Eliot Spitzer is back, this time as Slate’s newest columnist:

Last month, as the financial crisis and the government rescue plan dominated headlines, almost everyone overlooked a news item that could have enormous long-term impact: <a href=”http://www.avbuyer.com.cn/e/2008/30063.html”>GE Capital announced the acquisition of five mid-size airplanes—with an option to buy 20 more—produced by CACC, a new, Chinese-government-sponsored airline manufacturer.

Why is that so significant? Two reasons: First, just as small steps signaled the Asian entry into our now essentially bankrupt auto sector 50 years ago, so the GE acquisition signals Asia’s entry into one of our few remaining dominant manufacturing sectors. Boeing is still the world’s leading commercial aviation company. CACC’s emergence—and its particular advantage selling to Asian markets—means that Boeing now faces the rigors of an entirely new competitive playing field and that our commercial airplane sector is likely to suffer enormously over the coming decades.

But the second implication is even bigger. The CACC story highlights the risk that current bailouts—a remarkable $7.8 trillion in equity, loans, and guarantees so far—may merely perpetuate a fundamentally flawed status quo. So far, at least, we are simply rebuilding the same edifice that just collapsed. None of the investments has even begun to address the underlying structural problems that are causing economic power to shift away from the United States, sector by sector:

Spitzer goes on to say something I have been wondering out loud about. If these financial institutions are “too large to fail”, then hasn’t our government failed by allowing them to grow to such sizes? I believe something that needs to be looked at in all these bailouts is the government stepping in and breaking these mega-corporations apart. They now hold us by the short hairs, and that isn’t a pleasant notion considering the lack of judgment these CEOs show when it comes to common sense versus profit.

Let me put this another way. We have a super giant financial corporation. Let’s call it Scrooge Financial, in the spirit of the holiday. Well the CEO, Ebenezer, was just give a sweetheart of a deal by some Saudi Prince. Essentially that prince now gets control of the corporation and Mr. Scrooge gets more money than he could have dreamed of. It should also be mentioned that Scrooge Financial is one of the major holder of mortgages in our country. ~~lt;/p>

Now since there was no real oversight of this deal, no one knew that this prince was also a close friend of Osama bin Laden’s. OOPS! Now the new head of this company can simply start making some very bad deals in and put the company on the brink. Scrooge Financial is too big to fail, so our government has to step in and give them a bail out. Hey – thanks for helping Uncle Sam!

It all goes back to bin Laden saying he would bankrupt the west. Is the current financial crisis his doing? No, but we need to put protections in place to make sure our companies can’t fall into evil control like Scrooge Financial. The best protection for that is to eliminate corporations that are “too big to fail”. Hopefully a Democratically controlled government will do just that.