Do Americans understand that WE are going to pay the bill for this?

Imagine getting invited to dinner by someone very wealthy, who selects the nicest, most pricey restaurant in town. You have a delicious, beautifully-prepared and presented dinner, thinking how nice it is that this person chose YOU to invite to dinner. Then, when the check comes, your dining companion pushes the check over to you and says, "You didn't REALLY think I was going to foot the bill for this, did you?" -- and walks out the front door.

That's what's happened to the American taxpayer this week, as the government bails out AIG, and is now preparing to buy up the banking industry's bad debt, along with bailing out the Big Three automakers, whose short-term greed had them cranking out SUVs even as fuel prices rose.

Isn't it funny how Republicans are all about accountability and the notion that actions have consequences -- when the misfortune falls upon the poor and the sick and the middle class? But then when the so-called financial whizzes push their companies to the brink of bankrupcy or the world to the bring of global economic collapse, it's open the wallet and "How much do you want, sir?"

How often have we heard that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare? How often have we heard that we can't afford schools, roads, and investment in research? How often have we heard Republicans screaming that we can't afford universal health care, or that single-payer coverage is "socialized medicine"? Can we please stop the "socialized medicine" meme, now that the government has had to take over companies buffeted by the so-called "free market"? Today in my local newspaper, an ignorant moron had a letter printed bemoaning the tax burden on the middle class that goes to pay for the poor. Has this guy been living on Neptune? Or does he think that the executives from AIG and Merrill Lynch and WaMu and other companies are poor people?

For nearly thirty years, Republicans have equated "government spending" with "welfare." But by "welfare", they mean payments to help poor people keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. But when it comes to corporate welfare, well, that's a necessary cost. And Americans have bought it, hook, line and sinker. The increasing powerlessness of working people to the benefit of those who run these companies into the ground has us continually looking down the ladder. The question now is whether, now that the layoffs and the foreclosures and the gutting of 401(k) balances and pensions are hitting the middle class, if they're going to wake up, or if they're going to buy this nonsense that John McCain, a man who never met a regulation he didn't want to gut entirely, is somehow an agent of accountability and responsibility in corporate America.