Price and Miller voted for the bailout plan

David Price and Brad Miller are among those who voted for the failed bailout bill, which I have not been able to find on the Library of Congress website so far.  Whether that plan would have reduced the economic crisis or not, I think it is a case of the government trying to take from working people to give to the rich, and that can't be allowed to stand.  Many on the right voted against it, for the wrong reasons, while supposedly pro-"middle class" and working family Democrats supported it.  Apparently foreign pundits are upset that the bailout didn't go through and for days the BBC has been asking whether the great "free market" is dead and guests bring up the old line about capitalism being the best system ever invented and Tuesday NPR started sounding like that.  I just don't get it. It's as if they have forgotten that recurring crises or "market corrections" are an inevitable part of capitalism and they talk like something has changed forever.  If capitalism continues, I predict that it won't be very many decades before this economic neoliberalism ("market fundamentalism") returns in a new guise, assuming it is dying now. 

 

Then there are the Republicans who talk about the "slippery slope to socialism" and even Triangle Free Press mentioned "Wall Street Socialism" in a headline recently, which taints socialism with the connotation of welfare for corporations.  Even if the government takes over these financial companies, that is not in the least socialism. European countries, Venezuela, and Bolivia, among others, have nationalized companies, but they are still completely capitalist.  It would be a good reward for the greedy financiers (and oil executives) if their companies were nationalized and the profits put in the treasury, but it is still capitalism if the surplus value, value beyond what it takes to stay in business and created by the labor of the working class, goes to the capitalist class and the capitalist parties run the government.