Rural Washington says NO to bailout
10/11/2008

October 11, 2008

Rural Washington says NO to the Wall Street bailout; George Soros explains what it means

The Wall Street bailout got a resounding NO from rural Washington.   Although I doubt that most of my Washington neighbors understood that it wasn’t really Wall Street they were bailing out—those suckers had already made their money and walked away; indeed, one of them had become Secretary of the Treasury—it was the rest of us, everyone who had a job or hoped to have a job in the year ahead, we were trying to save.   But bottom line, I really don’t think they cared.  They were, and are, so sick and tired of being manipulated.  Of being ripped off and then having to pay for the crimes of the bastards who ripped them.

 “Let it go down,” they said of the economy.   Let it go down.

 It may have been a case of “cutting off their nose to spite their face,” but nevertheless, they meant it.  The old timers had survived a Depression before.  They remembered how hard it was.  And their attitude was, “You know what?  We can do hard.  As a country, we might learn something from having to do hard again.”

I actually respect where they’re coming from.

On October 10 Bill Moyers interviewed billionaire philanthropist George Soros on his new book, New Paradigms for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means.  Soros gave a clear, concise explanation of how we got into the mess we’re in and straight-forward recommendations for getting out of it:

“Deal with the mortgage problem:  Reduce foreclosures.  Recapitalize the banks.  And then work on a better world order where we work together to resolve problems that confront humanity like global warming.”

 As Soros explained,

“For the last 25 years the motor of the world economy was consumption by the American consumer, who has been spending more than he has been producing.   That motor is finished.  It's run out of — can't continue.  You need a new motor.  And we have a big problem:  global warming.  It requires big investment.  And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.”

(For the complete transcript, visit http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10102008/transcript4.html)