The Champagne's Still Flowing

The House yesterday passed the 400-plus page Wall Street Bailout Bill by a comfortable margin. It's gotten almost too late for my mind to be functioning properly, but it's on autopilot when it comes to this bailout bill. Sssshhhhhh. If you're real quiet, you can still hear the champagne corks popping in the swank offices and plush hideaways of all those execrable bastards who'll now be bellying up to the biggest free feed anybody could ever dream up. Yes, the fat cats and grubby capitalists are still celebrating their successful scare campaign to saddle the next three generations of Americans with the trillion-dollar bill for their profligate greed.

I really don't have the heart left to bemoan this terrible defeat of the American people at the hands their elected representatives. I agree completely with David Sirota over on Open Left, who has the energy to castigate the wimp-out Democrats and Republicans in the House who switched their votes from against the bailout bill on Monday to for the bailout bill on Friday. He also notes that the market went down the crapper yesterday, despite passage of the Wall Street bailout. Remember way back on Tuesday we heard about how the market tanked because of the House's refusal to pass the bill? Seems those things don't exactly track.

I just want to make a few short points, and then I'm going to bed.

1. Don't you even believe that $700 billion will be what this abomination is going to cost. Oh no, it's going to be hundreds of billions more than this.

2. The Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi, ought to hang their heads in shame. Stripped to its essentials, what they did was vote practically en masse for a "solution" dictated to them by the White House and its vile inhabitant president. Think about it: this is George W. Bush's plan we're talking about. You like how all his other plans have worked out for eight years? Well, if you supported this giveaway to Wall Street, don't you even think about whining and crying when this POS doesn't work, and the country not only has to pony up more billions for more ailing capitalists but also gets further into deep and lasting depression. I guarantee you, we haven't seen the last of business bailouts. There's another whole world of sectors out there who are now going to come calling with their grasping little hands out. (What did I tell you? I didn't consider the individual US state sector. Arnold Schwartzenegger wants $7 billion to meet California's bills. . . . And so it begins.)

3. You think you're going to get an unbiased administration of this bill from Paulson, a former CEO mogul at Goldman-Sachs who's worth about $500 million? You don't? Well, then maybe all the frigging investment bankers who got us into this mess and who will be contracted to administer the bailout will give the country even-handed administration. If you believe that, you and tooth fairy are drinking buddies. Words haven't really been devised to describe the corruption to come, brothers and sisters.

4. Obama's administration--I do think he's going to win the election--is going to be consumed with cleaning up the shit piled up from the last 8 years, and it won't be very long before the Republicans will be blaming him for all the existing shit and all the shit that's going to result from this "rescue plan." Nobody will remember that it was Bush and his untrammeled market policies that contributed most mightily to the financial disaster.

5. Start praying right now, even if you don't believe in prayer. We ordinary citizens need all the help we can get.