Article Contributed on: 9/28/2008 2:51:34 PM
Finally, on Sunday Afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives has released the 106 page "Discussion Brief" of the infamous $700 billion bailout plan.
You can see it here. They will ask the House to vote on it in less than 24 hours. One of the more jarring insertions in the proposed bailout is right up front in Section 101. This section gives the U,S. Treasury Secretary the right to "purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled
assets from any financial institution..." Note that the financial institution does not have to
actually own the troubled asset. It merely needs to want to sell it.
This whole "mortgage mess" started with the concept of securitizing mortgages. The way this was done was that a Wall Street Bank such as Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York, etc. would sell shares in a trust set up by the Wall Street Bank to (mostly) foreign investors. With the foreclosure situation as it is, the main parties who made the bad investments are foreign investors.
We are a democracy. We, the people, are in charge. Other countries are not so fortunate. There are monarchies like Saudi Arabia that do not have to answer to the people. They simply take all of their natural resources and sell them for money for the King.
In addition to monarchies,there are political dictatorships such as China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela who have raked in huge amounts of our financial resources since the imposition of "World Trade" by the Clinton Administration. These dictatorships and monarchies have established Sovereign Wealth Funds to play the market on Wall Street. They sell us oil. They sell us toys at Walmart. We sell them little.
Until the unravelling of this distorted system in August of 2007, we simply reimported our own money back from these monarchies and dictatorships. They bought bonds and securities. A lot of these were mortgage backed securities.
The new, desparately conceived bailout plan working its way through Washington would now give these dictatorships our taxpayer dollars under the supposition that they would go back to buying our debt as they have since the Clinton "World Trade" fiasco began. The bailout promises that the game would continue like it has for the past several years. After all, Iran, China and Russia are our best friends.
Yeah, right.
There is a cloistered, insular mindset that exists from Washington to New York. We see it in the newscasts and we see it in the politicians who apparently are buying into this 700 billion dollar joke.
It is refreshing to see that those of us that live in the United States of America (as opposed to those in the Wash-New York corridor) can spot a dog when we see one. The email, phone, and polling data all show strong opposition to this bad bill.
Please contact all available Congressmen, Senators and news outlet, Let them know your opinion.