The indispensable Glenn Greenwald on how the bailout follows 10 normal principles for how government functions:

(1) Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency…

(4) The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable….

(6) The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest. Hank Paulson let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt while intervening to save AIG, only for it to be revealed after the fact that Goldman Sachs — Paulson’s career-long firm of which he was Chairman until just a couple years ago — would have lost $20 billion had AIG failed.

…And on the failure of the bill to pass the House:

What seemed to happen is that enough members were afraid of the extreme public anger against this bailout bill and petrified of what it would do to their future job security. That’s a good thing — it’s called responsiveness and accountability.

As I wrote earlier, something needs to be done. Fortunately, a flawed bill or no bill is not the only choice, though no doubt it will be framed that way. Anyway, the rest of Mr. Greenwald’s piece is insightful, as usual.

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