The future ain't what it used to be."
--- Yogi Berra
$700 billion to bail out the financial industry! Actually, over $800 billion once they got done "sweetening" the bailout package. That is what the US Congress voted to allow Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to hand over to his Wall Street buddies, with virtually no oversight. And that was just for openers.
The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury on their own have dispensed hundreds of billions more to financial firms. What's more, the Federal Reserve, which is a private company owned by foreign bankers, refuses to identify to whom it has given the US taxpayer dollars that it has loaned into existence out of thin air (created from debt that will hobble our children and their children).
Billions for Bankers
Literally billions of those taxpayer-funded bailout dollars now are being paid to Wall Street big shots in the form of year-end bonuses, if you can believe it, on top of multi-million-dollar salary and benefits packages. Bonuses ... for failing.
These guys should have been fired years ago, but we allowed them to take full control of America's banks and corporations through illegal payoffs to our elected representatives, who then confirmed them into top government policy-making positions (like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, who two years ago took hundreds of millions in salary and bonus for his position with the Goldman Sachs banking firm).
Nothing for Workers
Meanwhile, the workers of America - the very people who made possible the financial industry that now plunders the heart of the American dream - are facing the bleakest Christmas in memory. Just two days ago, Congress refused to authorize a mere $14 billion in loans to the Big Three automakers. Loans that would have had to be paid back - not hundreds of billions given simply in exchange for worthless securities and equity, as in the case of the financial bailout. Loans secured by the last truly productive, large-scale manufacturing plants and assets in America, manned by the last truly productive factory workers in America.
Billions for bankers - nothing for workers. How typical for what America now has become.
Git a Rope!
It is beyond me why people aren't marching in the streets of Washington, DC, right this minute, torching government office buildings. Or on Wall Street, hauling out those corporate fat cats and stringing them up from lamp posts....
***************
We've Been Had
America is finished. The American dream is dead.
We've been had, folks. Most of those aware enough to be reading these words know that, however. It's the others, the ones who won't get off the couch, turn off the TV and start thinking about what really is going on, who are the real problem. To them I say what the old codger on the porch in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre said: "Yer already dead. Yer jist too stoopid to know it!"
New America. An idea whose time has come.--MORE--"
