The tax break for the rich wasn’t enough, the GWOT siphon on the US treasury isn’t flowing fast enough, CEO bonuses aren’t enough, usury is not unregulated enough, bankruptcy laws to ruin small borrowers aren’t predatory enough, the disparity between rich and poor is not obscene enough.
It’s not enough that the parasitic rich contribute only smoke and mirrors to the economy. Now the [investment] bank robbers are dropping even that pretext to demand that US taxpayers simply fork over the money. And don’t anyone try to follow them out.
Michael Hudson on paying for the bailout AND the fallout:
It is bad enough for the government to buy $700 billion of bad bank investments at prices that no private-sector investor has been willing to approach. This itself is an undeserved giveaway to the financial institutions that caused the problem by living recklessly in the short run. But making them – and indeed, helping them – pay back this gift with the aid of favorable tax and deregulatory policies will simply shift the cost off their shoulders onto those of bank depositors, credit-card users, mortgage borrowers and hapless pension-fund contributors to the money managers who have taken most of the current income in the form of commissions, salaries and bonuses to themselves. This will sharply add to the price of doing business in the United States, and specifically to the economy’s debt overhead by the banks making even more predatory loans.
It gets worse. In order for the existing junk mortgages to be “made good,” real estate prices must be raised further above the ability to pay for this year’s five million homeowners in arrears and facing default. Is this a good thing? Is it good to raise access prices for housing even more, forcing new homebuyers to go further into debt than ever before to gain access to housing? Mr. Paulson has directed the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA (Federal Housing Authority) to re-inflate the real estate market. They are to pump nearly a trillion dollars into the mortgage market.
Fiscal policy is also to be brought to bear to turn the real estate market around by pressuring cities and states to “help homeowners pay their mortgage debts” by cutting property taxes. The idea is to leave more revenue available for property owners to pay mortgage bankers. Unfortunately, this will oblige cities to make up these cuts by taxing labor and sales, running deeper into debt than they already are, or cutting back their spending on basic infrastructure, education and public services and continue shortchanging their pension funds. This is the price to be exacted to “protect the taxpayer’s interest” by bailing out irresponsible banks. The solution is to let them make even more money by acting in a yet more predatory way.
And:
The most egregious pretense is that the problem is only temporary, not structural. We are merely “freeing up” the market for new loans. This is precisely the opposite of what the classical economists meant by “free markets.” What America has is a bad debt problem, not a “liquidity” problem. There is no “illiquidity” when people refuse to buy a junk mortgage on a property worth only a fraction of the mortgage’s face value. Many of these bad mortgage loans are fraudulent. The Treasury bailout seeks to make $700 billion of fictitious financial claims “real” – that is, way overvalued as compared to their actual worth(lessness).
With all this bad private debt being hauled in by the US government hardly any notice has been given to the idea that the US Federal Government itself is putting itself at risk of default, too? In a way a governmental default (declaration of bankruptcy) would be a sort of poetic justice for the people of a country whose government has played an integral part in putting other governments around the globe into default with creditors in the past. 
Do you have any ‘toxic debts’? Maybe you moved out of an apartment and the place put hundreds of dollars of extra charges on your credit record claiming you did damages, even though these claims are false? Maybe you ran up 2 cents over on a debit card transaction, and the bank ran up their ‘overdraft protection’ charges on you? Maybe you were sold a junker and it fell apart a couple of miles off the lot? Are they still trying to collect payments from you? 
Democratic party-tied websites are spouting much the same analysis of the current economic crisis, which is simply that in their point of view, capitalism is great, it just needs ‘regulation.’ Give us a break, People! 
Watching the US Big Business government try to fix their economic flat is a lot like watching a driver 
To put things in perspective, it helps to know that Lehman Brothers holdings were 10 times the value of Enron’s, a company that also fell into bankruptcy amidst scandal. But the collapse of the American economy is not over yet, as other companies, such as Washington Mutual and AIG also appear to be on their way to going under. Here is what wikipedia has to say about AIG, the 18th largest company in the world, and one that in 2006 was fined over 1.5 billion dollars for fraud. 
…All except the really thick headed now know that the US party is over, though certainly there are a lot of thick headed Americans. So thick are they, in fact, that most Americans still believe the party is actually only over for a very short time, and that all will self-correct itself somehow! 
So many Americans seem to want to believe that China is a communist country despite the obvious fact that its capitalist economy’s products remain so deadly due to lack of any real government regulation rather than any supposed socialistic government over-regulation. 
COPY CAT LOSERS
It’s graft plain and simple. Especially since the money wasn’t burnt up in a war, or blown to the winds by Katrina. No, this money was funneled, by the supertanker load, to Bush and Cheney cronies in oil, weapons and banking.
As the US government has used taxpayers money to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, many liberals have seen this as only yet another sign of Republican Party perfidy. But look at Barney Frank, Democrat for a second. His job is Chair of the Financial Services panel since the Democrats took the leadership of the House in 2007. What’s he been up to during this bailout sale of US Treasury dollars?