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Wanda on the bank bailout

Posted By: sm on 2009-02-25
In Reply to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADr2KG5aso


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Who benefited from the bank bailout?

Wall Street, Citigroup, AIG, Fannie May/Freddie Mac, the car companies.


I don't want a check either but wouldn't be nice if they would give us the money instead of coming up with all these carppy bogged down packages?


What would you do if they would give us $30K or more?  That would probably cost less than what they are proposing and you know darn well, that money would go into the economy faster than their plan.


 


Bank Bailout Facts (2-min. video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JUWYEc0Fg&feature=related 
Bank Bail Out True Facts
 
GW started socialism with the bank bailout..
So go fry your baloney.
After seeing what happened when the last administration's bank bailout.....
There has to be some oversight somewhere! The banks can't/won't tell us what happened to the money...........
So much for transparency. Treasury refuses to give bank bailout information.

This again from the McClatchy news group, which is not conservative by any means:


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/65195.html


 


what exactly is a bank run?
x
Check your bank.........
A financial advisor on the Today Show this morning warned all Americans who have more than $100,000 in the bank, to shift their money to other banks that are FDIC insured. The FDIC only insures up to $100,000 per person. That does not mean different accounts within the same bank or different branches of the same bank. DIFFERENT insured banks. I, myself, do not have to worry about this as I don't even have a fraction of that, but I find the fact that this advisor felt the need to come on the air and spell it out very telling. She also said your bank will tell you that you just need to create more than one account within the same bank - NOT TRUE. She also said to watch the stocks of your bank - if stock prices continue to fall - get the he11 out!  BTW, greed is a sin, eh?
And our bank accounts are

in such wonderful shape today, right?


We now live in a fascist society where the Bush government is buying the banks.


Socialism would be a giant step forward.


Bank of Obama

 Because everyone deserves a bailout!


http://www.bankofobama.org/


Bank of America to cut 35,000 jobs.......sm
over the next 3 years.  Weren't they the ones who put money in your savings account every time you made a purchase? 

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4BA6ZD20081211?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
The feds should use the bank & Wall St.
Then put a lien on, and sell, their fancy mansions in upstate NY, their yachts, their Mercedes, etc.  Let their kids to go public school instead of fancy private ones.   They're the greedy ones who got us into this mess, let THEM pay for it, not us.
If it's a felony to incite a bank run, then
shouldn't these people on Wall Street be prosecuted?  After all, if they hadn't done what they did to the economy, then we wouldn't have to withdraw our money.
Yeah! Could I rob and bank and claim to be
nm
What is the bank bail-out if not socialism? s/m
Maybe you'd have better luck with your employees if you gave them a raise.  If you have a profit margin that allows you to give them a 25% bonus, surely a 10% raise wouldn't cause you to suffer too much.
Bank executives will be getting bonuses
and we are fighting over crumbs and religion.
"Central international bank" = sm
One-world currency. Interesting.
I was speaking about bank bailouts
not the stimulus. Two different things.

Since the banks are crying that they are losing money because of people not paying mortgages, etc., would it not make sense to boost them back up by providing the money THEY ARE GOING TO GET ANYWAYS to the homeowners first and therefore killing two birds with one stone?

Or no, lets just throw more money at them with no stipulations and no rules and bend over and continue to take it while they go on another vacation and laugh all the way to the bank. That definitely makes more sense.

Since people who rent aren't involved with the mortgage/bank crisis, no they would be left out of this one. But like Zville posted, they could be covered under the stimulus side of this "economic relief" that's being proposed.

How does it not tick you off that all the businesses are getting a bailout and "infusion" of cash but the average citizen is still going to suffer for the next two or three years?


The surplus also followed him out eh? We know because it's now in the bank accounts of the rich.
A lot of people made a lot of money during the Clinton years - that's real money, honey, and they're still rich, accounting for our current revenues. Without the Clinton boom years your president's buds (and your president himself, let us remind you) wouldn't have gotten their 100,000 tax break checks. Sure, the boom couldn't hold, but the point is that the favorable conditions created by a sounder Democratic fiscal policy allowed that boom to come about.

Now all we have is empty coffers, slashed public spending, and China owns us. Big improvement huh? Oops, but people like Frist are still getting over big time on their big time stock trades - all's clear in the upper 1% But since you likely aren't in it, it's hard to see what you find so appealing about being a credit slave one paycheck away from poverty. Is that working out good for you?
No need to wonder...current mortgage bank crisis...
brought to you courtesy of greedy democrats on Congress and greedy Democrats at the top of Fannie Mae. The handwriting is on the wall. This one's on you. McCain saw it coming in 2005 and the dems shut him down. Well, we are reaping what they sowed. To quote Toby Keith...how do you like them now?
Everyone and their mother withdraws their cash from the bank.
dd
No, not at all. But, leaves the bank with no money to loan.
dd
World Bank computer hacked
I don't believe for one minute the computers were hacked by some kids just trying to do it.  I find it very disturbing this originated in China.  Why haven't we been told about this before now, a year later?   This is China's government doing this.... When will we ever learn our lessons and stop doing business with communists countries.  We buy all their crap, because we are indebted to them to the tune of trillions of dollars, and they buy nothing from us.  Now there's fair trade at its best!!  Of course, what happens when you are indebted to someone/somthing?  You kiss their butts!!!!!!
Fed approves Chinese Bank CCB to open in US

Am I the only one who finds this scary?


Fed approves Chinese bank CCB to open office in US


Mon Dec 8, 5:15 pm ET


WASHINGTON (AFP) –– The US Federal Reserve said Monday it had authorized China Construction Bank, a leading Chinese state bank, to operate in the United States.


The proposed New York City branch of CCB "would engage in wholesale deposit-taking, lending, trade finance, and other banking services," the Fed said in a statement.


The US central bank recalled that China Construction Bank Corporation (CCB) is 57.0 percent owned by the Chinese state, 19.7 percent by US banking group Bank of America and 5.7 percent by Temasek Holdings, a sovereign wealth fund owned by the government of Singapore. The remainder of the capital is publicly traded.


CCB is the second-largest bank in China, with total assets of approximately 1.1 trillion dollars, it noted.


The Fed said it had determined that CCB had adequate anti-money laundering safeguards and had committed to respect US laws on money laundering.


CCB's own funds exceed the minimum set by the 1998 Basel Capital Accord and "is considered equivalent to capital that would be required of a US banking organization," the US central bank said.


CCB would be the fourth mainland Chinese bank -- excluding banks in Hong Kong -- to open operations in the US, after the Agricultural Bank of China, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications.


The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China's top bank, also has asked the Fed for authorization to open a branch in New York.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081208/pl_afp/uschinabankregulatebankingcompanyccb


Ahem. The West Bank is not theirs. Neither is Gaza.
So just how does that justify illegal settlements and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank?
Greenspan Backs Bank Nationalization

by: Krishna Guha and Edward Luce, The Financial Times


photo
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has come out in favor of nationalizing some banks. (Photo: Reuters Pictures)




    The US government may have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times.


    In an interview, Mr Greenspan, who for decades was regarded as the high priest of laisser-faire capitalism, said nationalisation could be the least bad option left for policymakers.


    "It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do."


    Mr Greenspan's comments capped a frenetic day in which policymakers across the political spectrum appeared to be moving towards accepting some form of bank nationalisation.


    "We should be focusing on what works," Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told the FT. "We cannot keep pouring good money after bad." He added, "If nationalisation is what works, then we should do it."


    Speaking to the FT ahead of a speech to the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, Mr Greenspan said that "in some cases, the least bad solution is for the government to take temporary control" of troubled banks either through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other mechanism.


    The former Fed chairman said temporary government ownership would "allow the government to transfer toxic assets to a bad bank without the problem of how to price them."


    But he cautioned that holders of senior debt - bonds that would be paid off before other claims - might have to be protected even in the event of nationalisation.


    "You would have to be very careful about imposing any loss on senior creditors of any bank taken under government control because it could impact the senior debt of all other banks," he said. "This is a credit crisis and it is essential to preserve an anchor for the financing of the system. That anchor is the senior debt."


    Mr Greenspan's comments came as President Barack Obama signed into law the $787bn fiscal stimulus in Denver, Colorado. Mr Obama will announce on Wednesday a $50bn programme for home foreclosure relief in Phoenix, Arizona. Meanwhile, the White House was working last night on the latest phase of the bailout for two of the big three US carmakers.


    In his speech after signing the stimulus, which he called the "most sweeping recovery package in our history", Mr Obama set out a vertiginous timetable of federal decisions in the coming weeks that included fixing the US banking system, submission next week of the 2009 budget and a bipartisan White House meeting to address longer-term fiscal discipline.


    "We need to end a culture where we ignore problems until they become full-blown crises," said Mr Obama. "Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles… but it does mark the beginning of the end."


Government prying into people's bank accounts nothing new.

And they're not just snooping on terrorists, as they claim.


http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06


Pay too much and you could raise the alarm


By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06



PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It's that everything changed after 9/11 thing.

But not Walter.

We're a product of the '60s, he said. We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges' behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn't call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn't try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn't changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

When you mess with my money, I want to know why, he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

The more I'm on, the scarier it gets, he said. It's scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to others, he said.


(Bob Kerr is a columnist for The Providence Journal. E-mail bkerr@projo.com.)



(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)


Let's riot and throw bricks through bank windows

Bailout

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our money, frist by inflation and then by deflation; the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks) will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered"


-President Thomas Jefferson


here's your bailout
I think that all the CEOs of the big three along with all their members of the board and whatnot, all the big wigs, that have made millions screwing people over for years and years should dip into their OWN pockets and sell a few houses, cancel a few vacations, cash in a few money markets and get their own companies out of debt.  Then, when the books are balanced, the people who have been making 80,000 a year to push a button should take a pay cut and NOT go on strike and live like the rest of real America.  Then they should be fine.
Bailout
if they fail, do you realize it would affect everyone. Millions of jobs in the auto industry alone. If people don't have jobs, they can't spend money anywhere. Stores will start to close, etc. It will affect everyone.
Bailout
I totally agree 1000% with your analysis - the only time these greedy CEO's give a hoot about us is when they see their profits increase.  You can bet your last five cents that if one of us went to them asking for money - they would call the police!!  It would be interesting to see  the salaries of CEO's in Europe as opposed to what these guys continually fleece us for...
About That First Bailout
Do you remember who told us "we had to act now or we might face dooms day (sic)" with all that bailout money? It was Hank Paulsen and George Bush. We may as well have flushed that first TARP payment down the toilet. There was no accountability, and no one knows where all that money went.

At least the present stimulus package has accountability built into it and some limits as to what can and can't be done with the money.
the bailout IS making

the US a socialist country - compliments of your beloved GWB and McPalin. congratulations you got your wish.


 


No Bailout for the rich
Say no to the bailout.  The FBI is investigating all of these companies for criminal mortgage fraud.
Why the rush for the bailout

There Is No Crisis--Summary by: Chris BowersTue Sep 23, 2008 at 16:22


Things are getting a little suspicious about this crisis.


1) Why did the Bush administration suddenly declare a crisis during the final two weeks when Congress would be in session during his presidency? Is it maybe because, after the election, Congress would know it wasn't dealing with Bush anymore?


2) If this is such a sudden crisis, why is it that the Bush administration was drawing up the plan for this bill for months beforehand?


3) Why is it that Congress is supposed to bail out many banks and firms that are actually quite successful and profitable right now, and not just those that are failing?


4) Why is Paulson blatantly lying to Congress about oversight?


5) Where did the $700 billion figure come from?


6) Why is Paulson urging that debate on the matter be held after the legislation is passed?The burden of proof should always be placed on those who are demanding a huge government bailout, not upon those who are skeptical that one is needed. And yet the questions keep mounting, with no answers in sight.


I am not saying that there is no need for government intervention. I am saying that the case for a $700 billion bailout is far from having been made. Until the case is made, there is no need to go forward. We will elect a new President in 42 days. We swear in a new Congress in 103 days. What is the rush? Why does this all of a sudden need to be done while the Bush administration is still in charge? The case hasn't been made, and answers are slow in coming, if they come at all. Chris Bowers :: There Is No Crisis--Summary


I don't agree with the bailout

We have some savings, but we still live paycheck-to-paycheck, not wanting to touch the savings.  I really don't agree that we taxpayers should have to fund this.  I think that the higher ups that walked away with 100s of thousands or even millions should have to pay for this.  Charge them with fraud and make them give it back.  I certainly don't feel I've put anyone in this situation and therefore don't feel I should have to pay for it. 


only 24% of us support the bailout
Yesterday it was reported only 24% of Americans support the bailout, 56% are opposed so 20% have no opinion. Senators' and reps' offices were flooded with calls and emails all day asking that the bailout be opposed. And I was one of those. Everyone should be contacting their own reps to express their opinions. That's they only way they will know what the people want.
Yes, and how about the bailout, ACORN, and
nm
Well.....look at it this way....if they don't push this bailout...
there are folks who know "where the bodies are buried." There is probably so much we DON'T know about all this...and yes, it is disgusting. Dodd and Frank, if they had an ounce of integrity, would apologize to the American people and resign. Pelosi, if SHE had an ounce of integrity, would demand it. So far John McCain is the ONLY one who has said someone should resign, and that was Christopher Cox, the Republican head of the SEC. He SHOULD resign. So should the treasury secretary, Paulson. Every member of that committee that voted back in 2006 to kill the bill McCain co-sponsored should resign. They should all be investigated criminally as well as far as I am concerned. I know the FBI is looking at Fannie/Freddie but talk about a day late and dollar short after Raines, Johnson, Howard, and Gorelick raped the American public for millions.

You're right. They should ALL have to go and start over.
SNL skit on the bailout. sm
Funny but sad because it is true.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/37758/saturday-night-live-c-span-bailout#s-p1-st-i1
TheSmokingGun/bailout
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1007083aig1.html
AIG spa trip, right after gov. bailout approved. This is disgusting.
Not a bailout, entirely voluntary (nm

x


I think we MT's need a bonus and a bailout!
nm
Again, I don't think the problem is the bailout itself, (sm)
but rather the way it's used, which right now leaves a lot to be desired.  As far as the rest of the country being screwed, well that's coming either way.  We have 2 choices--we can either do nothing, lose millions of jobs and go into a full-blown depression; or we can take a chance with bailing them out (preferably with stipulations) and owe a lot of money.  I think my preference would be to pay more taxes if need be, but still have a job so I could feed my family instead of not being able to do either of the above.
But, the first bailout passed because
the dems had the majority of votes. Am I right or did I lose my mind? DON"T ANSWER THAT QUESTION, PLEASE. LOL
Bailout dies in Senate.........sm
It's over, at least for this year.  I don't know, and the article did not state, whether there will be more talks after the first of the year. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4B50CL20081212?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
I have some ideas about auto bailout

Let the oil companies bail them out since they directly benefited from some of the bad management decisions.


Don't bail out the companies.  Give the money to the workers for re-education, etc., while the auto companies restructure.


My first suggestion was a little cynical, but I'm not sure why the second hasn't occurred to anyone.  ...


A little satire about the bailout scam. sm
A sense of humor can help in stressful times.

From The Nation to the nation:

"Dear Lucky American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson"

Bailout as a Nigerian Request for Help
Ron Paul's comments on the bailout. sm
Dr. No is still working for us in Congress.

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul
Letter to Congress re the bailout. sm
The bailout has stalled. Please contact your reps and tell them NO to the bailout. Phone calls, emails, and letters are having an impact. People have already lost their homes and jobs. According to experts in economics, this is going to cause inflation to soar and a depression.

Letter below is from someone who is on the verge of losing their home, and gave permission to copy it.

Almost 300 years ago the founders of this country believed in freedom and liberty so much that they risked everything—their property, prosperity, comfort, honor, and even their very lives—on the near impossible gamble of taking on the world’s greatest superpower, at that time, to win the liberty that we enjoy today. That example has inspired Americans through the ages until the present day to reach for greatness despite the presence of risk and uncertainty. Against these dangers the intrepid push forward, knowing the price of failure, yet never succumbing to fear because our system is so robust in its scope that failure can be overcome and the rewards of hard work eventually achieved. In these troubled financial times, we are tempted by fear to shy away from the responsibility that liberty requires and instead hearken to the safety net of socialism. George Washington and his men had no safety net. The price of failure for them was certain death.

More money can always be made, but once we give up our freedom for socialism we can only buy it back with blood and death. CongressPerson, that is too high a price for the rescue of a few banks that should have known better. Let them suffer the consequences of their actions. Let the markets buy up their assets and redistribute them as only a free market can. Bring back sound money and the value backed currency the Constitution requires. Stop the central bankers at the Federal Reserve from ruining our country. There will be some pain, just like there was in the winter at Valley Forge, but in the spring, the economy will thrive again just as did the army that won our freedom.

I call on you now CongressPerson to fight for our freedom. Fight with all your might and strength the way our troopers did at Cowpens. Do not surrender. Do not sell us out. Fight for us and our liberty CongressPerson, as if we were about to lose it…because we are.

RJH
Norman, OK

PS I am a homeowner in distress. I stand to avoid the specter of foreclosure if you pass the bailout…but PLEASE DON’T PASS IT! I would rather lose my house than see America lose her freedom. In time I can buy another house.
The Roundtable is chatting about the bailout.

Newt Gingrich, George Will, Steven Pearlstein, and Robert Reich are "debating".


The terms of the bailout will be posted on line around noon today. I think we all should read it to see what it's all about.