Our overweening financial hegemony is a thing of the past, and the value of the dollar is quickly following. If Paulson wanted to save Wall Street, he could have made a good start during the decades he spent there by firing his lobbyists. But that was never what he wanted. What he has always wanted is the utter freedom to act recklessly and have the taxpayer pick up the tab. And it’s a last gift that he wants to leave his friends before he leaves office with Bush.
So here is an idea or two on how we might solve the problem of the Wall Street-Washington ‘elite’, as they so nauseatingly like to think of themselves, who have done us so much damage.
First, abandon Washington. Let it return to the swamp from which it arose or turn it into an extension of the Smithsonian. Help to balance the budget by keeping all congressmen and senators home in the districts that elected them. Their constituents will have daily contact with them, making sure the elected ‘elites’ remember who brought them. The elected will be given a budget to maintain local offices, their staffs and for limited travel. All communication will be carried out by teleconferencing and other nifty 21st century techniques currently used by many organizations. One of the numerous benefits of this plan is that the lives of lobbyists will become significantly more difficult.
Second, ban the appearance on national airwaves of any expert, pundit, or talking head living in the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C. We don’t need to hear from even one more political analyst from NYU, economics professor from Yale or China expert from Columbia. We don’t need Sally Quinn’s fatuous Washington gossip or Brian Williams’s intense eyebrows. Since they only listen to each other, being ‘elites’ and all, not one of them has had an original thought or creative idea in years.
The people who are capable of a realistic sense of the health and well being of the country live inside the country, not on the Atlantic edge. We should get our economics analysis from a professor at the University of Iowa, our assessment of the South Ossetia situation from an unbiased analyst from the University of Minnesota, a discussion of the real meaning of the Wall Street fraud scandal from someone at, say, the University of Oregon. You get the idea.
With an unknown number of Henry Paulsons running amok through the East Coast government and media, its time we shifted our class of experts far away from their old geographic comfort zone.
Send an email to your senators and congressman now. Go to http://www.congress.org for easy access. Say it in small words that they will understand. No Bail Out! No Paulson Railroad!
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