There are no easy answers to the current crisis. But there are plenty of
important questions to ask our leaders, starting with:
1. How is it that
few, if any, of our leaders foresaw the consequences of the near-total
deregulation of the mortgage market and Wall Street? How could they not
have seen that the toxic combination of age-old greed, the growing
complexity of financial instruments, the lack of transparency in the
markets, and the cavalier attitude of those government officials who were
supposed to be minding the store would amount to no good?
2. How is
it that the Federal Reserve Chair has $800 billion to spend as he pleases
to save or buy corporations that are "too big to fail"? Why does he have
such discretion to spend so much of our money so freely, when other
economic needs such as health care, education, clean energy, public
transportation and on and on must go begging?
3. If a corporation is too
big to fail, why do we allow it to exist?
4. Why should Congress trust
the Bush administration -- the Bush administration that gave us Saddam's
phantom WMDs, the "connection" between Saddam and 9/11, the looting of the
Iraqi National Museum while the oil wells were guarded, the "death throes"
of the insurgency, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, the suspension of habeas corpus, the denial at first of global warming then the denial of our role in it then the denial of our responsibility and ability to solve it, the criminal neglect of New Orleans before, during and after Katrina, and the "deregulate at any cost" mentality that got us into this mess -- why should Congress trust the Bush administration with newly unfettered power to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars as the administration sees fit? How, in other words, can we not think that they will either reward their friends instead of the people, completely screw this up and make the crisis worse, or both?
Before Congress signs that $700 billion bailout check, we'd like some answers.
