It’s perfectly O.K. to bash the International Monetary Fund — some of the best people do it. But it’s important to bash it for the right reasons.

Quite a few of the I.M.F.’s most vociferous critics attack it because they believe it is in the business of rescuing financial fat cats. The idea that the I.M.F. creates ”moral hazard” — that international lenders are careless because they count on the I.M.F. to bail them out if something goes wrong — has become virtual dogma among right-wingers, many of whom seem to think that if we abolished the I.M.F. we would also abolish financial crises.

But this is a fantasy. There is not a shred of evidence, for example, that the investors who poured money into Asia before its recent crisis thought at all about the possibility of future I.M.F. bailouts. They simply suffered from irrational exuberance — and would have done the same regardless. (The exception that proves the rule is Russia, which investors thought of — wrongly, as it happens — as ”too nuclear to fail.”)

A more cogent line of criticism, associated in particular with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, attacks the I.M.F. for overplaying its hand. Mr. Sachs and others complain that when countries go to the fund for help, it demands drastic and often inappropriate changes in their economic policies, undermining investor confidence and actually worsening the situation. This view doesn’t suggest that the I.M.F. should go away; it suggests instead that it should lend faster, with fewer conditions.

This critique, unlike the moral-hazard view, has quite a lot going for it. In Asia, in particular, the I.M.F. seemed to want to restructure whole societies from the ground up, in the process feeding rather than countering the ongoing crisis of confidence. While some say that the region’s rapid recovery vindicates that policy, others more plausibly argue that the rebound mainly suggests just how excessive the I.M.F.’s demands were and how gratuitous the crisis was in the first place.

But granted that the I.M.F.’s performance has been unsatisfactory, what do you do about it? That was one of the questions addressed by the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission, a Congressionally appointed panel whose much-awaited report will be released today. (The other was what to do about the World Bank — but let me leave that for some other day.)

All members of the commission agreed that the I.M.F. needed to return to its original, narrow mission of providing emergency lending. But only 8 of the 11 were willing to sign the full report, and even this majority vote hides a deep divergence of views.

Here’s the problem: The Republican-appointed members of the commission, including its chairman, Allan Meltzer, are still committed to the moral-hazard argument. The draft of the report that came into my hands declares that ”The importance of the moral hazard problem cannot be overstated.” (Oh, yes it can.) And while the report did not in so many words call for abolition of the I.M.F., it suggested restrictions that would in effect make even emergency lending impossible. For example, the report wants I.M.F. loans to be repaid after only 120 days, with at most one rollover. To get a sense of what that means: Thailand, which only started to emerge from its crisis late last year, would have had to repay its loans in March 1998.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sachs, who was one of the Democratic appointees, signed the report, giving it at least an appearance of bipartisanship. Why?

My understanding, after communicating with Mr. Sachs, is that he believes that you need to hit the I.M.F. with a two-by-four just to get its attention, and that the specifics can be fixed later. And anyone who has listened to smug I.M.F. officials (not all of them, but too many) rationalize their decisions can see his point.

But the commission members who refused to sign the report had a different view: They regarded the report as an attempt not to fix the I.M.F., but to gut it — which for all the fund’s flaws would make the world a considerably more dangerous place. And anyone who has read the anti-I.M.F. literature of the right-wing think tanks that support several of the commission’s members can see their point, too.

It all comes down to a question of who’s using whom. And the truth is that I don’t know.

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

Some of these disasters were more or less anticipated. Economists have wondered for some time why hedge funds weren’t suffering more amid the financial carnage. They need wonder no longer: investors are pulling their money out of these funds, forcing fund managers to raise cash with fire sales of stocks and other assets.

The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.

These countries were at the core of the last global financial crisis, in the late 1990s (which seemed like a big deal at the time, but was a day at the beach compared with what we’re going through now). They responded to that experience by building up huge war chests of dollars and euros, which were supposed to protect them in the event of any future emergency. And not long ago everyone was talking about “decoupling,” the supposed ability of emerging market economies to keep growing even if the United States fell into recession. “Decoupling is no myth,” The Economist assured its readers back in March. “Indeed, it may yet save the world economy.”

That was then. Now the emerging markets are in big trouble. In fact, says Stephen Jen, the chief currency economist at Morgan Stanley, the “hard landing” in emerging markets may become the “second epicenter” of the global crisis. (U.S. financial markets were the first.)

What happened? In the 1990s, emerging market governments were vulnerable because they had made a habit of borrowing abroad; when the inflow of dollars dried up, they were pushed to the brink. Since then they have been careful to borrow mainly in domestic markets, while building up lots of dollar reserves. But all their caution was undone by the private sector’s obliviousness to risk.

In Russia, for example, banks and corporations rushed to borrow abroad, because dollar interest rates were lower than ruble rates. So while the Russian government was accumulating an impressive hoard of foreign exchange, Russian corporations and banks were running up equally impressive foreign debts. Now their credit lines have been cut off, and they’re in desperate straits.

Needless to say, the existing troubles in the banking system, plus the new troubles at hedge funds and in emerging markets, are all mutually reinforcing. Bad news begets bad news, and the circle of pain just keeps getting wider.

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.

It was a winning formula. And the great thing was that the new packaging didn’t require any change in the product’s actual contents — in fact, the G.O.P. was able to keep winning elections even as its actual policies became more pro-plutocrat, and less favorable to working Americans, than ever.

John McCain’s strategy, in this final stretch, is based on the belief that the old formula still has life in it.

Thus we have Sarah Palin expressing her joy at visiting the “pro-America” parts of the country — yep, we’re all traitors here in central New Jersey. Meanwhile we’ve got Mr. McCain making Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a k a Joe the Plumber — who had confronted Barack Obama on the campaign trail, alleging that the Democratic candidate would raise his taxes — the centerpiece of his attack on Mr. Obama’s economic proposals.

And when it turned out that the right’s new icon had a few issues, like not being licensed and comparing Mr. Obama to Sammy Davis Jr., conservatives played victim: see how much those snooty elitists hate the common man?

But what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to working Americans in general?

First of all, they aren’t making a lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that $200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.

Second, their real incomes have stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The Bush administration assured us that the economy was booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7 percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio plumbers went, so went the nation: median household income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than it had been in 2000.

Third, Ohio plumbers have been having growing trouble getting health insurance, especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10 employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent in 2000.

And bear in mind that all these data pertain to 2007 — which was as good as it got in recent years. Now that the “Bush boom,” such as it was, is over, we can see that it achieved a dismal distinction: for the first time on record, an economic expansion failed to raise most Americans’ incomes above their previous peak.

Since then, of course, things have gone rapidly downhill, as millions of working Americans have lost their jobs and their homes. And all indicators suggest that things will get much worse in the months and years ahead.

So what does all this say about the candidates? Who’s really standing up for Ohio’s plumbers?

Mr. McCain claims that Mr. Obama’s policies would lead to economic disaster. But President Bush’s policies have already led to disaster — and whatever he may say, Mr. McCain proposes continuing Mr. Bush’s policies in all essential respects, and he shares Mr. Bush’s anti-government, anti-regulation philosophy.

What about the claim, based on Joe the Plumber’s complaint, that ordinary working Americans would face higher taxes under Mr. Obama? Well, Mr. Obama proposes raising rates on only the top two income tax brackets — and the second-highest bracket for a head of household starts at an income, after deductions, of $182,400 a year.

Maybe there are plumbers out there who earn that much, or who would end up suffering from Mr. Obama’s proposed modest increases in taxes on dividends and capital gains — America is a big country, and there’s probably a high-income plumber with a huge stock market portfolio out there somewhere. But the typical plumber would pay lower, not higher, taxes under an Obama administration, and would have a much better chance of getting health insurance.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Joe the plumber would almost certainly be better off, but Richie the hedge fund manager would take a serious hit.

But that’s the point. Whatever today’s G.O.P. is, it isn’t the party of working Americans.

BOSTON — With each invigorating inning, the outlook grew more sublime for the Tampa Bay Rays. They are young, fearless and resilient, and they were about to bury the Boston Red Sox. Seven outs were all the Rays needed to reach their first World Series and end Boston’s season. Seven outs.

But the Rays could not get those unlucky seven outs. The Red Sox stunned the Rays by rebounding from a seven-run seventh-inning deficit to win, 8-7, in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Seemingly dead, the Red Sox unfurled a miraculous rally in the last three innings and trail three games to two in the best-of-seven series.

J. D. Drew lined a two-out single off J. P. Howell that scored Kevin Youkilis from second base in the ninth inning and powered the Red Sox to a shocking win. Youkilis reached base on an infield single and took second when third baseman Evan Longoria bounced a throw past first. It is a series again, a series in which Boston has the momentum.

On a night when some fans booed the iconic David Ortiz and some fans left Fenway Park, Boston scored four runs in the seventh, three in the eighth and one in the ninth to keep the series from ending. The Red Sox would not die, at least not in Game 5.

“Because of the situation we’re in, that was pretty magical,” Boston Manager Terry Francona said.

With two outs and two on in the seventh, Dustin Pedroia’s single off Grant Balfour drove in the first run. When Ortiz followed Pedroia, Tampa Bay Manager Joe Maddon surprisingly did not summon Howell, a left-hander. Either Maddon trusted Balfour or did not think the slumping Ortiz could do much damage. Ortiz drilled a three-run homer into the right-field seats.

For the first time all night, the Red Sox had a pulse and their fans were chanting. That continued against Dan Wheeler in the eighth. Drew had a two-run homer to chisel the deficit to 7-6. Could this really happen? Could the Red Sox really come back from a 7-0 hole?

When Mark Kotsay doubled over B. J. Upton’s head in center field, the Red Sox believed even more. Upton had seemingly caught every ball the Red Sox hit near center. Finally, the Red Sox put one over his head. Coco Crisp fought through a 10-pitch at-bat and singled to right to deliver Kotsay with the tying run. In the span of 10 batters, the Red Sox had scored seven runs.

“It was amazing,” Crisp said. “I kind of choked up. That was as good a feeling as I’ve ever had on a baseball field.”

After all of the doubts that have hounded the Rays during this incredible season, they will now have to respond to questions about whether they can come back from such a depressing loss. The Rays smashed three homers and were surely dreaming about playing host to a World Series game next week. Instead, the Rays will host Game 6 of the A.L.C.S. on Saturday night.

“If we had won it, we’d be in the World Series by now,” Maddon said. “We’ll just have to wait one more day, hopefully, to get that done.”

Once again, the Rays showed their power and pummeled Boston early. Upton hit a two-run homer on Daisuke Matsuzaka’s ninth pitch. Carlos Peña had a two-run shot in the third and Longoria, Upton’s power-hitting pal, followed with a homer. Scott Kazmir, who was not named the starter until Wednesday, allowed two singles in six scoreless innings.

When Longoria’s homer gave the Rays a 5-0 cushion, it grew as quiet as it can get at Fenway in October. John Farrell, Boston’s pitching coach, visited Matsuzaka. Although Farrell speaks some Japanese, there was little to say. The meeting was brief. Hope was evaporating on the Red Sox.

The Red Sox were 56-25 at Fenway, a cozy, 90-year old ballpark where they thrive by plastering balls off or over the Green Monster in left field. But the Rays swiped Boston’s strategy and excelled at wall ball. Nine of the Rays’ 10 homers in the last three games sailed over the Monster. Longoria, who had six homers in the postseason, became the first player to homer in four straight A.L.C.S. games.

Maddon made a late change and decided to start Kazmir, not James Shields, in Game 5. Shields, who pitched much better in Game 1 than Kazmir did in Game 2, was supposed to start on Thursday and seemed like the better choice.

Since Maddon made the decision on Wednesday and spoke about how an off-day on Friday would allow him to use his bullpen liberally, it seemed like a dubious move. Kazmir was 0-2 with a 9.00 earned run average at Fenway this season. Maybe Maddon had given the Red Sox a sliver of an opening.

On a night when Matsuzaka did not come close to duplicating his six no-hit innings from Game 1, Kazmir was good enough. The Red Sox had two runners on base against Kazmir in the first and in the second, but they could not score. By the third, Kazmir had a five-run lead and looked comfortable. Boston looked comatose.

The anxiousness that permeated Fenway eventually turned to venom. Ortiz, who is as beloved as any player, was booed after grounding out in the third and the fifth. That was a response to Ortiz being 1 for 17 in the series.

Closer Jonathan Papelbon was brought in to protect a five-run deficit in the seventh, a sign of Boston’s desperation. Upton lifted a two-run double off the Monster for a 7-0 lead. Tampa Bay’s lead seemed insurmountable, but it was not. The Red Sox rallied, so there will be a Game 6.