If you believe the wisdom of the crowd, this bailout blows. An intense and often spontaneous Internet backlash hindered bipartisan efforts to pass the $700 billion bailout. As soon as the basics of the measure were publicized, e-mail and Web discussions exposed a sharp and important divide between the public and elites on the proposal. Proponents insist the “rescue plan” is essential to shoring up credit and stabilizing the financial markets, while critics say taxpayer money should not be spent to bail out irresponsible behavior on Wall Street. A remarkably broad coalition of elites back the bailout measure, of course, from both parties’ nominees and Congressional leaders to the majority of commentators across the corporate media spectrum. Across the fuller spectrum of the Internet, however, it’s a different story. Websites of all stripes are brimming with intense opposition to the plan. Bailout talk dominated the blogopshere this week. References to the measure hit a staggering 14,000 per day at its peak, for the vote on Monday, according to the blog search engine Technorati.com. (By comparison, references to “Obama,” an international Web sensation, average about 8,000 per day.) On Capitol Hill, the high volume of constituent e-mail against the bailout has computers on the brink of crashing–literally. Congress temporarily banned e-mail to representatives because its website, House.gov, was about to go down. On Tuesday, a House official told members that the unusual step was “temporarily necessary to ensure that Congressional websites are not completely disabled by the millions of e-mails flowing into the system.”

The vast majority of e-mails are against the bailout, according to politicians who have disclosed estimates. Senator Sherrod Brown said in a newspaper interview that a whopping 95 percent of his e-mail opposed the measure and “nearly all” of Senator Barbara Boxer’s e-mail was against the bill, according to her staff.

Full Story: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081020/melber