As the US Congress prepares to vote on the trillion-dollar Paulson bailout of Wall Street, William Greider writing in The Nation predicts that the fallout of the deal “has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.”

“Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough–using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.”

Read the full story here.