reading between the doggones, betchas, and bless yer hearts

The problem with politicians who believe that government can't possibly work for the people is that when they take office they do everything they can to fulfill that prophecy. Just think Katrina.

So when Sarah Palin said on Thursday evening in her debate with Senator Biden, "Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem," it sent chills down my spine. Because if we look back at the last three Republican administrations and a possible McCain/Palin administration, she's right.

Steven Labaton writes in today's New York Times about a decision taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004, under pressure from top investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs), to relax regulations on debt to capital ratios which would allow those same banks to 'leverage up' and free up billions of dollars to invest in mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps and other complex derivatives, and that they be allowed to self-regulate these activities. Ya know, get government out of the way.

When have we heard this before? Ah yes, 1999. As governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed a law enabling most major industrial polluters to audit their own pollution records, provided they reported them, in exchange for which there would be absolute protection from public disclosure. He also championed tort reform which made it more difficult for individual citizens to sue these companies.(1)

In the end, investment banks collapsed under the weight of their own debt and Texas continued to lead the nation in air pollution volume.

Whether it's through deregulation, lax oversight, incompetent agency managers, or managers who lobbied for the very industries they now regulate, the Bush Administration followed the pattern set in Texas, and has, in its own circular logic, proven the theory of ineffective government.

Now, in the bitterest of ironies, it is the government that is called on to bail out one of the most deregulated and unsupervised industries. And thanks to Bush, the effort is lead by one of the bank chiefs who pressured the SEC to relax the rules on capital holdings in the first place, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO, Henry Paulson. And no one believes he can do it well, because no one trusts the government to do anything right.

So where do we go from here?

We can follow Sarah Palin's lead, if we believe government is never the solution. If we want to continue to bail out reckless industry titans, watch our social security go the way of our 401(k)s through privatization, our kids' toys continue to be coated in lead paint, our school cafeterias continue to receive the poorest quality meats from our nation's grossly under-supervised meat processing plants; if we want to no longer trust the drinking water that comes out of our taps or trust that the bridges we drive over won't collapse, by all means, we should vote for the ticket that doesn't believe that government matters.

In a more amusing irony, Governor Palin said in her closing statement, "It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We... have to fight for it and protect it, ... or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."

Ronald Reagan was warning against the socialist threat of Medicare, a government program now widely considered to be, along with Social Security, the third rail of government.(2) Why? Because they provide real solutions for real Americans.

(1) www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=670 and www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/jun/16/features.magazine57
(2) www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04herbert.html?ref=opinion