Are you sure this bailout bill should pass?

Two excellent articles on the present financial market failures:

Gretchen Morgenson, writing in the Times on Sunday:

In the case of A.I.G., the virus exploded from a freewheeling little 377-person unit in London, and flourished in a climate of opulent pay, lax oversight and blind faith in financial risk models. It nearly decimated one of the world’s most admired companies, a seemingly sturdy insurer with a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 116,000 employees and operations in 130 countries.

David Kay Johnson, writing in The New Republic, asks some good questions about the assumptions behind the bailout plan:

Taxpayers should be troubled that on Capitol Hill and at the White House the talk was about modifying the Paulson plan, not a different approach. They should be just as troubled that most news reporters and TV anchors initially assumed that there must be a crisis and only asked questions around the edges of the plan instead of taking it apart.

I'm not sure the bailout bill is going to pass, and I have my doubts that it should. I don't trust Bush and Paulson, and now that the House Republicans have emerged from the ooze to put their slimy stamp on it, I have even less confidence. I wish I had some reason to trust Pelosi and Reid, but we have spent the past two years waiting for them to do something about Iraq - their record of humiliating failure does not inspire confidence.

We live in an America whose priorities are set by the multi-millionaires, where average people get played, and the game is rigged so that all the benefits go to those who already have the most.

Do you really trust these people with $700 billion?

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