How to solve an economic crisis brought about by too much debt -

[fpb]

- get every major economy in the world to indulge in an unprecedented debit-based spending spree.

Comments

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

That's a good and terribly insightful point (or pair of points, really). Regarding the latter, though -- I don't think it's so much that the party system brands people with the follower's mentality as that it works to exclude those who don't have it.

This was illustrated rather clearly during the last election cycle: early on, when Obama and McCain each showed signs that they might have some small measure of leadership potential, large factions within both parties rather nakedly attempted to push them out.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am convinced, following Matt Towery, that McCain was deliberately sabotaged by the Republican establishment exactly because he had this funny habit of thinking with his own head. And when he actually called in - instead of Mitt "The Man of A Thousand Faces" Romney, the establishment blue-eyed boy - a woman who had actually stormed the height of her local party by driving out the old sleazy deal-makers, that was it. The Republican establishment was very willing to spend one or two terms in opposition, so long as they REMAINED the Republican establishment, rather than risk the success of two insurgents, that would risk a serious clean-up of the party. Even my mother, who hates Bush II with a passion, cannot understand why Lehmann Brothers was allowed to go to the wall. I would not be surprised if the answer turned out to be: to sabotage McCain's campaign - which had caught up with Obama by then, and which never recovered from that blow.