Maine Owl

Welcome to the USSA, you don't know how lucky you are, eh?

Things have gone through, as the Times puts it, "stomach-flipping turmoil" in the week since I last posted on the financial shitstorm.

$700 Billion Is Sought for Wall Street in Vast Bailout
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: September 20, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of the United States financial system, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States. ...

I don't think this is happening the way Trotsky imagined it would:

If America Should Go Communist
Leon Trotsky (August 1934)

Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.

Trotsky is extremely optimistic about America's advantages and its ripeness for revolution during the 1930s Great Depression. He thought, "civil war of a revolutionary nature isn’t fought by the handful of men at the top – the 5 or 10 percent who own nine-tenths of American wealth."

Boy, did Trotsky ever have this wrong. The Revolution is not coming from the bottom up. It is being formed at the top with the acquiescence of an invertebrate Congress.

Will the new financial take-over plan soon become known as the September 20 Revolution? Bush has done nothing short of asking Congress to repeal its Constitutional power of the purse and create a dictator in Treasury Secretary Paulson--handing him unlimited authority to appropriate middle class taxpayers' sweat in order to re-assert--in fact vastly increase--the privilege and control of the wealth-laden classes who find themselves teetering under the weight of failure of their last round of destructive schemes.

The prospects for the majority of the population will remain subordinate to the wealth holders, unless resistance does rise from the bottom up. I don't see it.