The word being used most frequently to describe the bailout package that is about to pass is "extraordinary." That adjective may apply to the amounts of money being transferred from taxpayers to Wall Street, but the process by which this is all happening is anything but "extraordinary." All of the "principles" that drive how our Government functions in general -- what explain the last eight years at least -- are perfectly evident in what has happened here:
I am only posting the first sentence of each point. You should click the link below to read the full text (a very good read.) -- meegbear(1) Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.
(2) Those who created the crisis, were wrong about everything, drive the process.
(3) Public opinion is largely ignored, as always, and public anger is placated through illusory, symbolic and largely meaningless concessions.
(4) The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable.
(5) Wall Street, large corporations and their lobbyists own the Federal Government and both parties, and (therefore) they always win.
(6) The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest.
(7) For all the anger over what Wall St. has done, the Government -- as it bails them out -- isn't doing anything to rein in their practices.
(8) When the Government wants greater and greater power and wants to engage in pure corruption, it need only put the population in extreme fear and it gets its way in every case.
(9) On the most consequential and fundamental questions that define the country, the establishment/leadership of both political parties are in full agreement, and insulate themselves from any political ramifications by acting jointly.
(10) Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can't top itself -- torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses -- it always tops itself.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/