Thank Gawd It Passed: Dude, where's my $700 billion?

[Fumesucker]

Once again the DFH contingent is proven to be correct and the pragmatic centrists wrong.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/12/17/700_billion/

Dec. 17, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- Giving $700 billion to a bunch of Wall Street bankers was never overwhelmingly popular. Back in October, the weekend after Congress passed what was supposed to be an emergency plan to save the economy, only 40 percent of voters said they liked the idea. But the stock market was tanking, and banks looked pretty woozy and, the theory went, the bailout would help stabilize things.

Oh, for those flush days of October. This won't be news to anyone with a 401K or without a winning lottery ticket, but even though Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has burned through almost all of the first $350 billion Congress authorized, it didn't quite turn things around. The infusion of money may have kept credit from tightening up further, but it certainly didn't jump-start the economy -- banks didn't resume lending to businesses and consumers. Stock prices never really recovered from their early autumn plunges, and more than half a million jobs vanished just last month. With the benefit of hindsight, lawmakers now express regret about the way the bailout was handled -- with few provisions for oversight of the banks or the Bush administration -- and the public hates it more than ever. The feeling that money and political capital were squandered even helped endanger the far cheaper and more popular bailout of the auto industry. So what went wrong -- and where did all that money go?

(..)

Now, even the people who designed the bailout say they're not happy about it. In the rush to action they didn't place enough controls on how the administration doled out the money, or what the institutions did with it once they got it. They also acquiesced to a one-sentence change requested by the Bush team that effectively protected the massive pay of Wall Street execs. "I don't think there's any way, under these circumstances, the administration would be able to get the resources," Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters Friday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reduced to scolding Bush and Paulson after the fact for their failure to use the money to help homeowners. "It was very clearly spelled out in the initial legislation that funds would be used for mortgage foreclosure forbearance," she said Monday. "It wasn't until ... we intensified the provisions that related to keeping people in their homes that this legislation even passed the House of Representatives. But it's been totally ignored by the administration. Absolutely nothing has been done to respect that part of the legislation, which is the only part of the legislation that had support in the Congress and enabled it to pass and become law."

[ixion]

1. Nancy, as usual, you were punk'd

you had a chance to do something right, and instead you bought into BushCo BS about needing the money immediately, and here we are now, a trillion dollars+ out of pocket and nothing is better.

The dem 'leadership' has been a great disappointment, IMO.