Is The Bailout A Good Deal ?

I have put off writing this for several days, because I wanted to see if I could come up with any kind of justification for Bush's plan to bail out Wall Street. But I can't. I don't replace the losses of Las Vegas gamblers with my own hard-earned money, and I can see no reason why I would want to bail out the Wall Street gamblers (just because they like to call themselves "businessmen").

These are today's "robber barons". They have made it their mission to pay off this Republican administration to remove the rules and regulations that were put in place to protect investors. Then they made a series of bad decisions designed to do only one thing -- push up the value of stock and fatten their own pocketbooks with no thought given to tomorrow.

The short-term profit was everything and the long-term be damned. Although they kept telling the small investor to leave their money in the market and think long-term, the rich didn't think that axiom applied to them.

Well, those deregulation mistakes and bad decisions have now come home to roost. Many of the big banking, investment, mortgage and insurance companies are looking bankruptcy squarely in the face, and they want the government (American people) to bail them out by giving them enormous sums of money.

I think they have a lot of gall to think they deserve this money, especially since they don't want to have to give up anything to get it. These are the same people who oppose unions, the minimum wage, universal healthcare, social security and help for the poor.

They're unwilling to pay their fair share of taxes and help out the millions of Americans who are having a hard time making ends meet, but they think they deserve $700 billion to $1 trillion of taxpayer money. Well, I don't think they deserve it!

The bail-out program Bush is asking for is outrageous. He wants the government to hand over $700 billion to the Treasury Secretary to use as he sees fit with no supervision. Theoretically, he would use the money to purchase the bad debts these companies have created for themselves, but without oversight from courts, Congress or any administrative agency.

Outrageous! We've known Bush was incompetent for a while now, but this exceeds incompetence. I think he's progressed to full-blown insanity. In his desire to bail out his rich buddies, Bush is ready to give them the keys to the United States Treasury.

But while I oppose the bail-out, it looks like many members of both political parties are buying into it. They have fallen for the line that these companies are "too big" to allow them to go under. I would like for Congress to kill this ridiculous program, but I think the best we can hope for is that Congress puts some conditions on the money.

If we're going to buy up the bad debt, we should get a controlling interest in the companies. The current management should be fired (without any golden parachutes), and government regulators should run the companies until they can be sold.

The money given out should be subject to oversight from Congress, appropriate administrave agencies and the court system. New regulations should be written that will prevent this from happening in the future. And personally, I would like to see corporations banned from lobbying the federal government.

Even if all that was accomplished, it's still a bad deal for taxpayers, but I have little faith in the good sense of Congress and none in the Bush administration. It will probably be approved without nearly enough oversight.

(Political Cartoon above is by Patrick Chappatte.)