Bailout, or the biggest bank heist in history underway?

We’re all hearing a lot this weekend about the proposed bailout of the financial industry now being negotiated. The initial cost of the bailout, consisting of a government-created entity to retain bad debts like a massive toxic waste collection pond, is somewhere between $700 to $800 billion.

As in, somewhat less than a trillion with a very big T, but more than half a trillion.

That’s roughly $2333 out of the pocket of each and every U.S. citizen.

You can imagine the surprise on my ten-year old’s face when I told him he’ll owe that much money, in addition to the amount he owes for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. His eyebrows rose up into his hair line as he tried to digest the idea. “But where am I going to come up with that kind of money?” he asked. “Do I even get to say anything about this?”

Um, no, you don’t, son, and it’s not clear we’re going to have a say, either.

Yesterday we heard that the executives who led the various failed and failing financial entities all want their golden parachutes. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said this was a deal breaker.

Yeah, me, too, deal’s off as far as I’m concerned; you can’t help the little guy who got shafted with a crappy predatory loan, you don’t need to give into extortion to the tune of millions of dollars per executive. But they continued to work through the weekend on this, no one walked away.

It gets worse, if you can believe it. A copy of the plan leaked last evening reveals terms that should have stopped Paulson and Congress dead in their tracks, but apparently we have arrived at a point where everybody in negotiations is stupefied by the lack of sleep, or inherently criminal.

This following bit should set the public to pitchforks and torches:

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.

What? No oversight? No method by which any court in this country can put a stop to monetary transfers to which the public may object??

This is an enormous powergrab, and far greater reach than any bank robber could ever expect. This is carte blanche power, given to the Executive Branch, without so much as a by-your-leave from the public, an upending to the notion of co-equal branches of government, and all of it demanded by the Treasury.

What little pretension at oversight there is comes infrequently – only twice a year according to this leaked plan, in the form of a report. That’s absolutely absurd; why should the American people permit hundreds of billions of dollars to be doled out without any review whatsoever save for an after-the-fact announcement via semi-annual report?

I struggle for words at this point. This is bad, beyond words bad.

Even my ten-year old understands how bad it is to give people your check book and not ask any questions about money spent from that account; I’m sure he’d think it was robbery.

There are small signs of hope. Many economists along the political spectrum < a href=” http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/09/blank-check.html”>from the right to the left are aghast. And even Congress must be doing a double-take. A Democratic Congressperson has vented their unchecked spleen to a well-known blogger, saying,

Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can’t be any “add ons,” or addition provisions. Fuck that. I don’t really want to trigger a world wide depression (that’s not hyperbole, that’s a distinct possibility), but I’m not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers.
[snip]
We may strip out all the gives to industry in the predatory mortgage lending bill that the House passed last November, which hasn’t budged in the Senate, and include that in the bill. There are other ideas on the table but they are going to be tough to work out before next week.
[snip]
I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them.

Whew…at least one elected official is as angry as I am about this proposal; I hope that more half of them are this riled up.