay to bail out).

Now there's something I hadn't considered.

They wouldn't happen to be big guys with Italian last names, would they?

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Excellent commentary by TIME on this....very interested to hear your reactions. (Links being so ephemeral, I may as well just post the whole thing....)

How We Became the United States of France

By Bill Saporito Sunday, Sep. 21, 2008

Antony Edwards / Getty

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future where too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national healthcare? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Admit it, mes amis, the rugged individualism and cutthroat capitalism that made America the land of unlimited opportunity has been shrink-wrapped by a half dozen short sellers in Greenwich, Conn. and FedExed to Washington D.C. to be spoon-fed back to life by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. We're now no different from any of those Western European semi-socialist welfare states that we love to deride. Italy? Sure, it's had four governments since last Thursday, but none of them would have allowed this to go on; the Italians know how to rig an economy.

You just know the Frogs have only increased their disdain for us, if that is indeed possible. And why shouldn't they? The average American is working two and half jobs, gets two weeks off, and has all the employment security of a one-armed trapeze artist. The Bush Administration has preached the "ownership society" to America: own your house, own your retirement account; you don't need the government in your way. So Americans mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy overpriced houses they can no longer afford and signed up for 401k programs that put money where, exactly? In the stock market! Where rich Republicans fleeced them.

Now our laissez-faire (hey, a French word) regulation-averse Administration has made France's only Socialist president, Francois Mitterand, look like Adam Smith by comparison. All Mitterrand did was nationalize France's big banks and insurance companies in 1982; he didn't have to deal with bankers who didn't want to lend money, as Paulson does. When the state runs the banks, they are merely cows to be milked in the service of la patrie. France doesn't have the mortgage crisis that we do, either. In bailing out mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, our government has basically turned America into the largest subsidized housing project in the world. Sure, France has its banlieues, where it likes to warehouse people who aren't French enough (meaning, immigrants orAlgerians) in huge apartment blocks. But the bulk of French homeowners are curiously free of subprime mortgages foisted on them by fellow citizens, and they aren't over their heads in personal debt.

We've always dismissed the French as exquisitely fed wards of their welfare state. They work, what, 27 hours in a good week, have 19 holidays a month, go on strike for two days and enjoy a glass of wine every day with lunch — except for the 25% of the population that works for the government, who have an even sweeter deal. They retire before their kids finish high school, and they don't have to save for a $45,000-a-year college tuition because college is free. For this, they pay a tax rate of about 103%, and their labor laws are so restrictive that they haven't had a net gain in jobs since Napoleon. There is no way that the French government can pay for this lifestyle forever, except that it somehow does.

Mitterrand tried to create both job-growth and wage-growth by nationalizing huge swaths of the economy, including some big industries, including automaker Renault, for instance. You haven't driven a Renault lately because Renault couldn't sell them here. Imagine that. An auto company that couldn't compete with a Dodge Colt. But the Renault takeover ultimately proved successful and Renault became a private company again in 1996, although the government retains about 15% of the shares.

Now the U.S. is faced with the same prospect in the auto industry. GM and Ford need money to develop greener cars that can compete with Toyota and Honda. And they're looking to Uncle Sam for investment — an investment that could have been avoided had Washington imposed more stringent mileage standards years earlier. But we don't want to interfere with market forces like the French do — until we do.

Mitterand's nationalization program and other economic reforms failed, as the development of the European Market made a centrally planned economy obsolete. The Rothschilds got their bank back, a little worse for wear. These days, France sashays around the issue of protectionism in a supposedly unfettered EU by proclaiming some industries to be national champions worthy of extra consideration — you know, special needs kids. And we're not talking about pastry chefs, but the likes of GDF Suez, a major utility. I never thought of the stocks and junk securities sold by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as unique, but clearly Washington does. Morgan's John Mack calls SEC boss Chris Cox to whine about short sellers and bingo, the government obliges. The elite serve the elite. How French is that?

Even in the strongest sectors in the U.S., there's no getting away from the French influence. Nothing is more sacred to France than its farmers. They get whatever they demand, and they demand a lot. And if there are any issues about price supports, or feed costs being too high, or actual competition from other countries, French farmers simply shut down the country by marching their livestock up the Champs Elysee and piling up wheat on the highways. U.S. farmers would never resort to such behavior. They don't have to: they're the most coddled special interest group in U.S. history, lavished with $180 billion in subsidies by both parties, even when their products are fetching record prices. One consequence: U.S. consumers pay twice what the French pay for sugar, because of price guarantees. We're more French than France.

So yes, while we're still willing to work ourselves to death for the privilege of paying off our usurious credit cards, we can no longer look contemptuously at the land of 246 cheeses. Kraft Foods has replaced American International Group in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the insurance company having been added to Paulson's nationalized portfolio. Macaroni and cheese has supplanted credit default swaps at the fulcrum of capitalism. And one more thing: the food snob French love McDonalds, which does a fantastic business there. They know a good freedom fry when they taste one.

(snip)
Yeah, so it's kinda long, but what do ya say, Channy?

__________________
An employee gets trampled to death by a frenzied, greedy mob at a Walmart sale, and customers actually complained when the store closed. Yet, I'm the bad guy for suggesting policies that assume people act like retarded herd animals that need government nannying and control....

It's going to get even worse.

__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

This entire "crisis" has a very simple solution: raise the prime rate. Raise the prime rate, get the deadbeats out of their houses, let the idiot bankers who loaned money yo deadbeat fail, and let the credit market shrink. By raising the prime rate we will encourage FDI and greatly moderate the effects of the egalitarian economic policies of the last 8 years.

There is not ONE thing that the government can do to help this situation, but they're doing a hell of a job making things worse. Government intervention in the economy is the historic enemy of prosperity; when will people learn this?

__________________
"Bring me that horizon".

Because the "idiot bankers" that loaned out bad loans, didn't only loan out bad loans, they are also full of good loans with hard working americans who will go under if the company goes under. Why can't you see past your ideological bais? If the company fails, it hurts everyone with loans through it, not just the deadbeats.

When they start believing lies. And then for only a few years, until it fails.

__________________
Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides