Where is their sacrifice, their solidarity, their partriotism?
Their bloody ordinary common sense?! Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The real culprits are sitting pretty on their Billions whilst the politicians are supposed to clean up their mess for them. No wonder they're not going about that task with a lot of enthusiasm - why take the consequences for other people's crass greed?
I suspect that Plan B was intended as the last installment of classic shock capitalism, except that it failed. Goldman has been a beneficiary so far. If the speculation about the need to recapitalize the Fed is correct perhaps doing that is seen as covering the tracks for what has been done to date. Then Paulson can exit and the problem falls to the next administration.
The dissident Republicans are complaining that this was just a gift to those who brought us the calamity. It is that and it could also be the get away vehicle for the actual heist, which consisted of giving most of the Feds assets to AIG to protect Goldman, keeping bad assets from Merril to protect B of A etc. etc. to keep collapse at bay till after the election.
It is unclear how the FDIC has managed to dispose of the toxic waste from its most recent aquisitions without using up its ~$70 billion reserve. Perhaps it can't manage and it needs to be re-capitalized also. In other words, the Fed and FDIC may be out of bullets leading up to the election.
By solving the problems of credit availability by creating new institutions that could supply necessary credit, the existing system could be allowed to unwind itself while what is left of the real economy continues to function. This would be opposed. It would be like a hostage taker releasing all his hostages. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
- Edmund Burke, philosophical founder of Anglo-American conservatism. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
