Bailout Looks Like Giving Jeffrey Dahmer Steak Knives

What has been done with the bailout money so far?

• massive parties

• executive bonuses

• paying dividends

• bank mergers

There is a real underlying problem, but the bailout looks more like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a new set of steak knives than an actual solution.

I sent the following letter to my senators, congressman, the speaker of the house, and senate majority leader:

Dear (Insert Congress Stumblefuck's name),

Please do everything in your power to stop further bailouts to Wall Street and corporate America.

The money given to Secretary Paulson to distribute as he sees fit has been spent on lavish parties, dividends, executive bonuses that exceeded the amount the firm received in bailout money and worst of all, bank mergers.

If a bank is too big to fail, it flies in the face of reason that getting BIGGER will somehow solve the problem.

Frankly, Congress going along with this bailout with only token squeaks at accountability reeks of Third World levels of corruption.

There is a real problem, but the solution should not be a reason for those who caused the problem to celebrate. They are literally economic terrorists threatening and doing real harm to most Americans.

Instead, they should be wondering how to pay their bills on the part of their bank accounts that aren't frozen, whether the forensic accountants will find all their off-shore accounts, and if they are cooperating with federal prosecutors enough to avoid serious prison time.

Secretary Paulson himself and those in the Bush administration who put together the initial proposal and those who benefit from this most should be subject to a RICO investigation not handling more taxpayer money than the cost of the Iraq War.

The solutions we need are far tougher regulation, oversight, and most importantly, welding shut the revolving door between corporations and elected office.

Further, given the epic scale of this corrupt handout to Wall Street, Congress cannot return in January and say you can't afford programs for the middle class and poor.

The Republicans have just suffered an epic defeat, but if Democrats think they can hold power by being just 5% less corrupt than the GOP, you will join them in the ash heap of history.

Sincerely,

To write your Congressmen & Senators and tell them to stop the open corruption and draining of our tax dollars to make the rich richer, click Uncle Sam:

How would gov't have bailed out Wall St. if they were middle class or poor?

A New York Times columnist wrote a very stupid article about how Treasury Secretary Paulson may have hurt McCain by not starting the bailouts sooner, rather than letting Lehman Brothers collapse.

It is now clear that the decision to let Lehman Brothers fail — made the weekend of Sept. 13 and 14 — provided a stunning blow to investor and consumer confidence. The economic statistics coming out now show that car sales and other retail sales, already weak, fell off a cliff. Business orders from other businesses dried up. What had been a fairly mild recession — and one that many denied was a recession at all — became a sharp one.

History does not allow do-overs, so we will never know what would have happened if Lehman had been treated as Bear Stearns was, or as the American International Group soon would be.
FULL TEXT

He seems to miss the point of why the bailout proposal justly drew the wrath of ordinary Americans on the left AND right.

Here is the response I posted on his blog:

Bailing out Lehman might have staved off the other bailouts by mere weeks or days, but it was the impression of the bailouts, not the failures, that hurt McCain.

The public perception is one of profound conservative hypocrisy and corruption. They demand unregulated capitalism and draconian cuts in the safety net for the middle class and the poor, but them trip all over themselves to bail out their wealthy friends when their scams blow up in their faces.

Think of what we do to people who need medical help without insurance or whose insurance shows them the door. They have to sell their houses, bankrupt themselves, and sometimes get divorced to qualify for help. Their lives are ruined.

By contrast, Paulson specifically demanded no strings attached, no requirements for hardship, and we have seen the results: they took our money and partied like the spoiled, useless, sociopathic frat boy human filth that they are.

If we treated them the way we do the middle class and poor who need help, they would have to drain their bank accounts of the past decades’ bonuses, sell the BMW, and three houses, and be forced to work for minimum wage until taxpayers get our bailout money back. And just for the hell of it, they would have to get random drug tests to make sure they aren't using our money for coke or crystal meth.

But of course that is based on an assumption that they are merely incompetent rather the more likely scenario that they committed intentional fraud on borrowers and the US taxpayers. In which case, they should be held in jail without bail pending their RICO trials, and wondering when it's safe to go to sleep without another inmate doing to them what they have done to America--and the world.