Ordinary citizens have every reason to complain about yet another government bailout of Big Business.  We don’t like to see tax money offered as a safety net for companies that fail and executives that can’t manage their business.  Why should the big guys get the money when the little guy has to endure risk indefinitely?  If that question can be answered satisfactorily for the American people, we’ll all feel somewhat better about the bailout plan.

Another flaw in the plan seems to be that executive pay won’t be capped for the people running firms that get the money.  Some politicians will tell you that, yes, executive compensation will now be limited.  They’ll tell you that those who brought down the system won’t be rewarded.  But loopholes exist that will allow executives to structure deferred-compensation packages that will bring home big, big paychecks.  I suspect that the hotshots won’t be looking at the $100-million-to-$250-million paydays that have been fairly common for CEOs of large corporations–corporations that lost money as well as those that made money–but the paydays will be big anyway.  Read the newspapers during the next year, and you’ll discover that executive pay is still stratospherically high.

My prediction won’t hold if the economy collapses.  But if the economy is buoyed up by the commitment of tax money to the banking system, the prediction will be good.  It’s an iron law of American capitalism.  Executive pay rises  faster than any other form of compensation in the entire economy.  Not too many years ago it was 100 times the wage of an average worker.  Now it’s 200 or 250 times the wage of an average worker.   And people know this.  That’s why they’re angry.

The political price is going to be high for the Republican Party.  When the party in power has an economic downturn on its watch, the other party usually takes the White House.  This year, at the end of eight disastrous years, the Republicans will pay dearly.  I know that the polls show a fairly tight race in many parts of the country.  I don’t believe them.  I did after Sarah Palin joined McCain as his running mate.  I saw how the power of myth and image could bend opinion overnight.  And McCain did enjoy a big bounce after the Republican convention.

But then the economic collapse of 2008 occurred, and I knew that the tallies were all different now.  The economy is the big issue, and the Republicans can’t claim that they weren’t responsible for its implosion.  (They’ll blame the liberals–just watch–but people aren’t going to be buying that argument.)

Moreover–to get back to a point I started to make above–the polls aren’t taking into account the vast voter registration that has taken place among Democrats and the huge numbers of young people who will be voting, some of them for the first time.  My feeling is that a landslide will occur.  President Barack Obama.  Deal with it.

But what emerged over the weekend was a proposal that the Treasury use the $700 billion to buy bad paper from the institutions without requiring oversight or regulation!  Isn’t the lack of oversight and regulation what brought us to this crisis in the first place?  Moreover, the bill he proposed would put the decisions by the Secretary of the Treasury beyond legal review.  He’s saying, in effect, “Give me the money, trust me to fix the problem, but I won’t be held responsible.”

The economists I’ve been reading in the past couple of days point out that Paulson would be buying the bad debts not at market price but at an above-market price.  He won’t say this publicly, but privately he has admitted it.

What’s going on here?  Is public money simply to be used to prop up big businesses that fail, with no accountability to the voters and taxpayers?  I’m no economist, but I know a bad deal when I see one.

During the weekend, by the way, John McCain said that he stands by his efforts in the late 90s to deregulate financial institutions, even when it was pointed out to him that deregulation was implicated in the present collapse.  Let us liberals remember too that this deregulation came when Clinton was still president.  He and Robert Rubin loved the idea.  I’ve praised this pair for coming up with a balanced budget, a $5 trillion surplus, eight years of unprecedented prosperity, a lowering of the federal deficit, and so on.  But they bought into the ideology that all regulation is bad.  And where was Robert Rubin when Citigroup was buying up tons of bad mortgage debt?

Never-the-less.  The country cannot afford another Republican president.   McCain wants to continue the Bush tax cuts–make them bigger, actually–and “appoint a commission” to see what happened to bring down the financial system.  Isn’t this the guy who was the head of the Senate Commerce Committee?  What exactly did he do on that committee?

The markets have reacted to Paulson’s proposed fix by dropping again.  I knew more bad news was coming, and so did you, but we never think it’s going to be as bad as it is, do we?

Read Paul Krugman of the New York Times.  Go to nytimes.com/blogs.  And read his column in the daily papers.  Years ago he began telling his readers what would happen with the housing market.  Every single thing he worried about has come true.

He learned well from his mother.  He became a fine student, worked his way through college, and then went on to Harvard Law School, where he became editor of the prestigious law review.  All of this success came through hard work.  After he graduated, he chose not to find employment with a big law firm, where he could have made a handsome living, but turned to teaching and community organizing.

He married a very intelligent woman who herself found academic success through hard work.  She also went to Harvard.  These people have two young daughters.  They’re a fine young family.  They enjoy an average level of material comfort, but they are by no means wealthy.

This man is, of course, an Elitist.

We now come to another man.  He was born into wealth and privilege.  His father was a Congressman, a World War II pilot who was shot down and returned to America a hero,  became head of the CIA, then Vice President, and finally President of the United States.  The younger man went to the same well-known prep school as his father had attended, did poorly, and then went to Yale, where his father before him had gone and been the captain of the baseball team.   It is widely believed that he was able to go to Yale only because of his father’s money and prestige.  He did not have good enough grades to get in otherwise.  He did poorly at Yale.

He did earn a degree from Harvard Business School.  He went into the oil business, at which his father had made money, but failed at that enterprise.  That behind him, he used the family name  to help him become a part-owner of the Texas Rangers.   When he and his partners sold the team, he made a fortune.

Earlier, he had become a pilot too, with the Texas Air National Guard, where he could serve without having to go to Vietnam.  Apparently he got tired of being in the Guard at a certain point and just left it, going AWOL.  This part of his life story isn’t clear because the records of his final months in the Guard have disappeared.

He became Governor of Texas and, because of his family name and ultra-right politics, was chosen by his party to run for the presidency.  He was awarded the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court in a disputed election and served two terms as President of the United States.  At the end of his administration, the country will be bankrupt.  The financial system is in a state of collapse, largely as a result of the laissez-faire policies of his administration. During his eight years in office he and his administration have repeatedly violated many of the provisions in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The country has engaged in an unnecessary war with Iraq, where it is bogged down.  Another war is going on in Afghanistan.   Americans are detested around the world.

Eminent historians throughout the country–more than a hundred of them–have agreed that he is the worst president in our history.

He likes to ride around his Texas ranch in a pickup and cut brush with his chain saw.

Therefore, he is a Man of the People.

Let’s see:  Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and now AIG.  The Fed has helped these entities, but it’s let Lehman and Merrill, Lynch go down the toilet.  I guess they weren’t “too big to fail.”  Thank goodness for corporate welfare, however, because those businesses that have been rescued can rebuild and look forward to more prosperous times (we hope).

The presidential election should be in the firm control of the Democrats, but it isn’t.  Everybody I talk to–nurses, Quik Shop clerks, retired professors, Federal agents (well, one–my son-in-law), the guy at the office-supply store,  the owner of the local Dunkin’ Donuts franchise–wants to talk about the economy.  My little informal survey (as well as the newspapers that I read) tells me that people are scared stiff, fed up, yet ever hopeful that something, somehow can be done.

But while the Fed has put Band-Aids on the problem, it hasn’t addressed the underlying wound:  the lack of useful oversight and regulation of Wall Street.  It’s a great irony that big businesses have successfully lobbied an all-too-willing Congress and the past four administrations to lessen oversight and regulation, only to have to beg for government intervention when their free-wheeling ways haveled to lousy business practice.

So it ought to be the Democrats’ election, since they can point to the last eight years of Republican incompetence on economic matters and, truthfully, not have to take much of the blame for the wreckage.  But can Obama and Biden come up with some sexy sound-bites to attack the Republicans?  Can they become political attack-dogs, like Sarah Palin, and convince the American people that they have a better way for the future?

They certainly ought to be able to, especially in light of McCain’s confusion about the whole economic situation.  (“Economics isn’t my strong point,” he has admitted.  “I don’t know much about economics.”  I believe you, John.)

But this election might not depend on what the candidates say about the economy.  It might well boil down, as  McCain political adviser said, to the personalities of the candidates.

Duh!  Of course!  Where have I been?  Didn’t Reagan win because of his good looks, his friendly, lopsided smile, his cheerfulness, and his embodiment of the Western Cowboy?  And wasn’t he pretty good at snide put-downs of the Democrats.  (We won’t talk here of his racist Southern strategy.)  How could any Democratic candidate, no matter what kinds of plans and ideas he had, compete with the larger-than-life Myth of the West, by an actor who had played the part in many movies, no less, and looked good riding a horse?

And now:  I was reading Joe Klein in Newsweek this morning in the doctor’s office, and he pointed out that Sarah Palin has the same Myth of the West thing going for her.  I was barely able to get the gist of his idea before the doctor called me in, but the gist was enough.  The Alaskan Frontier!  An independent, gun-toting, God-fearing woman who can insult the Democrats with a smile and govern Alaska while caring for five kids.

Obama is not going to look good riding a horse.  Joe Biden isn’t going to claim that he knows how to field-dress a moose (though he can slice up a political opponent with a barbed remark).  So forget about ideas and plans and policies and issues and diplomacy and all that government stuff.  We’re in the realm of myth and archetype and tribal emotions.

The Democrats might still pull this one out of the fire.  After all, things are going to get worse on the economic front, which is the number-one issue (“There you go again!”) in the country.  But they’d better get some catchy sound-bites and a few sexy slogans.   I think that the Sarah bounce is already starting to fade–a little–but she’s going to do a lot of damage in the Western states, in Florida, and in the South.  No matter that she’s an air-head.  The Republicans for a long time have been smart enough to know that a dumb candidate doesn’t matter.  And the Democrats have been dumb enough to think that a smart candidate does matter.

—–I wrote the above paragraphs a few hours ago, before I discovered that the Dow had, by the end of business, actually dropped by nearly 450 points.  That drop, along with the bad economic news that will inevitably continue, has just erased the Sarah factor, I think.  Neither McCain (who can’t draw a crowd alone) nor Palin (who can draw a crowd but not say anything of substance) can explain away the last eight years of criminal incompetence in this administration.

I’m saddened to see my modest teacher’s pension go into the toilet, troubled profoundly to see the hard work and savings of my children half-destroyed, shocked to realize that my brother’s life of hard work and honest business success have been knocked down, and angered beyond words that my country’s wealth and prestige have been pissed away by a sneering, perpetual adolescent who set out to show the world how tough he is, a paranoid vice president who knew how to manipulate him, and a compliant Congress led by Republicans bought off by Big Business.  Pissed away by businessmen who couldn’t even succeed when they rigged all the rules in their favor.  Pissed away by politicians who sold their shriveled souls to lobbyists for steak dinners and rides on the corporate jets.  Pissed away by every special interest that wrote the laws that the corrupt politicians were willing to pass to continue in office and mouth the ideology of free markets that have rarely been free because of the special interests who make up the rules in their own favor and call them truth.  And pissed away by the angry voters who bought into this debased ideology and put the rascals in office.

The economic question is now not Are we in a recession?  It’s Are we going to go through another depression?  The world markets are panicked.  Henry Paulson is proceeding by guesswork, without a rational plan.  The Federal Reserve chairman is almost out of options.  There is, in fact, almost no leadership in this administration that can meet our economic problems.

Well, the Bush people wanted no oversight, no regulation, no transparency.  Leave it all up to the free hand of the market.  Now we see what happens when the market goes unchecked.

l. The economy imploded.
2. Joblessness continued to soar.
3. Inflation outpaced the buying power of wages.
4. The national debt pushed beyond 9 1/2 trillion dollars.

Barack Obama is doing his best to discuss important issues like the economy, the Iraq war, alternative energy, tax-relief for average-income earners, restoring American prestige with other nations, and rebuilding our infrastructure. But ever since Sarah Palin came on the national scene and became the Youthful Republican Woman Rock Star, most of the Republican effort has turned to the tried and tested culture wars (religion, abortion, class resentments) and away from substantive issues.

Yesterday both Obama and McCain addressed the question of the free-falling stock market. But how many Americans know what they had to say? The real issues are buried under the really interesting stuff like lipstick.

Has anybody, by the way, come out for the pigs? How do you think they feel?