Bipartisanship?

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-CT) has constantly been in the news lately, but his latest remarks about possibly nationalizing some American banks generated front-page news in The Hartford Courant and The New York Times.

Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, was just one of several prominent officials who have raised the possibility of a bank takeover in recent days. Stocks in major banks such as Bank of America had been beaten down and continued to trade lower when the markets opened Friday, as fears of nationalization hovered.

Dodd told The Courant that his remarks were not intended to advocate nationalization. They were "merely suggesting it was a possibility."

"This idea of nationalizing banks is not comfortable," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). "But I think we've got so many toxic assets spread throughout the banking and financial community, throughout the world, that we're going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago, no one likes. To me, banking and housing are the root cause of this problem. I'm very much afraid any program to salvage the banks is going to require the government... I would not take off the idea of nationalizing the banks."

---- Oh sure, placing banks under ownership and control of government, temporarily (wink wink), is a great idea. The government is good at running things and good at implementing policies on a "temporary" basis.

In the dreams of Karl Marx - "Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly"...

Change you can believe in - are we there yet?

Apparently, for now, the idea of nationalizing banks has been dismissed as absurd - until it's done. And then you will see, socialist management is just as incompetent as capitalist management. Probably because it's the same managers, using the same word list: Room for debate, insolvent, government injected capital, majority stake, last resort, momentum, distinguished economists say ____ (fill in blank), and toxic assets.

Yessiree - let's dump all this salvaged toxin into the cook books of the federal government - we're gonna spin straw into gold and live happily ever after.