It is frightening though not surprising to see the Federal Reserve stepping in these past few days as lender of last resort to credit markets that were freezing up. Two hundred billion dollars! In effect, it is nationalizing the debt instruments so eagerly developed and gulped up by private banks and investor funds. The latest interventions by the Federal Reserve essentially mean that worthless or near-worthless instruments can now be put up as collateral (at face value?) by the banks. I understand that the credit markets needed to be jolted into making liquidities available again, but I fear the consequences of the moves. And I find it tragically maddening, rather than ironic and contradictory (which I find it to be also), that a government hell-bent on privatizing everything from health to education and social security, ends up picking the pockets of the public when there is need to correct the “irrational exuberances” of the private equity markets or ensure private control of energy sources. For the war in Iraq, public money too is just poured out to the tune of almost three trillion dollars into a national professional army *and* almost as vast a privatized military operation to serve (ensure, continue, bolster?) an entirely privatized energy policy. So here we are: robbing the nation and privatizing everything of real value, essential to life, but financing out of the public treasury (actually through indebtedness) the results of gross financial mistakes and foreign adventures that mostly large private interests profit from.