"Are we back now today to a republic in which the only citizens asked to display civic virtue and sacrifice are the 1 percent of Americans who serve their country in uniform? How many of the other 99 percent of us take the time and effort to be good citizens, to make sacrifices — even the modest sacrifice required to understand the issues of the day in all their complexity? If not — if, as in the antebellum United States, we assume that our political judgments are sound merely because we are common people and we have an opinion, and that bumper sticker political philosophy is all that is required of us, then we would do well to remember the fragility of our democracy. It failed once, and that failure was retrieved only by the sacrifice of 620,000 Americans. At any given time, our democracy is only a generation away from failing once again. Thus every generation is responsible for maintaining, protecting, and promoting the republic."

"In other words, the Treasury feels that the reason it can’t use the funds in the manner Congress intended is because it believes the banks would act in an unscrupulous manner in order to subvert the intentions of the United States government at a time when the economy is facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression?"