Are we there yet?

$350,000,000,000 (Three-hundred and fifty Billion Dollars) was handed off to a baking industry who has no conscience and is motivated almost completely by greed and power hunger. It was handed over with no “oversight”, no strings and no “transparency”. Now we are all left asking wheredit-go? When asked the banks respond with “we don’t know”; “none of your business”; “Keeping track of the money was not part of the deal.”

Bush and Paulson talked us (Congress) out of this money, because everyone is in panic mode, and then just pissed it away. The idea of this money to the banks was to loosen credit by creating liquidity; Get under-performing “toxic” assets off the bank’s balance sheets and replace them with high quality US Treasury assets. The government would take those bad assets, restructure, rework or season them into performing assets, then liquidate them to repay itself. Simple.

The problem is they did this deal with the greediest group of con men in history and they got taken, probably with malice and forethought. I can’t even imagine how much of that money is now in off-shore bank accounts. Their grandkids will have plenty of money to pay back their share. My only advice to them is to remember, somewhere in eternity, the wheel comes full circle and you will be faced with a payback. I just pray to God that I can be there to see it.

I know, Paulson’s real plan, was to have the big boys use that money to buy all of the shaky, failing mid-size banks that could have eventually bankrupted the FDIC. Everybody wins. The entrenched beaurocracy digs in deeper (click to image: large blood-filled tick on a dog’s ear – with chorus – “eeeeuuu”), the big banks get bankier, and all at the expense of that bottomless pit, the tax payers who are too stupid to figure it out. Somebody got paid! We may never know who, but somebody, besides the bankers, got paid!

The bank exectives took the money and bought more banks, subsidized their stock holdings, and entrenched their hold on their own institutions. The idiot beaurocrats (Paulson, Bush & Congress) actually thought these guys would use the money to benefit the country and their own industry, without putting rules or conditions in place. Can you even imagine the stupidity of that kind of thinking? Give an addict a fix and ask him to share it? I don’t know what planet they live on, but it isn’t mine.

So that did not fix the credit liquidity issues. The auto industry can’t sell their crumby cars because nobody and get a loan from the banks, due to “lack of liquidity”. Now we have to dip into the TARP well to give money to Auto companies so they can pay their grossly bloated-wage union workers and annual executive bonuses as usual for the next couple of months. That’s right we are about to spend $15,000,000,000 (BILLION) to save the auto industry from bankruptcy for 90 days.

This did not fix the plummeting housing prices that are pillaging the only asset most of us have. This did not fix the 40% loss of all of our retirement assets while congress keeps theirs fully intact, untouched. This did not help all of the small businesses that are now laying off their staff and shutting their doors.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right [and responsibility?] of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.[1]” Are we there yet folks?


[1] Declaration of Independence