Please see this interview (on video and in transcript) of Howard Zinn discussing the bailout. He confirms my point of view and he is an expert.
Certain grownups keep telling me this is just a market downturn of which we should think nothing. Like that compound fracture in your leg, which is just a scratch, get some sleep and you will have forgotten about it by tomorrow.
Others say that this is the worst crisis since the thirties and that is why we should give more money to the institutions which caused it. Zinn points out that the solution discovered in the thirties was to distribute money elsewhere.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Word.
And did you see that banks like JPMorgan have no intention of easing the credit crisis by lending some of the $25 billion that they received? No, they’re going to use it to acquire more banks and to save it for a rainy day. See article
Good God. I hadn’t seen the article but it doesn’t surprise me at all, at all. I do not think this will make a difference and I want to know how bad it is going to get, how fast. Food is sky high and we are paying more for our retirement plan, which of course feeds the stock market. But this must be just the beginning. I don’t think I am being alarmist, I have seen it happen elsewhere.
Zinn is my father’s generation. He talks about the returning veterans, of whom he was one. The basis of our eventual family prosperity, after years of poverty, was the GI Bill, which got my father through college, and the FHA, which made it possible for us to own a house, which my parents bought in 1947. For people like my parents, with zero assets, these government programs made all the difference.
What worries me today is that we’re looking at a very large population with many older people. The ruthless dumping of boomers from the job market and medical plans, when they are years away from social security and Medicare, is causing lives to fall apart. I’m seeing this all around me now.
And more and more my feeling is that for young people it’s like that Animals song:
It’s a hard world to get a break in/ All the good things have been taken…