Excellent Essay: The Power of 'No'

An excellent essay, "The Power of No," has been posted to Common Dreams by Dave Lindorff. Without any more yapping from me (I've ranted enough today,) here is an excerpt:

As Nobelist economist Joseph Stiglitz has written of this outrageous rip-off, there are four problems facing the financial system, and the bailout proposal only addresses one--getting the toxic mortgages off the banks' books and onto taxpayers' hands. Left unsolved is the gaping hole in banks' balance sheets in the form of loans made to people and companies which cannot be repaid, which will mean they still won't start lending money again. Left unaddressed too is the continuing collapse of housing prices, which will inevitably lead to more bank collapses even after the bailout. Finally, Stiglitz says there is the general loss of faith in the financial system--a major crisis which the bailout will also not solve.

Stiglitz doesn't even address a fifth problem which is that this trillion-plus-dollar boondoggle (and when you add in the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, the multiple mega-bank failures and the pending auto-industry bailout, you're already talking $1.5 trillion and counting), all of it with borrowed money, the stage is being set for a collapse in the US dollar, with consequences that will reverberate through the economy. Consider: if the dollar collapses, as many experts say is almost inevitable with this kind of huge addition to the national debt, oil prices (which are set in dollars) will soar to compensate, the price of all the other goods that Americans import--more than half of everything we use in daily life thanks to the decimation of American manufacturing--will rise dramatically, and ultimately, in an effort to stem the bleeding, interest rates will have to be raised, thus bringing what's left of the economy to a grinding halt.

All of this is readily predictable--and indeed a group of over 200 prominent economists has written Congress joining Stiglitz in opposing the bailout plan--but that doesn't matter to the proponents of the bailout in Washington. What they want is to get past Election Day, and the bailout may do that, unless the public gets really aroused.

The tsunami of calls and emails to Congress, and last week's nationwide demonstrations against the bailout suggest that the public is waking up to this looming disaster and to the fact that they are being sold a bill of goods.

Ron Paul mentioned (quite heatedly) the impending collapse of the dollar. Lindorff goes into much greater detail about the fallout of such a collapse, in our manufacturing-free US economy. Think the price of gas is high right now? Imagine struggling even to afford food.

And yet good ol Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were up there on the stage again last night, grinning and hugging each other (and that jackal Paulson;) as though they had just saved the world. Once again, to no one's surprise, they sold us out to the Neocons. (It is my fondest wish for our nation that they both find themselves without jobs after election day this November. Traitors... both of them. Its not like they need the employment; they can each live out their days in luxury on their lobbyist kickbacks alone.)

Could it really be true, that this time... congress is actually listening to us?