US hegemony no longer respected.

The BBC has a very different view of the financial situation in the US. Every American should pay more attention to what the rest of the world thinks.

The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower.

On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.

On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.

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Let me repeat that lead from BBC.

The financial crisis is likely to diminish the status of the United States as the world's only superpower.

On the practical level, the US is already stretched militarily, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now stretched financially.

On the philosophical level, it will be harder for it to argue in favour of its free market ideas, if its own markets have collapsed.

In the middle of an election, that is not what anyone want to say to the American Public.

I am reading a lot of very angry notes, all aimed at stopping the bailout. Some of them talk of how the media sold their soul to Wall Street. But, most of these have gotten the story wrong.

Watching the debate tonight, I was struck by one thing that Joe Biden said. Referring to an conversation with the late Mike Mansfield, Biden remarked that he never questioned the motives of those he worked with, even his most vocal opponents. Far too may of the notes that I have seen attribute motives for actions based on the mistaken assumption that all results must have been intended. That is the material for Oliver Stone movie.

I think that most Congressmen are scared to death. They are scared that they won't get re-elected. They are scared that doing nothing will lead to the next great depression. They are scared that someone might pull aside the curtain and reveal that there is nothing behind it.

On the other hand, there are many things that they also passionately believe in. One of these is Free Markets. Now, BBC says that even this is being challenged, as by John Gray.

"The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over... The American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated."

With the purchase of large stakes in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac you may be seeing the beginning of something totally new for this country. The movement that Gray mentions might be toward Socialism or toward Fascism. It is hard to know.

Gray found it ironic that the week in which Treasury Secretary Paulson is on his knees to Congress, the Chinese astronauts completed their first space walk. Personally, I think that China is adopting the worst features of unregulated capitalism with it's ongoing problems with product safety. Not hardly a model to be emulated.

More than ever, we need to work with a Green Economy, one based on sustainability, not growth. Until that happens, we will have continued crisis and bailout. We will have Greed and we all know that Greed is Good on Wall St.

Those who say no.

When I read or listen to all of the verbiage that is floating around concerning the financial straight that the Bush Administration has put us in, I feel very much like I am still listening a broken phonograph disc, repeating the same word over and over. No matter which side of the "bailout" question I am listening to, it is almost without exception based on grabbing a single concept, extrapolating that to being the cause for everything and then suggesting that there is only one answer.

It ain't that simple, folks, as I will try to explain after the the jump.


The anti-capitalist left views the entire fiasco as a way to get the average taxpayer to pay for the mistakes of the capitalist goons who cause it and floated away on their golden parachutes.

Then, there is the argument, made by some who would say "yes" to the bailout, that some of these companies are just too big to fail. That leads to further assumptions such as enforcing a greater degree monopoly protection, or breaking up the big institutions. The results of that would probably be the same as what we got by breaking up AT&T. It will not be what the proponents claim.

Personally, this does not affect me as much as it will affect many. I don't really need to assets in my 401-K and they are in a well balanced group of stocks.

However, I grew up with parents who were forever impacted by the Great Depression. My father owned a small town grocery and lost it because he could not get the credit to buy new stock and his customers, to whom he had allowed credit, could not pay.

We see that happening already in this case, affecting mainly small businesses. NPR had a story on this AM about a small machine shop that had one of their best customer's cancel all orders. The company owner said that he even drove over to the customer's plant to count the cars in the parking lot and verify that they were still in business.

There are members of Congress who are absolutely scared of being responsible for the next Great Depression having lived through the last. I don't blame them. I am old enough to have observed the results. I don't think that most Greens are or they might be more circumspect in their rhetoric on the "no bailout" side.

There are multiple options as to what we should be doing. Maybe we need to take a bit more time than the market is comfortable with. Again, I would blame Bush and Paulsen for that. The rhetoric that they used set up expectations that could never be met.

The real issue is the fact that we have an economic expectation of perpetual growth. The facts are that, while population may continue to grow, the resources of this planet are finite. Greens should arguing for a conversion of our economy requiring growth to succeed into one based on the idea of sustainability. That is a word that seems to have been lost from our political discourse. It needs to be re-introduced to the American Public.

Bail out at 10,000

I tend to be a contrarian when it comes to politics. As for politicians, I am a pessimist and rarely pleasantly surprised. But there is a long list of things that most commentators are not talking about.


I did appreciate the analysis of the House vote offered by Chuck Todd on NBC's Nightly News.
According to Todd,the yes no vote depended on whether the Representative was in a close race, or had one recently. Those is safe districts voted aye. Those facing a challenge listened to their constituency's fears and voted "nae".

Beyond that, if there was a failure of leadership here, I think that started with Nancy Pelosi who could not make up her mind whether to blame everything on the Republicans for the last 50 years, or to urge more bi-partisan work. As usual, her timing was terrible. Cindy Sheehan should be all over this as it is a great opportunity to trash Pelosi.

I don't know whether having Nader in town helps or hurts on that question. He will also trash the plan but the focus will be on Ralph, not Cindy.

Almost every staffer in Washington in working double overtime trying to protect their bosses backside.

When I heard the Republican plan for an mortgage insurance.

House Republicans negotiated a section into the bill that would establish an insurance program for toxic assets. Instead of selling troubled mortgage-backed securities to the Treasury, banks could instead purchase insurance from the Treasury on the assets.

That still leaves the situation without regulation and the lack of regulation is very much what got us into this mess. What makes them think that the industry that found creative ways to leverage the risk will show any more risk aversion with an insurance policy to bail them out. That is even worse than the Paulsen plan.

With all of the fear and uncertainty in the market, someone should be asking the House Republicans, beginning with Mike Pence (IN), what they think about privatizing Social Security. That never made sense to me, even though the long range track of such assets is upward, life circumstances happen when they happen and don't ask permission from the market first. It was a fraud when it was suggested and it is clearly not something that they want to talk about now.

Thanks to Dave Roberts at Grist, I got around to reading Chalmers Johnson at The Nation. It is not normally on my reading list, but this is one of the best commentaries that I have read.

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our long-standing, ever-increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left.

One last thought. My wife was talking to one of her old college friends today. Her friend does not pay much attention to the news. When Rumiko mentioned that the stock market was down 777 points yesterday, that caught her friends attention. "That's terrible. All of my income is from dividends and interest." When anti-capitalist leftist talk about the scuttling the bailout, they need, at the same time, to say exactly what they will do with all of the 401-K plans, the corporate and union pension funds, that just lost as much money as the bailout will cost. That is our money, some of it is my money, and I would hate to see it disappear for lack of intelligent action.