It’s finally begun: the socialization of the American economy. However, unlike many pundits on Fox News worried, it is happening at the hands of our current lame-duck administration as it fumbles through its last few months in office. The new plan for the American economic bailout package has shifted its focus from buying out the bad debt from banks to simply buying pieces of the banks to encourage them to restart normal lending behavior. While students can appreciate that the government is trying to encourage specific types of lending, such as student loans, allowing the government to be in charge of the World’s largest financial institutions worries surprisingly few. In fact, many Wall Street experts believe that this intervention represents a more efficient move to fix the economy.

While experts begin to applaud the change in tactics, the wisdom of giving ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money to the same corporations that landed the American economy in this mess seems limited at best. A staunch economic conservative should not agree with buying off bad debt to help financial institutions for various reasons. If they could stomach that however, the idea of giving firms engaged in perverse market behavior money with minimum strings attached and the ability to continue running their business as usual has to induce suicidal behavior.

The Bush administration must have an ulterior motive that they are not disclosing. While various other moves seemed misguided in the past, there are clear undercurrents of insidiousness in these efforts to jumpstart the economy. The link that the White House hopes we will miss is the recent Supreme Court ruling to allow the Navy to continue using sonar in its sub-hunting tests in California. Justice Roberts’ decision that the lower federal courts over-stepped their bounds in protecting the brains of endangered whales reportedly harmed by the tests is an obvious order from his handlers in the Oval Office. The facts all point to Bush using the naval tests as part of the construction of a sub-sea storage facility to store all of the money that he is laundering through these heinously bad banks. When all of the money disappears in new economic disasters this January, don’t be surprised. It won’t be found again, but there will be a definite addition built on the Crawford, Texas, Bush Ranch. Unless of course the Taliban somehow got their hands on some nuclear powered submarines, because then all of this sub-hunting is really going to come in handy.

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