> Is what's good for [Goldman Sachs] really good for
> America? Is there truly No Alternative?
That's an honest question, and I'll give you the honest response: the US financial system is having the equivalent of a heart attack. Interbank lending has shut down, and consequently the central banks of the EU and US are swelling their balance sheets, serving as interlenders of last resort.
This is not a psychological crisis or an attack of nerves. Neoliberalism has self-destructed, in a systems crash eerily similar to the one forecast by Hideo Kojima's magnificent and sublime "Metal Gear Solid 4", and is threatening to take all of us with it. To avoid catastrophe, massive public money is needed for a bailout.
Sure, the current bailout sucks. What's likely to happen is that they'll try to drain the ocean of bad debt, instead of recapitalizing the banks (shoring up the dam). So the point should be to hammer out concrete alternatives for Bailouts 2.0 and, likelier than not, 3.0 -- bailouts which should involve, at the very least, taking over the banks and auditing the heck out of them (what used to be called, "expropriating the expropriators").
-- DRR