There must be better alternatives to this bail out

[Blue Meany]

than turning over money to the very people who had so much to do with causing the crisis. For example, if we really need liquidity to grease the rails of the economy, why doesn't the govt. just open a commercial banks of its own, directly lending money to companies that actually produce things rather than to the Ponzi marketeers on Wall Street. We have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make mortgages, already. If we need to kick-start the economy, we should do that by directing fnds to the poorer sectors of society rather than to the investor classes: demand-side economics actually works. If all these investment banks fail, the govt-owned banks can probably get some great deals from the bankruptcy auctions, rather than paying "cash for trash" as is now proposed.

No matter how the govt intervenes, I don't see a way out of this without pain for most of us, because, since we started exporting factories and good jobs during the Reagan era, much our economy has not been real: we've been operating from bubble to bubble with credit, ficitious capital and paper assets. China is producing everything we used to and our main manufacturing export is debt and derivatives. As the dollar decline in value--which would seem ineviteable in the face of this mess with our without a bailout--we will not be able to afford foreign goods, so we may start producing them ourselves again, and begin to pull ourselves out of this economic ditch that CEOs, corrupt govt. officials, and the investment class have have created.