Bucket Brigade

Today Washington is in a frenzy to pass a bill to bail out Wall Street banks.

About the Bush Administration’s initial proposal, I can’t argue with Paul Campos’s take at Lawyers Guns & Money. L’etat, c’est moi is about right. Bush’s friends in high places never suffer the sting of failure, not when average taxpayers can be made to suffer it for them.

John Cassidy comments at the New Yorker site. He closes with a reference to the New Deal. My mind is wandering back to some public school classroom and some American History lesson, probably from 10th or 11th grade. I don’t think my teacher in the Morris County, New Jersey public schools was a raving Bolshevik. But he did take on faith that the New Deal reforms, especially stuff like the Glass-Steagall Act, were a good thing, a sensible response to the excesses of the 1920s, and above all an irrevocable thing, like the polio vaccine. Nobody would roll back the clock to un-invent these safeguards. Sometimes I wish America was really like my teachers said it was.