Not being an economist or a wall street mogul, I can't understand the nuances of this Wall Street mess and the proposed 700 billion dollar bailout. But then I've heard some economists say on television that even they don't understand all the new instruments on Wall Street these days: credit default swaps and so on.
Yet our Congress is told by the president and his chief economic guys that if they don't pass this bailout, the entire economy will collapse and we will enter a second Great Depression.
There most assuredly has been scandalous behavior throughout the economic sector, from the small and large mortgage brokers who made the ill-advised loans, to the securities firms who bundled together a bunch of worthless loans and sold them as securities, to the credit default swappers who, from what I can gather, bet that the whole mess would fail and so stand to gain tons of money with the bailout, when they are paid for betting against the solvency of the system.
But as Congress tries to decide what to do, and we ordinary Americans struggle to understand and make up our own minds whether we are going to accept what Congress does or get out the pitchforks, there are two huge scandals that stand out above all the others.
The first scandal is that our economic system has been allowed to become so complex that ordinary citizens and even ordinary lawmakers cannot understand it. How on earth is someone supposed to regulate, supervise, and legislate, when one cannot even understand what is happening?
And the second scandal is that we don't even know if we can trust the president and his economic team. The Bush administration has already lied so much to us that we have no idea whether what they are telling us is true - that the system could collapse - or whether this is all an election year ploy to advantage their own party.
That it has come to this in our great nation - that things have become too complex for us to understand and thus govern ourselves, and that our president is a crook and a liar whom we cannot trust - does not bode well for our democracy.
