> all the more so since they have looted
> the national treasury and ensured that a Dem president will have very
> little wiggle room for discretionary spending.
Well, my guess is that the scale of the crisis is such that we're not likely to see a replay of the 1990s, when bond traders famously vetoed Clinton's meager stimulus package. Neoliberalism has done an amazing job of ripping its own heart out, to the point that the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street had to crawl, hats in hand, for a $700 billion bailout from Uncle Sam and a roughly $1 trillion bailout from the EU countries - and we're only in the initial phase of the crisis. More bailouts will be needed. So massive government spending is back on the agenda.
The deeper issue here is that the multipolar world everyone knew was sort of coming, maybe 10 or 15 years in the future, has arrived early. To make a long story short, the US can't be the consumer of the world anymore, the EU and East Asia need to move to Euro/Asiakeynesianism. The EU has already torn up the Maastricht restrictions in order to finance its bank bailout, but need to do more to help Eastern Europe and Turkey; China and Japan need to help out their SE Asian neighbors. Russia is providing assistance to Belarus and will hopefully do what it can to help out its Central Asian neighbors. This is also a golden opportunity for Latin America to delink from US neoliberalism and EU euroliberalism, and accelerate its regional integration. I'm pretty sure this is what the finance ministers of ASEM are discussing at this very moment...
-- DRR