Who Cares What the People Think, RIGHT?!

On Saturday (9/27/08), Rasmussen Reports came out with a poll that showed public support for the current bailout bill down to just 24% among the American people!

SEE: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/general_business/support_for_bailout_plan_now_down_to_24

Yes, the package had to be put together quickly and “something needed to be done,” but the American people clearly don’t have much sympathy for fat-cat CEO's and even less for government functionaries, like Barney Frank who helped engineer this mess.

In another September 2008 Rasmussen poll 51% of those polled said the federal government had too much control over the economy already.

One provision that the House Republicans did get gutted was HUGE! They scuttled a provision in the bailout bill that would’ve put some of the profits from the sale of distressed assets the government buys into an affordable housing trust fund. That provision, section 105(d) of the bailout proposal, was removed according to reports from Politico and CBS News.According to The Politico, “ACORN, a Democratic ally, was not specifically directed any funds in the previous proposal, but money that went to state and local governments could then have been divvied out to the organization, which the GOP said was a deal breaker. Fevered opposition to the provision had become a viral sensation.”

While few Americans may be in the mood for a bailout, they feel benefits mainly the same CEOs that routinely walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars after, often lackluster performances, at best, that viewpoint is wrong.

This ISN’T “a stock market (or Wall Street) bailout,” it’s a credit market bailout.

The current problem is that short-term credit markets that even the healthiest businesses rely upon have become so restricted that businesses can’t access them and EVERY business relies on this short-term credit access.

That’s why so many otherwise healthy businesses, many with little exposure to the subprime mortgage debacle recently went under.

We NEED to get that short-term credit market repaired.

The question is, does this bailout do that?

The second question is, since government isn’t looking to keep and run any of the distressed companies it’s bailing out, seeking instead to set them up with merger partners and otherwise repatriate them back into the ocean of the private sector, where will the opportunities for investors lie and will that scenario set up even more dire investment scenarios, like the recent short-selling feeding frenzy that took down so many otherwise healthy companies.

Still, the people have largely been ignored in all this.


At the very least government should be making a much better effort to educate and sell the American people on this plan. Far better than merely sending Hank Paulson over to CBS’s 60 Minutes for a quick interview!


Worse still, is the fact, and THIS a large majority of the American people understand, that some of the very people who helped cause this crisis by retooling the Community Reinvestment Act back in 1994 to, in effect, mandate “bad” or high-risk loans, then using both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to both issue and then package nearly a TRILLION DOLLARS of “bad paper” as fraudulently misnamed “government-backed mortgage instruments,” to be sold to leading investment firms both here and around the world.


Those are people like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, who along with Jim Johnson, Frank Raines and others both in Congress and at Fannie and Freddie should be charged with felony malfeasance and in some cases, “abuse of office.”


The terrible thing about all this is that it’s a crisis of government abuse, NOT of Wall Street excess and too many in the mainstream media are too dumb to understand that.


Thankfully there are things like this...

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UPDATE: The Conservatives DID listen to the American people! Conservatives on BOTH sides of aisle listened to their constituents, with mail coming in better than 100 to 1 AGAINST the current bailout, 94 Democrats and 132 Republicans in the House opposed the bailout measure.

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Look, I support the measure, and even I acknowledge that these Conservatives did the right thing, in listening to their constituents. The government did a very poor job of explaining what this was (NOT a "Wall Street bailout" but a "short-term credit market" bailout)...if I'd thought this was a "Wall Street bailout," as our incompetent mainstream media keeps on calling it, then I'd have opposed it myself.

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Yes, the NYSE is down today...WAAAAY DOWN! But if this ultimately gives these Conservatives MORE leverage (and it SHOULD) then perhaps this won't be such a bad thing. Look, ideally I want Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines and the others at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who pushed almost $1 TRILLION in bad loans, as casually as a crack dealer peddles crack to be frog-marched out of Capitol Hill and into federal prisons as quickly as possible. I want Obama's connections to the fetid and misanthropic hate group ACORN to be exposed and ACORN's complicity, in fact, their major role in pushing for "credit socialism" made clear and widely known.
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I'd also like to see those associated with ACORN treated like the economic terrorists they are, in short to be treated no differently than members of other hate-groups.

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And YES, I want to see those on Wall Street who were complicit, who KNEW of the toxic nature of all this bad debt to be treated no differently than the Enron guys, the Tyco crew. Of course, I'd really like to see Fannie's and Freddie's two biggest apologists in Congress (Barney Frank and Chris Dodd) treated that exact same way.

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Go on, get'er done my fellow Conservatives.