The Wall St. Bailout - Honest Questions, Trickster Answers

The NY Times is carrying an article supposedly intended to help the American public understand the Wall St. Bailout Plan that is being rushed through Congress without the careful study that it should get. But the article has all the appearance of what I would expect of playing a part in a unified effort across the country to talk the public into accepting this plan at face value -- and get ready to be bilked to an extent that will dwarf what it has already experienced in the past eight years. Note that those in the upper brackets, the ones most able to pay the taxes that will be required, have long ago been relieved of the requirement to pay their fair share, and in fact McCain and his Pal are campaigning right now to make those cuts permanent and even to institute new cuts, always a surefire Republican vote-getter. But even now?

The article is in the form of question and answer, and it is as if one person, the honest and frank one, wrote the questions, while the dissembler and the con artist wrote the answers.

For example:

Q. How is it that the administration and Congress, which have not tried to find huge amounts of money to, say, improve the nation’s health insurance system or repair bridges and tunnels, can now be ready to come up with $700 billion to rescue the financial system?

A. The first question will surely come up again, involving as it does not just issues of spending policy but also more profound questions about national aspirations. As for rescuing the financial system, elected officials in both parties became convinced that, while a couple of venerable investment banks could fade into oblivion or be absorbed by mergers, the entire financial system could not be allowed to collapse.

Not until almost midway through the answer, with the words "elected officials," was any attempt made to come up with something that had the appearance of being forthright. But meanwhile what about health care and the bridges and tunnels? Those concerns won't vanish and no longer be of any concern. Instead they will remain upfront and urgent, yet they are still to be left twisting in the wind, becaise the greedy and reckless bankers must first and always be saved from suffering the consequences of their ways.

All this is so disheartening that I'm tempted to say that maybe it would've been best to call the bankers' bluff and to do precisely nothing. This whole crisis has too much of an air of being a concerted effort, with all the players knowing which parts they will play and playing them perfectly, so that the guilty will go unpunished and the innocent will have to pay.