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No bail out without regulations

This letter has not been edited

Cord MacGuire, Boulder

Published December 1, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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It’s really quite impressive, the alacrity with which the financial oligarchs of corporate America are able to marshal the Federal government into heavy duty action on their immediate behalf, while other pressing needs, like single payer healthcare for working families, just simply have to wait, as it always seems they must.

However, it’s not at all surprising that these irresponsible and detached capitalist bosses are summarily relieved of any material responsibility for their financial malfeasances, since it’s widely understood that they long ago acquired the U.S.

government at auction prices. It’s their most valuable asset and protector, without which their corrupt and exhausted economic system would have long ago been democratized, if not overthrown.

President-elect Obama says he seeks to “change“ many things. Yet, tellingly, his economic team is dominated by orthodox neo-liberal hacks like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, whose very own economic theories have been entirely discredited in the current ruins of their global implementation.

A publicly funded bailout of the nation’s biggest banking and insurance houses, without imposing on them strict new government oversight and regulations, will only reward a venal system of corporate capitalism that will inevitably fail us again. It will also confirm the political vacuity of our bourgeois democracy.

Comments

  • December 1, 2008

    6:28 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Clarence_Boddicker writes:

    So what economic system do you propose? Should we have the United States Department of Automobile Manufacturing that provides everyone with a vehicle based on "needs"?

  • December 2, 2008

    12:48 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Yankee writes:

    No Cord, free markets and capitalism have not failed. In fact, it is the success of freedom that has made us the most prosperous society ever known while collectivism lies on the ash-heap of history.

    Marxism has failed. Ongoing attempts to reconstitute a command control economy on an incremental basis will work no better.

    Obama realizes that much.