The deep cry for integrity: An old sin now demands its wages

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/17463

The deep cry for integrity: An old sin now demands its wages
by Robert C. Koehler | September 26, 2008



How about we tack a values shift onto the $700 billion economic bailout package the Bush administration is asking for?

Hello, 2008? This is 1929 calling.

What's still missing in too many venues of official concern is the big, national aha! We can't solve our problems, as Einstein said, at the level of thinking at which we created them. We certainly can't solve this one at the level of thought, collusion, cowardice and hubris that brought us, oh, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, Katrina . . . (what am I leaving out?) . . . domestic spying, collapsing infrastructure, abandoned vets.

Greed and deregulation have sucker-punched the economy more than once (e.g., the savings and loan scandal, the high-tech bubble) since Ronald Reagan undid all but a few shreds of the New Deal two-plus decades ago and set the virulence of privatization into motion, but the current financial implosion really has experts worried. This may be the one that really wrecks things for our children and grandchildren.

It's an old sin, of course, that is now demanding its wages. The traditional right, slowly waking up to the extent to which it has been betrayed by the Bush administration, is beginning to see it almost as clearly as the progressives.

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The best we can expect from Congress right now, of course, is that it listen to its constituents and refuse to cave in to the notorious Section 8 of the Bush administration's bailout request: that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's decisions regarding how nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars of taxpayer money is disposed of should be "non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

No blank check! My God, how deeply and thoroughly does the Bush administration have to screw things up before its arrogance is countered in the reality-based community? A skeptical Congress may insist on a few provisions to accompany the bailout, such as: federal authority to help beleaguered homeowners stay in their homes; restrictions on CEO salaries and severance packages in bailed-out companies; and oversight (praise the Lord) of Bush's Treasury Department.

But the deep cry for economic integrity has yet to be heard. The common good awaits representation.