get on the phone and call your congresscritters. They all suck. I don't have a problem telling them they suck.
Journalist Edmund L. Andrews wrote for the New York Times 19 September 2008:
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The Bush administration, moving to prevent an economic cataclysm, urged Congress on Friday to grant it far-reaching emergency powers to buy hundreds of billions of dollars in distressed mortgages despite many unknowns about how the plan would work.
Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, made it clear that the upfront cost of the rescue proposal could easily be $500 billion, and outside experts predicted that it could reach $1 trillion.
The outlines of the plan, described in conference calls to lawmakers on Friday, include buying assets only from United States financial institutions — but not hedge funds — and hiring outside advisers who would work for the Treasury, rather than creating a separate agency. Democratic leaders immediately pledged to work closely with Mr. Paulson to pass a plan in the next week, but they also demanded that the measure include relief for deeply indebted homeowners, not just for banks and Wall Street firms.
At the end of a week that will be long remembered for the wrenching changes it brought to Wall Street and Washington, Mr. Paulson and Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, told lawmakers that the financial system had come perilously close to collapse. According to notes taken by one participant in a call to House members, Mr. Paulson said that the failure to pass a broad rescue plan would lead to nothing short of disaster. Mr. Bernanke said that Wall Street had plunged into a full-scale panic, and warned lawmakers that their own constituents were in danger of losing money on holdings in ultra-conservative money market funds.
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Alexander Del Mar, a graduate mining engineer, and appointee to several government offices during his lifetime, wrote, in his book Science of Money (1889):
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The vast and progressive populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States of America, who, every ten or fifteen years, are permitted to float upon the full tide of commercial activity, are compelled at alternate intervals to yield up a large portion of their profits in trade to a body of cosmopolitan financiers, "who toil not, neither do they spin," but who are enabled to control the markets of the world and turn its activities largely to their own advantage. These "squeezes" are fatuously termed commercial crises, and their periods commercial cycles. Some learned Economists have even connected them with the spots on the sun! ...the commercial community has been subjected to alternate epochs of monetary contraction and expansion, in which much of what it accumulates at one period is insidiously filched from it at another.
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In my own personal opinion, I don't like the idea of America's economic system being held hostage by "a body of cosmopolitan financiers", and them, and the two political parties that have enabled all this to happen should be swept from government. They are all a disgrace to America, and to all who work for a living.