Naomi Klein

"...what’s so stunning about this... is that here you have a crisis that everyone seems to agree is borne of deregulation, and they’re actually calling for more deregulation. We have a situation where the debt is exploding on American taxpayers, and they want to suspend corporate taxes, which is actually what might defray some of those costs from regular taxpayers. So it’s an incredible display of opportunism. And this is what I mean by stage two of the shock doctrine. The first stage is just the bailout, but the second stage are all of these radical reforms that are going to be invoked in the name of the crisis that the bailout is creating, whether it’s pushed through right now or whether it’s pushed through later."

Update Sept. 27: Fortunately, enough in the senate/house of reps have caughten on to the ruse to cause serious delays/kerfuffles. Amazingly, it's a clutch of hard-core Republicans that are providing the thorniest resistance. And Democrats, who might have caved in, don't want to be left holding the skunk. Seems Paulson's mistake was to edit the bill down to three pages: as a result, the infamous Section 8 became all-apparent. Harper up here is much slicker: he would have buried that nasty provision in a omnibus bill of 47 pages and tried to ram it through unnoticed (as he did with that censorship law). Let's hold our collective breaths, cross fingers...

Here though, is another discussion that suggests that Republican ideology in the House blocked what seems a more plausible proposal put forward by the Democrats, along the lines of a successful government bailout in Sweden in the early 1990's... and that it might ultimately plunge the country into a '30s style depression.

Clearly, I have a lot more authority when I discuss iambic pentameter.

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