General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Iceland Was Right, We Were Wrong: The IMF [View all]cprise
(8,445 posts)...over to money and property. They are still all that matter, unfortunately.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think you can ditch the machinery of monetary capital (using the playbook of market fundamentalists, no less) without having first built up political capital to cover the profound breach in trust. Letting all the banks fail would literally leave us with no way to function on a day to day basis. Perhaps that appeals to some DUers as a reverse form of Thatcher's "shock therapy". I call it a road to one of the nastier forms of fascism because that's how people would react to the shock.
I'm not saying that rescuing banks is *preferable* to protecting people's homes or bailing them out. But once a nation has gone down the neoliberal road that we have, there's no way to tear the banker's interests away from the average person on the street -- Not when those people have forgotten how to function locally or even *like* each other.
Any expectation that we can write a last-minute fix into law to stanch the societal damage that both Republicans and 'New Democrats' have abetted strikes me as much more problematic than a realization that by 2007 things had already gone way too far. You would be writing the laws for a public that is psychologically unequipped to lend it any credibility.