The Treasury’s Financial-Bailout Proposal to Congress is another power grab by the Bush Administration! It is not a solution to the problem!

The problem with this massive 700 billion dollar bailout is that it bails out the wrong people!

It saves the giant financial institutes from taking a monstrous financial hit after they gambled with their money and the money of the people they talked into purchasing mortgages that they simply could not afford. But they SHOULD take a huge financial hit. That is how capitalism works.

The people who need to be rescued are the homeowners who trusted the advice of these criminals and purchased homes that they were not going to be able to afford. Sure we can blame them, but they only accepted the risk because they were told by trusted financial institutes that everything would work out fine. So now the financial giants still get to call themselves "giants" but the homeowners are just going to continue faulting on their loans. This is a temporary solution and will not solve the real problem.

And who is going to foot this 700 billion dollar bill you ask? Well you and your children will of course. It just gets added to the national debt. (According to the Star Tribune: To accommodate the bailout, the proposal would raise the national debt ceiling from $10.6 trillion to $11.3 trillion. )

If you click the title of this post you will find the actual proposal being put before Congress right now. If you read it carefully you will see that it gives absolute control to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to do with this money whatever the hell he wants. If you are too lazy to click the link then you can read the most important and frightening part right here:

Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

So the Secretary of the Treasury will get TOTAL control over this money, and NOBODY will be allowed to oversee his decisions or provide any input. Does THAT seem like a good idea to anybody? I mean wasn't he and the Bush administration the ones in charge when this crisis occured?

Well Randi Rhodes, progressive radio personality, and out spoken critic of this bailout offers this alternative idea to the one offered by the Bush administration.

1. Give Homeowners the ability to negotiate home loans, car loans, credit card debt .
Set up a Resolution Trust Corporation to buy back homes we can't afford to keep with a Board of Directors to monitor all purchases and sales.
2. Immediately force Financial Institutions to stop paying dividends to shareholders.
Sell the hard assets of failed financial institutions, offices, buildings, computers, desks, any real property they owned.
3. Oversight on the entire Bailout process through a Board of Directors to oversee any auction of company assets.
4. Charge CEOs with fraud and levy huge fines on those who profited from Fraud and Misery.
Enact a law that states that a CEO can not make more than 144 times the amount the lowest paid worker makes.
5. Ban NO BID contracts with shadowy people who for a profit will price and sell assets, loans, banks

Yeah is it okay if we offer this Secretary of the Treasury job to Randi Rhodes? Because her idea makes a hell of lot more sense then Paulson's does.

Liberal radio talk show host Randi Rhodes is attacked.

Randi Rhodes was mugged on Sunday night on 39th Street and Park Ave, nearby her Manhattan apartment, while she was walking her dog Simon.

According to Air America Radio late night host Jon Elliott, Rhodes was beaten up pretty badly, losing several teeth and will probably be off the air for at least the rest of the week.

The article goes on to make accusations that this might be an attack on Rhodes because of her liberal views.

I find that kind of talk to be completely irresponsible.

You know many of us on the left make make note of how quickly the Right wingers attempt to make everything that they disagree with some kind of attack. A conversation about religion is an attack on Christianity, a disagreement about the war is the work of a traitor, any coverage of some of the criminal activity from this White House is simply because the press hates the President, and so on.

If we are going to define ourselves as the voices of reason we certainly cannot go down the same path. All we have heard is that Randi was attacked and badly injured. There has not even been an "official" confirmation as of yet. So let's leave the conspiracy theories in the back room for, at least, the time being.

Trust me when I say I would not put much past the Wingers or the White House, but I will have to have much more evidence before I "go there".

Update: It turns out Randi Rhodes WAS NOT MUGGED. She simply fell. I am not going to delete this post because the point I made about not jumping to conclusions is even more relevant in light of the facts. Let us strive to be careful people, there are Americans who may actually be listening to us.