The problem is that the market crisis is so complex and far-reaching that it defies traditional partisan scripts.  For example, there's been a lot of faux-distress talk about "socialism."  All of these pure conservative types squawking about socialist bailouts and government ownership of capital, boo hoo hoo.  Please.  The super-elite federal politicians who have been running our country for the last few decades are all capitalists in the extreme.  Let's not forget that both parties are littered with corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and former/future CEOs.  No one in this whole mess actually wants government ownership of vast swaths of capital assets.  The elite from both parties have done quite well for themselves operating the system as it is now, which consists of a steadily-growing federal budget, its companion cash-flow for big business insiders, and the incumbent re-election racket that keeps the whole thing churning.  The US government doesn't need the headache of owning stuff outright.  It's much easier to just keep the federal spending train going through private contracts in the military and service budgets.  So all of this hand-wringing about socialism is crap.  Aside from Ron Paul and like-minded consistent libertarians, where have these real small-government conservatives been as we poured trillions upon trillions into expanding our military all over the globe (and that's before the current Mesopotamian occupations)? Bloated government is bloated government, and the distinction between owning and renting doesn't make much difference in the long run, if the whole pie is expanding anyway.

The brute fact is that the concentration of economic power, a steady American trend since the mid-1970s, has resulted in a small cadre of financial elites controlling the general shape of our entire economy and society.  This is not just a temporary "bad paper" issue, as many would have us believe.  This is not just some bad mortgages that need to be unclogged from the financial system, as President Bush phrased it in his address the other night.  If it hadn't been sub-prime mortgages, the financial elite would have found some other way to siphon money away from workers.  This is not about any particular bad investments that can just be cleaned out so that the market gets back to 'normal.'  This is about power.  Regular working people are completely powerless, in that they have no basic ability to control the contours of their own lives.  We are dependent on the corporate world for our jobs, services, and almost everything else. Even though we work longer hours, commute further, and improve our productivity, our wages stay flat and the rewards of growth are siphoned off and filtered upwards.  Our retirement funds, if we have any, are given over to investment companies, and we just hope that they don't gamble it all away.  If we have health care, it's only at the pleasure of our employers, and our paycheck contributions continue to soar as glorious free-market costs spiral out of control. We don't grow our own food or manufacture our own products locally any more, so we're at the mercy of long supply-chains and the global economy's ability to continue to find cheap labor and cheap transport (the latter being a quickly-disappearing feature).  

All through our lives, we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control: big corporations, big governments, huge anonymous markets, international currency exchange rate, etc.  So while we want to stick it to those greedy Wall Street fat cats who made all of these bad decisions, we're in the unenviable position of also being cripplingly dependent on those same fat cats for our jobs, our products, our retirement money, and any small business capital we might need.  Regular people's lives have been so absorbed into the corporate/finance matrix that we can't stick it to 'those guys' without bankrupting ourselves. 

This is what concentration of power is all about.  It's not about inequality per se.  Theoretically, a society could have vast disparities in wealth and still not be unjust, provided that people at the bottom still had power to control their own lives.  As Cicero noted in the greatest political statement of all time, "freedom is participation in power."  But in practice, an unequal society becomes unjust when the people at the top control every meaningful aspect of life for the people at the bottom.  And that's what we have in America right now.  More and more families are literally powerless, and the results run the gamut from anti-immigrant rage to hyper-escapist entertainment to chronic obesity.  As control over things that really matter slips from our grasp (things like the dignity of work, the balance between labor and leisure, or the natural beauty of our surroundings), we retreat to the subjective realities of fantasy and ideology.  

So if our national 'leaders' get around to rescuing the financial world temporarily, and even if the terms of the bailout are favorable to the American taxpayers, the overall structure of concentrated power will have changed not one iota.  If the US government manages to get back a few billion bucks for American families, we will still be stuck with a general systems breakdown of epic proportion. In the bigger picture, the current financial meltdown is just one ring of failure within a set of concentric circles of collapse, a topic which we'll get to next time.