It’s not surprising that our “leaders” are having difficulty finding concensus on what the media has labeled the “$700 Billion Bailout”.
There’s no right way to do the wrong thing.
However you look at it, greed and stupidity should not, must be rewarded. If it is, the funding may restore some semblance of stability, but it will last only until the stampede to the next get-rich-quick bubble.
What does this mean?
For starters, that means no CEO compensation for failed companies, full stop. That means any Realtors found to have been tweaking up housing costs by influencing appraisers must be brought up on charges. That means politicians who encouraged this debacle via runaway deregulation pay the price for doing so. That means anyone who chose to invest in houses to “flip” takes the loss.
You can probably think of more.
Those who *should* be rewarded? Those who paid their mortgages on time. Those who didn’t overcommit their resources. And those forced into debt by circumstances beyond their control should not be punished.
If people *are* punished for behaving responsibly, then they won’t do it. The breadth of consequence of this coming to pass are too great to describe here, but it means the end of the American way of life.
Trust is the cornerstone of any society. We’ve allowed it to erode with the willing cooperation of our “leaders”. Now those entities we’ve erroneously trusted are tottering on the brink.
This erosion of trust has to change, right here. Our leaders must re-earn the trust of the nation and the world, by showing that there are severe consequences for irresponsible behavior.
That means making the hard decisions and carrying them out, to show that they themselves are not exempt from responsibility, even if it costs them their political careers.
Should we fail in this, we may not be *able* to salvage the next crisis.
It’s always amazed me that our city persecutes those who run our critically malfunctioning red lights, rather than the inbred morons who designed and operate them.
that he apparently so fervently believes we should be. 
We’re seeing now one insidious danger of entrenching a two-party system into the American process of governance–