Uncle Sam wants to bail out Wall St. with my money? Whatever. It makes me sick but I suppose it needs to happen. However, attaching a hundred billion dollars of tax breaks and other pork to the bill makes me want to break things. I hope the house republicans kill this thing.
America has a very fundamental decision to make regarding the nature of our capitalism. Wall St. CANNOT continue to have it both ways. They take insane risks and we make them whole? Not without some strings brother and I see no strings in this bill, no commitment to regulate the industry going forward. If public money is to be used to fix this mess then the public interest needs to be looked after. I view this in the same vein as Title IX that drove the emergence of womens sports in educational institutions. The Universities that took public money had to let the girls play and if Wall St. takes public money, the regulators need to be able to do their thing.
Don’t even start with the “government made them do it” argument. It is baloney. If you are the CEO of a company and you allow your company to run in a manner that makes it insolvent, you have but one person to blame.
Here endeth the populist rant…:)
October 2, 2008 at 9:58 am
Wow – you Republicans aren’t giving President Bush much love
these days, even when he says “pretty please”.
October 2, 2008 at 12:06 pm
And we have both major candidates supporting the bailout. And Rep. Frank Wolf supports it. I called his office yesterday to voice my opinion and the guy on the other end said “thanks”. Forget the fact that the Government stared this mess in the late 1990s by expanding the Community Reinvestment Act to allow (or require) banks to lend to un-credit-worthy borrowers with subprime loans and the banks were only too happy to comply — get their fees, raise their share prices and get Fannie to take these risky loans off their books.
I have yet to find out if the bailout plan addresses some of this systemic failures rather than a bribe to politicians with tax-cut candy to get them to vote “yes”. It’s sickening!
October 2, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Councilman Harrover,
First I would like to take this time to thank you for the changes you have made to your contact listing. However; one change was not caught. You currently have the phone number for Property Maintenance listed as 703-257-8273. This is a Zoning phone number (mine to be honest) and I have to transfer people to Property Maintenance. The phone number for Property Maintenance is 703-257-8424. When you get a chance could you please update this information.
Thank you for your assistance.
Rose
October 2, 2008 at 3:00 pm
done.
October 2, 2008 at 4:16 pm
The Bill will pass. However, it must be noted that Wall Street is like professional sports. If the manager of a baseball team gets fired for doing a bad job, he gets hired by another team the following season. It’s a pretty tight knit “ole boys network” they got there.
October 2, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Lets also blame the illegals who simply walked away from mortgages when they could not longer afford to pay it and because they used false or stolen ids to get the loans in the first place. We also need to blame those people who purchased homes out of their price range using questionable loans. People who purchased homes using no interest loans were fooling themselves.
If everyone paid their mortgages and loans on time, does anyone think we would be in this mess? I don’t think so.