Bailout Brou-ha-hah
This smells to high heaven.



Image: Huffingtonpost.com.


Like Lazarus when risen from the tomb, this Wall Street bailout "stinketh."

The greater majority of U.S. citizens who are aware of the situation are opposed to this sleight-of-hand; then there's the rest of us who are either narcotized by the corporate media shills and apologists, or who have other things on their mind, like the bank taking their house.

But my big question is this: will either of the two sitting senators who are candidates for President, bother to show up and vote? McCain hasn't made a Congressional vote since April 8, and Obama on July 9 -- to renew FISA (!)

McCain has the dubious distinction of being The Most Absent Congressman of the 110th Congress --not there to participate in Senate functions about 64 percent of the time. Obama is a little better--having missed some 45 percent of the votes. Don't take my word for it, read here.

Sure, they've been busy. But this is only the fate of the nation we're talking about.

If these two who have made so much hay over this thing cannot take time out of their campaigns to do the job their constituents sent them "down to Warshington" to accomplish in the first place, why should we even be considering giving one of them the highest civil office in the land?

Just asking.

For some rational insight to all this, I direct you to Becky, Just A Girl In Shorts Shorts Talking About Whatever, who is always good for some smart observations and plenty of sass, here.

She makes this critical point:

"We are really not in danger of the ATM's running out of money or our credit cards being denied. My cousin is a banker in Seattle. He specializes in small business loans. I was talking with him on Friday, and he had just got home from doing a three million dollar loan to a new customer.

There is much greater panic in the Halls of Washington than on Wall Street or Main Street.

As smart as they are, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson are not the repository of all wisdom in the world. One hundred economists, from various universities, are on record opposing this bailout."

Read it all here.

Jim Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation is, well, at his best when events are at their worst.

He writes:

"What we're seeing in this fiasco, among other things, is a lesson in the diminishing returns of technology. This is a train wreck of investment vehicles so complex that they could only be created with the aid of computers. The result is that hardly anyone -- perhaps even nobody in or out of Wall Street -- really understands what they represent. In fact, this alphabet soup of engineered securities -- CDOs, CDSs, MBSs, SIVs, etc -- was cooked up from a recipe of Ponzi algorithms.
They were designed to be mathematically indecipherable, except by computers, in an alternative universe of model-making that bore only a superficial relation to the real world. That was their dirty secret. And the dirty secret of the Great Bail-out is that, in the real world, we will never be able to discover the actual trading value of these things at any number above zero. This is why they are called "toxic."

Get it all here.

Financial sector contributions to Congress: Opensecrets.

Andrew Cuomo, Fannie & Freddie and the slippery slope into this mess in the Village Voice.

And Bush signing the The American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003.