Ok. First, I'd like to point you to this
really excellent article in the Rolling Stone. It does a pretty good job of explaining the causes of the crisis and the major problems with the current efforts to stop it. People are spending days on the senate floor debating projects that cost millions while the fed is performing trillions of dollars of unexamined transactions behind a smokescreen.
What should be done about it?
First, do you know what the Glass-Steagall act is? If you don't, go learn about it. It's really important. It was an act put in place to prevent exactly what is happening now. And then it was dismantled throughout the 80s and 90s. This dismantling is one of the primary reasons for the current economic crisis... both its direct effects and the way it begat a culture of deregulation.
This is one of the things the New Deal was about, the part that everyone seems to be willfully forgetting right now: it was about placing restrictions on banks to prevent them from doing the same goddam things they'd done in the 20s... to stop out-of-control speculation.
If you know anything about this crisis, you know that out of control speculation, corporate greed, and irresponsible levels of leverage are a direct, traceable, and primary cause. Most of the things that caused this crisis were ILLEGAL from the 30s to the 80s, when big business started to steadily purchase people on both sides of the aisle in Washington, instead of focusing primarily on the Republicans.
So the first thing we need to do is get the legal protections back... the things that prevented banks from playing dice with invisible money. We need all those laws back, and we need letters stamped over the new legislation that says, really clearly "The Economic Crisis That Started in '09 Was A Direct Result of the First Time We Got Rid of These Rules." so that the next time some idiot whinges about the free market we can jam these laws down his esophagus. Sorry. I'm just a bit on edge.
After we get these laws back, the next thing we have to do is change the way the Fed works. Right now, the fed is giving trillions of dollars worth of cash and loans to random people all the time, and no one in goverment or in the public is allowed to ask to whom they're giving this money or why. I can't comprehend how this can be the case, or why it's never been changed before, but it has a bigger impact on our economy than a dozen stimulus bills. Still, people are going to keep lying about mag-lev trains and whining about the unnecessary nature of health care until the cows come home, because they aren't thinking... because they've been trained by their party that the fed and the corporations are sacrosanct, and that the new deal failed, and that what we really need is another world war. Yeah, that'll fix us right up.
