Unsurprising Economic Meltdown, and Hope For The Future...

This was forwarded to me, so I cannot be positive of the author. Regardless of author, it is a worthwhile take on where we: unfathomable hundreds of billions of dollars are in the process of being shoveled from our kids pockets into the hands of the super-rich.

Unsurprising economic meltdown, and hope for the future...

Steal from the poor and give to the rich: this is the policy that we have in recent days seen the U.S. Government unhesitatingly and irresponsibly sanction by bailing out the big gamblers and law-breakers with tax-payer money. At least now this short-sighted and destructive approach to governance is undeniably out in the open. We saw this happen in the 1980s with the savings and loan scandal and bail-outs, and we are seeing now, as we saw then, people like John McCain, Phil Gramm and the usual assortment of corporate pirates get off scot-free and continue on their paths of self-advancement and cronyism. The mismanagement and plundering of our nation's wealth and the cavalier drive to burden future generations of its citizens with crushing debt have been hallmarks of U.S. government practice for quite some time, but never to the unprecedented degree that we have experienced during the eight years that the Bush Administration has plundered the treasury for the benefit of a tiny, very wealthy minority. Hopefully voters will keep this in mind when deciding whether they wish to continue in the same vein with McCain, or give change a chance to happen with an Obama administration. Perhaps, too, the mainstream media outlets, in response to the now undeniable financial and moral crises we face, will get back to allowing issues more pressing and significant than the personal and ethical foibles of Ms Palin to take precedence in their daily election "coverage." I have my doubts about their willingness to do so, but there is always hope.

--Viggo Mortensen.

As David Sirota writes at In These Times:

[T]his week’s White House legislation demanding Congress surrender its power of the purse, and give an unelected appointee—in this case, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—the power to hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to “any financial institution,” “without limitation…on such terms and conditions as determined by [him].” In a nation priding itself on separating powers between the branches of government, the bill explicitly states that decisions by Paulson may not even “be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it—even the mere thinking of it—is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight to electoral accountability itself.

Read more Sirota.

Of course, the mainstream media is getting the focus wrong. The news reports I have heard have been along the lines of "Congress is refusing to act on White House bill" when the headlines should be "White House pushes no-strings-attached billions for wolves who have raided and wrecked the hen house but now promise to rebuild it, tries to override legislative branch in so doing."

P.S. - It has been confirmed by a trusted source that Viggo Mortensen did indeed write the piece above.