So Nancy Pelosi's To Blame - I Don't Think So

So Nancy Pelosi is to blame. Two-thirds of your party vote against you, instead of on behalf of the best interests of your country, and a simple speech is to blame for the disaster. Judge for yourself. Would this have made you vote against the bailout plan? Or would it (should it) have made you realise the enormity of the mess you'd helped bring about and the responsibility you had to seriously sort it out? As the Obama camp retorted yesterday:

The Obama campaign reacted with irritation. A spokesman for Obama said the Republicans' "angry and hyper-partisan" utterances were exactly why Americans are "disgusted with Washington".

"Now is the time for Democrats and Republicans to join together and act in a way that prevents an economic catastrophe," Obama's camp said.

Yet again, American politics fails at the last hurdle. Sometimes you get the feeling that more countries should follow the British example and extend the summer recess into autumn. At times like these, oversight by the legislature can lead to monumental political blunders. No. I'm not saying there's any alternative to a parliamentary democracy. But you sometimes wonder if we shouldn't insist that our parliamentarians live more like hermits, in wonderful isolation not from each other - nor even from their voters - but rather from everything and anything that claims to represent the capitalist flavour of the free market.

As Andrew Regan on Bloggers4Labour points out:

Free markets do not equal Capitalism, and if there's ever to be a viable Socialism - unencumbered by nationalism and corruption - markets will be free there too, which is identical to saying that economic and social interactions between equal (I know, but read on) individuals will be unrestricted, as they must be in a (I know, but read on) democracy. In practice, Capitalism operates in polities where political and economic rights are unfairly allocated, as they have been for centuries, and where the powerful owe their success to layer upon layer of theft, patronage, and downright luck. The mass of the population have little practical economic freedom, and even relatively benign Governments/States have little to offer.

Which doesn't sound incredibly different from what Pelosi had to say yesterday:

Madam speaker, when was the last time anyone ever asked you for $700 billion? It’s a staggering figure. And many questions have arisen from that request. And we have been hearing, I think, a very informed debate on all sides — of — of this issue here today. I’m proud of the debate.

$700 billion. A staggering number. But only a part of the cost of the failed Bush economic policies to our country. Policies that were built on budget recklessness. When President Bush took office, he inherited President Clinton’s surpluses — four years in a row, budget surpluses, on a trajectory of $5.6 trillion in surplus. And with his reckless economic policies, within two years, he had turned that around.

And now eight years later, the foundation of that fiscal irresponsibility, combined with an anything goes economic policy, has taken us to where we are today. They claim to be free market advocates, when it’s really an anything goes mentality. No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute, and the taxpayer will bail you out.

Those days are over. The party is over in that respect. Democrats believe in a free market. We know that it can create jobs, it can create wealth, it can create many good things in our economy. But in this case, in its unbridled form, as encouraged, supported, by the Republicans — some in the Republican Party, not all — it has created not jobs, not capital, it has created chaos.

After the dreadful events of the past year and in the light of what now may very well happen over the next, on either side of the divide which is an ocean that separates us, perhaps not so very much will soon divide us at all.