Clean them all out, every stinking one

James K. Galbraith explains the simple premise behind his new book, The Predator State, which sounds like a worthy progeny to his famous father’s classic, The New Industrial State:

It has become clear that, if the Republicans had their way, this election would not be about issues . It would be about anything else: personalities, associations, the politics of fear, and the life history of a long-ago prisoner of war.

But fate blew McCain's cover. On the morning that Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch fell, John McCain spoke the immortal words of Herbert Hoover: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong" . . . . The Dow Jones average fell 504 points that day. As stocks crashed, suddenly people remembered that modern markets cannot exist without a cop on the beat. . . . Without regulation, predators take over, and when they do, trust eventually collapses. Every important market is in peril now, precisely because of the predators in power these past eight years. . . .

There you have it. Without regulation, the guys who would be good, for fear of falling behind, get dragged into the practices of the predators, the businesses without scruples. And then it all falls down: trust in making investments dies, credit dries up, consumers go into a shell, businesses cannot sell anything. In a modern economy, it is trust that creates wealth – trust that the economic transaction you decide to enter into – a purchase, an investment, choosing a job -- will have the value you hoped for subject to the risks you understood. It is government establishing basic rules of the road that keep the predators out, that allows trust to form and become a reality and more than an illusion.

Galbraith further explains why McCain inherently can solve nothing:

This is McCain's deeper problem. If he is elected, under his leadership, trust cannot be restored. No one with his philosophy or record can do that. Restoring trust requires a government of trustworthy people. Team McCain doesn't have any. . . .
And so the choice in this election is well-defined. One party believes that the government serves no public purpose. The other believes that it must. One party has turned the government over to lobbies, to cronies and to big donors. The other is beginning to realize that a real government must be rebuilt. One party would keep the same crowd in office; the other would have to begin by clearing them out. No one can say there is no difference between the parties this year, and the basic issue in this election is really just as simple as that.

And this is just the economy. Think how much trust in America McCain can restore throughout the rest of the world.