Hey Brynn, I'm not for these companies getting off at all. But I'm also against paying off other people's credit card debt.

Wrong again.

Banks are the problem, nationalizing them is is the solution.

The Carter/Reagan/Clinton/Bush administrations deregulated banking and financial and rich speculators system made billions from predatory loans, a change in bankruptcy rules thoughtfully provide them hustlers from both parties like Joe Biden, the export of jobs with the connivance of the Carter/Reagan/Clinton/Bush administrations and twenty five years of tax cuts for the rich. They and they alone are responsible for this crisis and the bailout is an attempt to make us cover their losses.

Essentially the bailout is an example of Reaganite Thatcherite voodoo economics. Their economic game plan consists of nationalizing the debt of profiteering speculators and making us pay if off while allowing those same profiteers unlimited scope for theft of our assets through the mechanism of predatory banking and financial practices. The Democrats plan only differs from Bushes slightly. It offers a few sops to working people to distract them from the most colossal and incredibly callous case of government theft in history.

What the bailout, with or without the petty changes proposed by Pelosi means in real life is several decades of even more austerity for working people, an even greater loss in our standard of living, the end of any chance of needed social programs like socialized medicine and even more cuts in infrastructure (dams, bridges, levees), fewer libraries, hospitals, schools, scholarships and more tent cities which may well become known either as Obamavilles or McCities.

Since it’s improbable that working people are going to accept that it’ll mean more repressive measures like the Paytriot act, attacks on unions and FISA like attacks on the Bill of Rights. We’ll all live in Denver or St. Paul soon.

The solution is obvious. Nationalize the banking, financial and insurance industries without compensation to stockholders and run them with democratically bodies (the real kind, not the Obama, Biden kind).

That should be combined with a 10 year moratorium on foreclosures, garnishments and repos plus the abrogation of predatory mortgagees and credit card rates, which can easily (if there's no profiteering involved) be rolled back to one or two percent to cover administering them.

The Republicans want a bailout. The Democrats will basically, after much handwringing, go along with it. That’s another reason, if any was need for us vote for the union led and financed US Labor Party if it makes it past the anti-democratic roadblocks put up by the Democrats (sic). If not vote for socialist or communist candidates as a protest or join the scores of millions who sit it out because they’re smart enough to refuse to vote for the lesser bigot, the lesser warmonger or the lesser evil. And don’t forget to vote against all the anti-GLBT referenda and initiatives. Help build a GLBT left to get us out of this mess.

Bo, the good news is that you have defended your ideas with logical examples and knowledge. The bad news is that the chance of invading and conquering the rusty ideas of "he who cannot punctuate" mirrors our success at Tora Bora.

*He will not answer an economic question as he does not know how to.* Simply has no argument other than his voting commercial among other things such as "Joining people at the hip in drag." He obtains great satisfaction from getting us to respond to him, and I kind of think of it as Charity.

I have been in two unions beginning when I was 16 and through my college years, but that did not prepare me for reality. I paid my dues and they were happy to take them. Where they went I do not know, but I have never seen a pension statement for me.

I am going to say it: Unions have a fatal flaw and it is why they are dieing. They stifle innovation in the workplace and allow people to stay in a position when they no longer wish to learn new ways of accomplishing old tasks.

"Hey, if I do that it might cost one of my Brothers a job."

So they carry wooden ladders that require two people to carry them rather than an aluminum one that one person can carry.

I have done many trade shows at McCormick Place and other venues around the United States. I was only ever viewed as walking money by the unions who typically wanted a four hour minimum for the carpenter($95.00 per hour)who did not know how to do anything to set up glass display fixtures. I would be doing all the work and the carpenter would be handing me sheets of glass. My dad (God rest him) would come in to help me set up. He spent 50 years in the railroad union and he knew BS when he saw it.

If an "exhibitor" complained it was not unheard of to have a fork lift "accidentally" run through your booth filled with merchandise. The crew bosses were spending a great amount of time talking with shaved headed guys named "Vinnie." Without telling me, dad went and had a chat with the shop steward, and in future we at least got a carpenter's union member who knew how to set up the type of display fixtures we used.

On one occasion (at frustration over stupidity) I sang "Look for the Union Label" to an electrician. :)

Finally, the cost, theft and damage caused by them (and a near death ulcer attack) drove me out of McCormick Place and in to a permanent non union showroom in the Merchandise Mart. Since the 1930's when Curly Humphreys stumbled upon the value of union pension funds in Chicago there has been corruption in unions. It is much less today than it has ever been. Some poor Socialists support those who would cheat them. Some unions would rather have the factory go out of business than tell their members they have to go back to school.

Bo as long as you equate the pettifogging corruption of a few union leaders to the depraved speculators who’ve ruined our economy and the politicians who service them I’ll continue to say you’re dead wrong. There is no comparison with the corruption of genocidal leaders like LBJ and Nixon, Clinton and Bush. The unions are not at all like the Democrats. Unions fight daily for equality on the job. The Democrats, your, and not just Frank, but most Democrats gutted ENDA. And in the process they deliberately tried, and with some success, to divide the LGBT communities.

AS for the Labor Party it’s not going to play much of a role because much of it’s progress has been held back by Sweeney and other AFL-CIO bureaucrats who want us, as you do, to vote FOR bigotry, war and economic collapse even though they, like you, say they’re against those things.

I live in Nevada and have the privilege of voting for “none of the above candidates” which is what I’ll do. I don’t feel compelled to vote for a candidate just because they’ll win. But I will say that if Obama wins and has to prosecute an unwinnable war while the economy tanks he’ll be Nixon Redux and Hoover Redux. It will help dismantle the two parties of war and economic chaos whose leaders have never stopped pandering to bigots. I can’t imagine why anyone could like that enough to vote for it.

I think it’s excellent for the left and minorities to run independent campaigns as an educational tool, but this is not a democracy and it will not be changed in the voting booth. It will be changed when unions, ourselves, women, African Americans and immigrants and other build movements massive enough and militant enough to get our way. Especially unions. Management types like to belittle working people and our unions but unions are the heavy infantry of social change.

If, and its not clear yet, this crisis matures into a repeat of the Great Depression that will become crystal clear. Unions are our only guarantee of prosperity because in a very real the Great Depression never ended; it just got hidden behind the massive spending of the military industrial complex. That’s the real reason for Korea, the Cold War, Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq. They keep retargeting but they keep fighting.

BTW the stats you cited about SEIU are one of the reasons why Andy Stern's little empire is crumbling. This is a bad time to be out of a job, and hopefully he'll be able to find that our first hand.

No we don't agree at all. Your question only proves that your views are profoundly ahistoric. They’re a variant of the flat-earth thinking that dismisses social context. It ignores our response to the class war being waged against us by corporate rich. In discussion of politics and economics change is the constant and nothing is static.

Your attempt to equate a little minor corruption in the unions, or the political timidity of Sweeney with the depravity of the war makers, bigots and economic predators of the party that you support is ridiculous. You can’t get away with saying that they’re even remotely on the same scale, even as an excuse to throw up you hands and supinely vote for the lesser warmonger, the lesser bigot or the lesser pet of Wall Street, whether you choice is McCain or Obama.

The opinions of right-wingers who try to defuse the defense of working people agaisnt the attacks on our standard of living is a great comfort to the speculators and the DC politicians who service them while screwing screw us. Clinton was expert at it and Obama is a Clinton clone. The fondest hope of opportunist hustlers like Obama and McCain is that will throw up their hands and step aside, refusing to take sides when push comes to shove.

Once again, let me offer to email you a list of books about unions, and the radical and often revolutionary history of the US. You need a crash course in how the big questions get settled.

I make that offer to help dispel some of your cynicism and pessimism. It’s unwarranted. If you knew anything at all about the history of social change you’d know that as the shock of collapse or oppression wears thin people always get very radical. The institutions they’ve built to defend themselves, whether it’s the Minutemen militia of 1776, the Union Army or the AFL-CIO then become instruments for fundamental social change. That view coupled with the kind of program I outlined is a way to organize working people that will bring matters to a head.

If this crisis matures into a repeat of the Great Depression, or more accurately, a continuation of it some people are going to be scared stiff. The contest for power between working people and the banking, financial and political vermin who run this country will be shocking and mysterious to them. But, as you can see from the comments on this subject and the reaction of working people throughout the US lots and lots of us are looking forward to a time when the class war will not be so one sided.