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UPDATE (9-21-2008):

NEW YORK TIMES financial columnists Floyd Norris and Gretchen Morgenson discussed what bailouts entail. Morgenson said:

“The ugly thing about this is privatizing gains and socializing losses. So when things are going well, the managements make out, the shareholders make out, the counterparties are fine. All the private sector people do well. But when something goes wrong, when decisions are made that turn out to be bad decisions, the U.S. taxpayer has to take on the problem. And there’s something very wrong about that.”

(SOURCE)

Amy Goodman’s latest column, “Wall Street Socialists,” exposes the hypocrisy of the wealthy elite classes of this land of so-called equality.

The financial crisis gripping the U.S. has the largest banks and insurance companies begging for massive government bailouts. The banking, investment, finance and insurance industries, long the foes of taxation, now need money from working-class taxpayers to stay alive. Taxpayers should be in the driver’s seat now. Instead, decisions that will cost people for decades are being made behind closed doors, by the wealthy, by the regulators and by those they have failed to regulate.

If I wanted a bailout from my present formidable credit debt crisis, I cannot ask for taxpayer funds because I am not as important or valuable as AIG, Lehman Brothers, or Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Even though the risky practices those financial giants were practicing was of the same character as that of my own, in the over-reliance upon credit which the future cannot guarantee my own ability to pay back.

And so, out of one side of their mouths, wealthy bankers, neo-conservatives, and the right-leaning talk radio blatherers rail against “socialized medicine” (i.e, a universal right to health care) and seek to profit from a privatization of social security; they fear and malign all forms of their Red Herring, State Sponsored Socialism. Out of the other, those very same wealthy bankers accept the anti-capitalist practice of government bail-outs at tax-payer expense, and are justified in this un-free-market practice by neocon Republican strategists and their mouthpieces in the media.
I’m sick of this rank hypocrisy. Please give me the same consideration afforded the fat-cat bankers, and bail me out of the debt I got myself into. Or else treat the billionaire golden-parachutists just like me, and let them sink or swim.
Survival of the fittest as an economic doctrine is called “capitalism;” don’t be a socialist and bail the rich out of trouble, and to the middle class and poorer classes turn back into a capitalist!