Wall Street Bailout Is the Subject of a Columnist's Extra Piece

By: Dave Astor David Sirota, who writes a Friday-released weekly column for Creators Syndicate, is offering a free extra piece today about the Bush administration's massive Wall Street bailout.

The piece, written for In These Times magazine, offers "five key questions we should all be asking." They include:

1. What will prevent the bill from allowing both parties to use the guise of purchasing worthless mortgages to further enrich their largest campaign donors?

2. How are Americans and investors supposed to feel confident that the crisis will be solved, if the very people who engineered the crisis are being relied on to solve it?

3. How is this meltdown a failure of "oversight" if it has almost nothing to do with illegality?

4. When did a crisis suddenly mean that giving away taxpayer cash to campaign donors is laudably apolitical, but spending taxpayer money on taxpayers is inappropriately "political"?

5. How are we going to pay for this?

In his introduction to the piece, Sirota writes: "Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it -- even the mere thinking of it -- is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight, to electoral accountability itself.

"In the immediate aftermath of what could be the starting gun of a second Great Depression, the public this week will face a wave of propaganda from Washington. Using the same playbook that succeeded in passing the Patriot Act and the Iraq War authorization with almost no questions, politicians will inevitably invoke love of country, fear, loathing, and red-alert emergency -- all designed to ram this bill into law as fast as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible."

And Sirota concludes: "To date, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only lawmaker who has laid out a specific plan to both re-regulate the financial markets and responsibly finance a bailout. He proposes to impose a 10% surtax on those making over $500,000 a year, raising roughly $300 billion. 'The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush's economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout,' he said.

"How that fiscal conservatism is met on Capitol Hill will expose the real motives -- and interests -- behind the bailout package."

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