Over the weekend I had a good discussion with my step-dad about the bailout and decided I should revisit the topic despite the USG passing the bailout bill into law.

One thing I didn’t let fully play out in my mind was exactly how far a credit freeze would go. If the banks stopped lending every day American businesses would grind to a halt. My step-dad sells marble counter-top installation services and his job would stop cold–if people stop getting home loans, homes stop getting built and that means no kitchens are built in homes and that means no marble counter-tops would be sold.

And this is just one thread of the giant sweater that is the American economy.

The thing is, I’m OK with all American business stopping for a little bit. I think our system is royally screwed up if it so heavily relies on CONSTANT lending EVERY DAY. But what can you do? Come up with a better plan? Sure! But you can’t just walk up to Henry Paulson and say "Yo, this system, it sucks."

You need the support of millions in order to make a change that the system itself would never want. See, Paulson used to run one of the banks he’s going to be bailing out. Yeah, conflict of interest much?

Paulson wants his old pals to get bailed out and he likes the system the way it is. Everyone rich can stay that way and risk is passed onto the USG and, indirectly, the American people. This is the ultimate crime of the mega-corporations. They make themselves so "valuable" by being HUGE. But they are so huge they crumble under their own weight. So, they are bailed out by the system that allowed them to get so big in the first place.

So, something big has to happen that turns everyone against that system.

Make no mistake, if it weren’t for the USG and Wall Street’s breaking the rules of the free market, the free market would have failed.

The ONLY thing keeping our economy alive is this new money.

Doesn’t that scare anyone else?

Think about that: the only way to save the system is to break the rules of the system. Our leaders (who allowed this to happen in the first place) are just propping this mess up with a stick, hoping the stick won’t break.

The reality sure seems to be that if we don’t suffer now for this, we’ll suffer later.

Seems simple enough. But wait–if it’s that simple, why did the Federal Reserve pull $630 billion from other central banks to help with our crisis only to have the USG pass its $700 billion bailout package? (Read about the Fed’s move: http://thepete.com/…government )

Why would the bailout package be needed at this point? And why are some banks considering the possibility of not accepting money from the bailout at all? (Read more about that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…et.bailout )

In America we are not adequately prepared as kids to deal with the absurd "complexities" of the economy. Every time I try to learn more about stocks, futures, derivatives, etc, my brain starts to hurt. My basic sense of logic is forced out of shape just to follow what these people are telling me.

It all seems like a big shell game and frankly, I think the market should be shut down. It’s all just a scam–a game of slight-of-hand where the magicians move money from the many to the few. It’s like Vegas times a million–or should I say 700 billion?

We need to get back to simple, honest business-doing. No more unregulated free market. Let’s mix in some socialism and water this crap back so we don’t get in over our heads.

So many times we in the "Blame America First" crowd (aka the "Lack of Blind Faith in the American System" crowd) are told that all we do is whine and that we have no solutions.

Well, I’ve mentioned mine. Shut down the stock market, introduce certain basic aspects of socialism that cover basic needs for people and serve as a parachute for certain huge businesses that get too big to support themselves. We have people dying because they can’t afford health care. Yet we’re letting criminals get away with it on Wall Street and we pay them to do it. I say we let everyone go to the doctor’s including the banks and the corporations that fail. We’ll look at them, fire who screwed up, get them back on their feet and moving.

They fail again? We break them up into their component parts.

No more corporate behemoths that bring down the entire economy when they fail.

Who ever thought up the current plan should be fired and forced to live with poor people for a while.

Of course, as long as we put up with this system, it’s We The People who are giving the government and the banks and the corporations a blank check.
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It’ll take five seconds to call and let them know what you’re thinking.

Go to House.gov in the upper left corner of the site, there is a field where you can enter your zip. Click the “Go” button and you’ll see the name of your House Rep. Click on that person’s name and you’ll be sent to their website. Then find the contact link, click on it, get their number in Washington DC (odds are they’re in DC to vote on the bailout bill) and then CALL IT.

Emails are fine, faxes are fine, too, but calling will make the difference. They need to here a voice and be inconvenienced by calls to really feel the pressure. Please do it, it takes literally seconds to say “Hi, I’d like to register my lack of support for the bailout bill.” When I called, they then asked me my name and zip and once I told them, they thanked me. That was it. PLEASE DO IT NOW. No bailout bill is a good bailout bill. We’re helping the rich when they won’t help the poor (us!). Watch the video if you need convincing.

Contact your Representative in Washingtonseesmic.com/images/seesmichtml.gif) left top repeat-x”>

Earlier this evening a buddy of mine started an IM conversation with me. Here’s approximately how it began:

Him: Shit.
Him: You there?
Me: Yeah, man, what’s up?
Him: My bank got taken over.
Me: HA-HA!
Me: Mine, too.
Him: lol
Me: Which one?
Him: Wachovia. You?
Me:WaMu
Him: ahhh, sucks.
Me: S’ok, I’m broke.
Him: me too. lol
Me: haha

I guess this is where the meek inherit the Earth?

Sign of the (economic) times…

It’s the end of an era on Wall Street, according to that screencap from CNN.com, it’s the end of the era of the Wall Street investment banks. According to the article that the headline links to (here: http://money.cnn.com/…/index.htm ) the government is taking over the last investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. This is a move that: "allows Goldman and Morgan to scoop up retail banks and to streamline their borrowing from the Federal Reserve. The shift also is aimed at removing them as targets of nervous investors and customers, who brought down their former rivals Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch this year."

So, basically, this was done to strengthen these huge banks and to stop them from crumbling under the pressure of the other banks crumbling. If these banks did crumble we’d have a bigger economic meltdown.

At least, that’s how I understand it.

HOWEVER, the cry of "socialism!" is a common thing in our country. Obama’s been called a socialist, anyone who wants to see free health care for everyone has been called a socialist and now I’m calling the USG socialist since so many seem to think the government doling out money is socialism.

This puts the USG in the same category as the Soviet Union and the Nazis (apparently). They were all considered socialists–and thanks to that, we know that socialism IS EVIL.

OK, the real irony here is that socialism is NOT evil. It’s the people who practice it that can either be corrupt or not. When you ignore hundreds of thousands of homeless and jobless people in our cities, that’s OK. But when you ignore the plight of our crumbling banking system that’s just wrong.

Amtrak? The airlines? Banks? They’re all corporations and all have been bailed out by the government–by our tax dollars.

The people who cry out against socialism think it’s fine when corporations need help, but not individuals.

When individuals need financial help it’s because they didn’t work hard enough or they’re lazy or druggies or hippies.

When Wall Street needs help, no one really talks about why they need help, they just get that help.

Sure, the news and pundits explain that "these banks are too big, they can’t be allowed to fail" but what does that really mean?

It means that the individual is not important. Only the system matters.

That doesn’t just sound like socialism, that sounds like <em>communism</em>.

What it all sounds like to me is hypocrisy.
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Happy Saturday! Bush and TreasSec Paulson want Congess to agree to spend nearly three-quarters of a TRILLION dollars to save our economy.

Where the hell do we have that kind of money laying around? You can’t even say "Oh, we’ll be paying for this for decades in taxes!"

You can’t borrow money from the future. We WILL be paying it back for that long but where is that money coming from and what were we going to use it for?

I’m pretty sure we will be just conjuring the cash from nothing but I’d like to hear that from someone official for once.

Do you have any idea how injecting 700 billion new dollars will change the value of the US dollar? The value will drop even lower.

What worries me even more is that Bush made the comment today that “The risk of doing nothing far outweighs the risk of the package.”

Doing nothing would be a much greater risk than spending $700 billion.

He just admitted that our economy is totally screwed.

And I mean TOTALLY.

What’s worse than needing to spend nearly one-tenth the national debt to "save" our economy?

I’m betting that the media and even most people won’t get the severity of this.

The US economy is FUBAR and the only thing that will save it is 700 BILLION.

One helluva thing to wake to.
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