Congress and the President told us that the $700 billion bailout for banks and Wall Street was necessary to help Main Street, and it had to be done RIGHT NOW.  No time to stop and think about doing something actually useful – if we don’t give the financial industry all our money RIGHT NOW the whole economy will grind to a halt.

Well, the stock market is still falling, more layoffs and plant closings have been announced, and government officials are actually using the word recession as something more than a vague concept that could be rendered obsolete merely by throwing money at banks.

So what is going to get done with this $700 billion?

Suntrust announced better than expected profits, but says it still expects to take advantage of the bailout money.  PNC is using our money to buy up National City.  So far, the bailout is being used for the big banks to get bigger.  How does this help the economy?  How does reduced competition in the banking industry help consumers and small businesses?

It doesn’t.  It only helps the big banks.

Does it help those of us actually paying our mortgages on property that was overpriced due to the artificial demand for housing created by a mortgage pyramid scheme that separated those who generated the loans (and collected their commissions) from those who had to actually collect on them?

It doesn’t.  The bubble has burst and our equity is gone.

On the other side, we have politicians calling for the government to step in and let people keep homes that they were never able to afford and should never have bought in the first place.  When did “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” become “you owe me a house and a car”?

Maybe the entire working middle class of America should go to Vegas, keep gambling until all the credit cards and home equity lines are completely maxed out, and declare bankruptcy.  It seems to be working for the banks and for Congress.

The latest attempt at Welfare for Wall Street is underway in the Senate, with a new bailout bill, not restructured to get taxpayers more for their money, but with other, totally unrelated, items added to it.  Apparently, Harry Reid thinks a spoonful of sugar will help the bailout go down.

The bailout now appears as an amendment to a bill requiring health insurance to provide mental health coverage that is no more restrictive than general medical coverage.   Also packaged in with this is another one year patch on the Alternative Minimum Tax (how about a permanent fix for this indexing it to inflation,  boys & girls?), the extension of tax breaks for alternative energy and conservation (should have been passed on its own months ago), and tax relief for disaster victims.

These are all separate issues that need to stand (or fall) on their own, not be used as excuses to waste taxpayer money on insulating banks from their own bad business decisions, and further proof of why we need the Legislative Accountability Amendment.