The presidential campaign has finally been forced to get real. With the United States facing the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Paulson is looking to tax-payers to provide a massive bailout of the very financial institutions responsible for fueling the crisis in the first place. The plan appears to be a bail out of Wall Street, more YOYO (you're on your own) economics for Main Street. Socialization of debt, while maintaining privatized profit.

So what do the candidates have on offer? Will Obama, the candidate of change challenge the fundamentalist free market economics that led to this mess? Can McCain, the fundamental deregulator, reinvent himself as an economic reformer?

Today on GRITtv we discuss the crisis and the bailout with MICHAEL HUDSON, chief economic advisor to Dennis Kucinich's 2000 presidential campaign and the author of Super Imperialism; ED OTT, Executive Director of the New York City Central Labor Council; MAY CHEN, Executive Vice-President of UNITE HERE; and MAX WOLFF, Professor in the Graduate Program of International Politics at the New School.

While you're waiting for the LIVE stream, a piece on the bailout from our colleagues at The Real News.