I implied a few weeks ago that the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was just the beginning (my post was entitled "Bush’s punks get ready for a government takeover of the housing debt market"), and now we are seeing what further plans the Bush regime has to help their Wall Street cronies–they are now looking for Congressional approval to stage a further $700 billion bailout of financial institutions.  Not a takeover of these troubled institutions, mind you–just an enormous taking off their hands of troubled assets.

Clearly this represents another noxious case of "privatize the profit, socialize the debt," letting the financial institutions retain control of their valuable assets while dumping the troubled or worthless ones on taxpayers.  Of course, any perceptive observer has long understood the current administration to have had tendencies toward communism, which is probably the best description of the type of system America is moving towards.

But beyond that, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (the economist who warned the nation that Bush’s proposed tax cuts in 2001 were a bad idea) has looked at the details of the $700 billion proposal and doesn’t like them.  Read his whole post and let him explain why the proposal has "nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving."