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Socialism is better than
capitalism. So say 20 percent of Americans, and another 27 percent say
they can't say which is better, according to an April 9 Rasmussen poll.

There's hope.

When
you consider that virtually no newspaper, broadcaster, well-funded
think tank, teacher, or anybody's boss or commander ever said something
nice about socialism, it's remarkable that only 53 percent of us still
favor rule by the moneyed class. Perhaps folks are learning how
capitalism sacrifices happiness for individual gain.

BILL MOYERS:
When you say they fought you, help us understand what actually happens. What do they do?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
Some won't even sit at the table. The American Bankers Association walked away. The Community Bankers walked away. Some credit unions would take no part in this conversation. They wouldn't even discuss the possibility of what we could do to deal with this mortgage foreclosure crisis.

Others participated initially, and when the time came, turned and walked away as well. I was left standing, having basically accepted many of their changes. Meanwhile, they were working feverishly in the halls of the Senate, going office to office, trying to convince people to vote against Durbin's bill. And I knew that I had an uphill battle. They're pretty convincing. They're pretty powerful.

And I have to say that the group I was trying to help, the people facing mortgage foreclosure, don't have that kind of political clout. By and large, these are people who are on the skids. They're running into trouble and voting is perhaps, you know, a sacrifice for some of them. Being involved in lobbying is beyond anything that they'd ever done or could consider doing. So I really was trying to speak for some of those people against some pretty powerful political forces.

SENATOR DICK DURBIN ON THE SENATE FLOOR:
Why is it in this country, in America, that we can find hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars from hard-working people all over the United States to come to the rescue of bad banking decisions, rotten investments, mortgages that were fraudulent on their face, but can't summon the political will to do something about 8 million families in America who are going to face foreclosure? That is where we are.

BILL MOYERS:
What would your provision have done for those people?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
If you're facing foreclosure and at least 60 days delinquent in your mortgage payments, you would have to present to your mortgage institution all of your documents to apply for a new mortgage. They would look through your income statements and your net worth and decide if you could qualify for a mortgage at a lower interest rate or a principal that brings it down to fair market value. If they didn't offer you a mortgage, you could raise it in bankruptcy court. Just as people can do now, legally, when it comes to a vacation home, a farm or a ranch.

SENATOR DICK DURBIN ON THE SENATE FLOOR:
The law prohibits the bankruptcy court from rewriting the terms of the mortgage of a person's home. Why? Why does that make any sense? If the bankruptcy court can rewrite the mortgage on your vacation condos, your farm, or your ranch, why can't they do it for your home? That is what this bill does.

BILL MOYERS:
What you just acknowledged is that there is a two-tier standard here. What did the lobbyists say, when you said to them, "Look, rich people can get this provision. They can get their mortgages renegotiated, but ordinary people can't." What did they say to you?

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
Well, they argue about the sanctity of the contract, Bill.

BILL MOYERS:
Contract with--

SENATOR DICK DURBIN:
With the original mortgage, and I have to tell you that it is a little hard to swallow, when we're dealing with a banking industry that has entered into so many bad contracts, creating these rotten portfolios of mortgage securities. And then in desperation, turn to the taxpayers at large, who had to come in and bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars. Their holy contracts that exploded in their faces really weren't that holy, when it came down to it. They were ready to take taxpayers' money to stay in business. But I offered this same amendment a year ago. At the time, the projection was two million homes in foreclosure in America. Moody's now projects eight million. That's one out of every six home mortgages in foreclosure. That means that there'll hardly be a block untouched in America, without a foreclosed home, which will affect the other people around them, and the value of their property.

Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil -- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

Now collective societal responsibility is common sense for, say, a Dane or a Frenchman. Most of them anyway.

For Americans though, it's an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country.

Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers are still balking when it comes to doing what’s necessary to contain the crisis.

It was good news when Mr. Paulson finally agreed to funnel capital into the banking system in return for partial ownership. But last week Joe Nocera of The Times pointed out a key weakness in the U.S. Treasury’s bank rescue plan: it contains no safeguards against the possibility that banks will simply sit on the money. “Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead.” And sure enough, the banks seem to be hoarding the cash.

There’s also bizarre stuff going on with regard to the mortgage market. I thought that the whole point of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the lending agencies, was to remove fears about their solvency and thereby lower mortgage rates. But top officials have made a point of denying that Fannie and Freddie debt is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government — and as a result, markets are still treating the agencies’ debt as a risky asset, driving mortgage rates up at a time when they should be going down.

What’s happening, I suspect, is that the Bush administration’s anti-government ideology still stands in the way of effective action. Events have forced Mr. Paulson into a partial nationalization of the financial system — but he refuses to use the power that comes with ownership.

Whatever the reasons for the continuing weakness of policy, the situation is manifestly not coming under control. Things continue to fall apart.

CNN: What do you think caused this crisis?

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Zakaria: We did, all of us. Since the 1980s, Americans have consumed more than they produced, and they have made up the difference by borrowing. Not only on the personal consumer level but in how our government runs.

Every city, every county and every state has wanted to preserve its many and proliferating operations and yet not raise taxes. How to do that? By borrowing, using ever more elaborate financial instruments.

Easy money plus leverage equals financial crisis.

CNN: OK. So what do we do now?

Zakaria: In the short term, all the solutions require that governments take on more debts and larger obligations. This is inevitable and necessary. But that doesn't mean we should, as some noted economists advocate, stimulate the economy with more tax cuts.

That would be only one more way to keep the party going artificially, like asking a drunk to go to AA next year but in the meantime to have even more whiskey.

A far better stimulus would be to announce and expedite major infrastructure and energy projects, which are investments, not consumption, and therefore have a much different effect on the country's fiscal fortunes.

It's true -- the way that the U.S. is portrayed on Al Jazeera matters, and we take that responsibility very seriously. We followed up the initial piece by sending the reporter to get reaction from African-American Obama supporters. We gave the last word in this saga to the owner of a PR firm in Atlanta:

"They are not America. They don't reflect America, they don't represent the America that I live in and am a part of, and they don't reflect the majority of Americans."

We will have to wait until November 4 -- or the early hours of November 5 -- to know who Americans will choose to be their next President. But there are certain things we do know now.

After the dark and gloomy years of recent times, this race has electrified the world. It's a U.S. election that has more international resonance that perhaps any in our lifetime.

And all of these issues have been debated and explored in hundreds of hours of coverage on Al Jazeera English, an award-winning channel that is broadcast in more than 100 countries.

Except for most of the United States. Political and financial interests have pressured American cable companies from carrying Al Jazeera English.

In a country that regards itself as the world's leading democracy, that is regrettable because Al Jazeera's coverage has been fair, comprehensive and respectful of different points of view. And a window on the world.

As the world welcomes this new and exciting U.S. era, isn't it time for Americans -- when it comes to being able to see Al Jazeera - to actually be allowed to make their own judgment?

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism.

Since the 1930s, U.S. banks were the flagships of American economic might, and emulation by other nations of the fiercely free-market financial system in the United States was expected and encouraged. But the market turmoil that is draining the nation's wealth and has upended Wall Street now threatens to put the banks at the heart of the U.S. financial system at least partly in the hands of the government.

The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks, buying up a portion of their shares to shore them up and restore confidence as part of the $700 billion government bailout. The notion of government ownership in the financial sector, even as a minority stakeholder, goes against what market purists say they see as the foundation of the American system.

Yet the administration may feel it has no choice. Credit, the lifeblood of capitalism, ceased to flow. An economy based on the free market cannot function that way.