Thus we have likely been watching the D.C. Street Theater (recently back from nationwide tour over the August recess at Town Hall meetings in every state) with some amazement. Knowing that the truth is that health care is the third leading cause of death, perhaps wondering if greater access for some of the ~50 million Americans without insurance is actually going to “fix” what’s wrong with health care in this country. Which is #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations in both access and outcomes.

One of the more “important” results of what is now more honestly being called Health Insurance Reform is the promise of government subsities to enroll as many of those ~50 million uninsured Americans in for-profit health care as possible. This is of course a way to compensate for-profit insurers for new regulations that will prevent them from refusing to insure those with pre-existing conditions, rescinding policies when the person gets sick or injured, and other racketeering practices that have 3 of every 4 of the “medically bankrupt” bankrupt despite HAVING insurance.

So I went Googling to find out if the uninsured and underinsured use a lot of health care, since that doesn’t ring true. What Google responded with were various evaluations of how much the uninsured as a CLASS cost the delivery system every year. The best example is a pdf from Health Affairs entitled:

How Much Medical Care Do The Uninsured Use, And Who Pays For It?

Here we can see in black and white that the uninsured use the medical care delivery system far, far less often than anybody else. If we divvy up the total cost of health care in America evenly amongst a rounded 350 million citizens, the cost is $7439 per person every year. But the uninsured – 50 million of the 350 milliion – only cost $1253 per person. That means in real terms the per capita cost to 300 million insured Americans must go up to over $8250 per year!

Wow! Looks like the uninsured are a positive bargain! At least, in actuarial terms, as an insurance hack would view such things. Thus an extremely desirable, low-risk pool of potential patsies to bilk.

Now, we all know that most of overall expenditures reflect people who use way more than an equal share of medical care per year. In addition to the uninsured who use little health care, there are tens of millions more Americans who also don’t use the health care system unless they have to. Co-pays and deductibles have been rising as fast as premiums (at many times the rate of annual inflation), so even the middle class doesn’t have money to go to doctors anymore.

So what we’re looking at (in order of importance for the Congress) in the matter of health insurance reform is that -

1. The for-profit insurance companies are so RICO crooked that they absolutely must be regulated severely.

2. Co-pays and deductibles are completely unreasonable (and getting worse fast), making even expensive insurance these days useless except for Big Ticket items. For which you have to fight hard, threaten to sue, or go bankrupt. Unacceptable for those who have to eat the losses (We The People).

3. In order to get items 1 and 2 accomplished, the insurers must be ‘given’ that pool of ~50 million people who barely use the system at all. They can make good money on these people.

4. The “Public Option” we’ll end up getting will be a subsidy to the insurers to cover the people who seldom use health care, and the minimal pay-out for those who do.

The only way a public option can actually control costs (beyond any limits imposed on the insurers, which will be made up for by the increased pool) is for it to be a government-run single-payer system. One that bargains for prices on everything, and with clout. That is not what we’ll get, so all this is just shine to disguise a bailout of the insurers in exchange for absolutely necessary regulation of their fraudulent tendencies.

The pool of uninsured in this country is very desirable for profit-oriented insurance companies, but most of them cannot afford $3000 apiece a year for premiums. Regulation that limits their ability to refuse pre-existing conditions, drop people for no apparent reason when they get sick, or simply refuse to honor their contracts, is going to cut into the for-profit industry’s bottom line. And that bottom line is and has long been extremely lucrative. They’d love nothing better than to get their hands on all those relatively healthy people, whose premiums will be paid no-questions-asked by the government.

And what does the government get? Coverage of the Big Ticket items for the generally healthy population. They’ll spend about $3000 per capita for the policies with large personal deductibles and co-pays. Then when one of those people has a bad accident or comes down with cancer and costs $50,000 that year, the actual cost of the care is covered. That the difference will likely bankrupt the patient matters not. The bailout here is for the insurers and the government, not for the people.

Health insurance is not health care. It’s a futures market on the suffering of real people. Because health care in this country is more dangerous than not getting health care (unless you’ve got heart disease or cancer), there are tens of millions of people in this country who avoid the system like the plague. Because it IS a plague.

So… wake me up when they start talking about addressing what’s really wrong with health care in this country. Nothing coming out of Congress about insurance reform is going to change the lives of those of us on a Shoestring Budget. The government will buy insurance to protect the system against us if we get hurt or sick. Most of us weren’t worried about them in the first place.

The biggest bank failure of 2009 happened last week when the FDIC moved to shut down Colonial BancGroup of Alabama, along with four other banks, bringing the total thus far this year to more than 70. A quick deal with BB&T to purchase Colonial caused its shares to rise. FDIC will be shouldering much of the losses, of course, which adds billions to the bailout of the banking system while at the same time working to further bank consolidation for the wealthiest banks still standing.

Such situations are a ‘win-lose’ proposition. Win for BB&T and their stockholders, lose for We the Taxpayers. This scheme where the feds cap the buyer’s losses at taxpayer expense is just another outrage to the hard-pressed public at a time when all the glorious pronouncements of economic recovery have yet to even begin to touch the lives of the general public still losing jobs at a high rate while no new jobs seem to be forthcoming.

And on top of the still-dismal economic situation for average people in this country, now we have the extremely contentious health care reform debate ongoing that looks more and more like bad street theater every day. Between the noisy hoards of idle old folks bused around the country to shut down discussion of provisions during Town Hall meetings held by vacationing congresscritters, and the absurd lies being spewed by the usual suspects at FoxNews and right wing radio, it’s looking more and more like the final result will be a significant new tax on the working poor that will be earmarked directly to the health insurance industry by means of mandatory purchase of junk insurance.

The situation is really health insurance reform, though reform isn’t really a good title either considering how much the Death by Spreadsheet crowd will end up getting from the public directly and from the government as subsidies. Yes, they will have to stop excluding anyone with a pre-existing condition, retroactively canceling policies if the insured person gets sick, and simply not paying for covered health care after the fact. But they will more than make up for however much this costs them by the ~40 million new policies the uninsured will have to purchase, and with government subsidies for many of those as well as losses incurred by having to honor their contracts.

And I am sure readers know that “junk insurance” – insurance that has a high deductible and hefty co-pays – isn’t going to help a person living on a shoestring budget already. Whatever ‘extra’ money those people might have saved over months to pay for a doctor’s visit will be taken by the insurers for that junk insurance. Leaving the working poor even worse off than they were before.

Even the so-called “Public Option” Obama and other Democrats have been touting is just another insurance option. Basic buy-in Medicaid, for which the government plans to auto-deduct from people’s bank accounts to make sure their premiums get paid on time. No word yet on whether they’ll do that for bank accounts that don’t have enough money in them to cover the deduction (like mine, for instance), thus causing families to suffer huge bank overdraft charges and messing up their other payment plans, or if a too-slim bank account qualifies people for automatic subsidy to make those insurance payments. But if I were to guess, I’d guess it’s just going to shaft the barely getting by yet again by throwing their bare budgeting into chaos and costing them more than they can pay.

Isn’t it funny how the wealthy and well-off are somehow able to convince themselves that we at the low end of the spectrum somehow have lots and lots of ‘extra’ money they should be able to take at will?

At any rate, we will not know until Christmas at least what the health care bill looks like or what’s in it. None of us should be holding our breath hoping for real reform or actual access to health care. In the end it’s way more likely that the government will simply be able to claim that they’ve ‘fixed’ the access problem – those ~50 million uninsured and ~100 million underinsured – so the U.S. will no longer rank #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations on all measures of health care. While We the People will simply be poorer than we were before. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect to be so long as people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are spouting lies about killing granny and the Medicare crowd is hollering for the government to keep their hands off their Medicare. Stupid and/or evil people always seem to win in this country.

If you haven’t called or written your representatives and senators yet, please do so. We don’t have much of a voice in what happens in this country, but they at least need to know we’re out here and want real access to health care instead of just another theft of what little we do have. Then when we lose we’ll have earned our own bitching rights!

One of my favorite series bloggers sarahnity has a weekly series at Daily Kos called “Frugal Fridays” that offers different tips and ideas every week, by her and a number of volunteer authors, on how to make your money go farther, how to earn money on the side, and how to hang on to what you’ve got. Last Friday the theme was frauds and scams geared toward those being most harmed by the current economy, entitled Don’t Get Fooled Again.

I’m just going to list the major confidence games going around in recent weeks/months, and the several resources and good advice offered to help people determine if something’s on the up-and-up or just more grifters targeting the weak to make themselves strong. The series is awesome, definitely worth bookmarking by all readers of this blog and checked every Friday afternoon for the latest in resources for the frugal.

The major scams making the rounds these days – particularly via the internet – are sometimes old and sometimes new. There’s the standard Work from Home sting where you have to pay to find out who’s hiring. If someone wants your money before showing you the want ads, it’s likely a scam. Real employers aren’t looking for you to pay them, they’re seeking people to pay for good work.

Then there’s the new-ish trick of Facebook identity theft where a clever grifter assumes an identity from among your networking ‘friends’ (often a relative) to beg for money. Be suspicious if someone on your Facebook page suddenly asks for money. Often the real person knows nothing about it – so check on regular email before sending anything.

There are also property tax scams going around where someone tells you you’re paying too much for property recently devalued. All you have to do is send money and the scammers won’t do anything for you. These can come in the regular mail too, so always do your homework and check with your real property tax officials about what’s what. If you really do pay too much, they’ll let you know for free. In line with this there are also housing and mortgage frauds, where someone offers you a “special rate” to refinance, take your money and disappear. Don’t fall for it.

There are more, of course. Please click on Sarah’s linked diary and check them out, there is good advice on how not to be victimized and who to report suspected scams to in your state and locality.

Surely that odd finding is another consequence of asking the wrong question the wrong way, so perhaps more than 11% of likely voters are fairly aware that the POTUS doesn’t manage the economy as part of his (or someday maybe, her) job description. but judging from how little (and poorly taught) civics is included in a public school general education these days, maybe this misconception is just that widespread.

As Gene Healy wrote at the time in The Cult of the Presidency…, “Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging.”

In February of 2006, when the inevitability of burst bubbles of debt and oncoming serious recession/depression became too obvious for those paying attention to ignore, Robert J. Samuelson wrote in defense of increasing finger-pointing toward the G.W. Bush White House for Newsweek magazine -

We have a $14 trillion economy. The idea that presidents can control it lies between an exaggeration and an illusion. Our presidential preferences ought to reflect judgments about candidates’ character, values, competence and their views on issues where what they think counts: foreign policy; long-term economic and social policy – how they would tax and spend; health care; immigration. Forget the business cycle.

Now that the “deepening recession” of 2006 has resulted in the complete financial failure of the world economic system in September of 2008, there’s a lot of talk from pundits and the public about what Obama can or should be doing, but the president has no direct control over the Federal Reserve, no control at all over Wall Street or the insurance industry, and basically no control over how much of his budget gets enacted by Congress – where the 1-2% of it that qualifies as discretionary spending gets spent.

He can appropriate emergency funding (if the Fed and Wall Street agree) for stimulating the economy, he can lobby Congress to support deficit spending policies while making promises about the things he really does have control of – like our current ~$10 billion a month commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan – and he can plead with or bamboozle the public over the airwaves to go along. That’s about it.

So buckle up for the ride, it may get rougher before it gets smoother.

For a great many regular hard-working, tax-paying American citizens the way money works in the modern world is very much a mystery. This is not surprising, considering that money has always been a mystery shrouded in mythical associations, psychological phobias and religious overtones. And designed to be thus by those who do know how money works. When the US Federal Reserve was established in 1913, it was not actually made a National Bank under the control of the government, it was established by and for the wealthiest bankers and Wall Street barons as an independent entity with only ceremonial ties to the federal government.

In a critique of the ancient psychological “money complex” in his book Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown explored the debt-guilt association in the essay Filthy Lucre. Brown wrote, “Whatever the ultimate explanation of guilt may be, we put forward the hypothesis that the whole money complex is rooted in the psychology of guilt.”

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that a development in late June of 2008 that rocked the American financial world went largely unreported in this country. It appeared in an article of Spiegel Online on June 26, 2008, entitled The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve.

It seems that the International Monetary Fund [IMF] became concerned about the rate of inflation Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was allowing in 2008, and how that was affecting the price of goods – primarily crude oil – all over the world and translating into flashing neon signs of coming recession. Because the world’s financial dealings are tied to the US dollar’s value, the IMF exercised an option under its bylaws that it had never before exercised in regards to the United States: it scheduled an audit of the entire US financial system.

As part of that audit the Fed, the SEC, the major investment banks, mortgage banks and hedge funds were to hand over confidential documents to the IMF auditors. About two thirds of IMF member states have undergone this process since the Fund was started, so the US really didn’t have the power to opt out. President Bush refused for seven long years of his administration to allow the IMF audit, even as he ran up the debt grotesquely with his oil wars, no-bid contracts, free-for-all bubble-blowing on Wall Street, etc. Your basic Republican cash-out before turning the country over to Democrats who spend 4 or 8 years thereafter trying hard to repair the damage the greedheads have done.

Bush finally agreed to the IMF audit, so long as it didn’t begin until his last weeks in office and isn’t scheduled to end until after he was gone. 2010, to be exact. The auditors took up residence last July, just two months before the CDS bubble burst and took both Wall Street and the Fed down with it. Bernanke had already lowered the interest rates so drastically that he practically had to pay banks to borrow money, and this left him no leverage as the shit hit the fan. When our economy tipped, so did everyone else’s. As the IMF was no doubt concerned about.

It’s hard to know who is most responsible for the fix we’re in. George Bush’s wars, his friends’ greed, the Fed’s inaction, the funds’ CDS pyramid scheme, the insurers’ ridiculous gambling bets, or the oil companies who drove the prices up so far in the months before the election that half of America stopped driving (thereby cutting demand way down even as the oil barons racked up obscene profits). We may suppose the IMF is going to find out.

The best indicator that there was collusion and much back room dirty dealing going on is the fact that the audit began in ernest (the paperwork was due) on September 30, 2008, the end of the fiscal year, though the warnings had been issued in June. September 30, 2008 also just happens to be the exact date that George W. Bush claimed that half a trillion dollars’ in immediate bailout money just HAD to be in the hands of those institutions the IMF was planning to audit, or the economy will collapse!

Could it all have been not just unethical, but illegal even by whatever rudimentary banking and investment rules remained after W. wiped most actual regulations off the books early in his term? Does this explain the mass exodus to off-shoring havens of the bonus babies We the People have been forced to pay off with our hard-earned dollars? Will there come a time of reckoning when the world’s crookedest greedheads and game-players will be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity?

Stay tuned, dear readers. This one is bound to keep rearing its dragon head as the audit proceeds. Should be interesting!

Links:

The Shrinking Influence of the US Federal Reserve
Corrente: IMF to audit US Financial System
Did IMF Audit Lead to (expose) US Economic Collapse?
Banks Holding Up in Tests, but May Still Need Aid

We’ve seen a lot of desperation as the world (and US) economy tanks in the wake of the mortgage-loss pyramid scheme crash. We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole and rhetoric from the candidates who want to replace Bush-Cheney as President and Vice-President of the United States. This is The Week That Was, votes will be counted tomorrow night, and we should know sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday which of the contestants gets the erstwhile “prize.”

As Wall Street began its precipitous fall, Republican candidate John McCain was busy informing the nation that the ‘fundamentals’ of our economy are strong. No, they aren’t strong, they’re utter failures after years of massive tax cuts to the wealthy, heavy borrowing to support two wars, and the “Unfettered Free Market” [TM] frenzy allowed by blanket de-regulation of the banking and investment sectors.

To get an idea of just how outrageous things had gotten, consider the so-called “Mortgage Meltdown” that took so many once-staid capitalist houses into ruin. We all know that housing prices had ballooned in most urban areas of the country, a ‘bubble’ sustained by the practice of lending to workers whose incomes haven’t seen even a minimal rise in more than 30 years, for houses that cost easily twice as much as they could hope to afford and three times what they were actually worth. Many of these loans were made with specific criminal intent to skim fees off the top, and saddled with adjustable interest rates that worked just like time bombs to force people into bankruptcy.

Knowing that these time bombs would explode X number of years down the line, the banks and futures traders on Wall Street invented a new paper vehicle called “Credit Default Swaps” for the express purpose of betting on strapped families defaulting on their mortgages. [Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny]These are an insurance vehicle, insurance to be paid out to the holders of the policies on bad mortgages. And those policies – as “Credit Default Swaps” were sold and resold hundreds of times. This is what led corporate insurance giant AIG to be one of the first Big-Time Players to fail, our government moved right in to nationalize it.

This situation is a prime example of the philosophy of “Privatizing the Profits, Socializing the Losses.” It’s a bail-out to rich gamblers necessitated by unregulated greed. Pure and simple. Look at how it worked…

The number of risky, possibly criminal, largely ARM mortgages in the US that have or soon will default amounts to approximately 1% of all the mortgages outstanding. The re-insurance scam ended up valuing these mortgages at 5 times the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. They were of course never worth anywhere close to that much, this is just the amount of insurance pay-outs once they DID default. And default they did, that brought Wall Street – and the world markets which participated in the scam – to their knees.

Despite the fact that candidate McCain did not seem to have the slightest grasp on the impending doom (his chief financial advisor Phil Gramm famously called people concerned about the situation “whiners”), his tax promises to the nation if elected is still to maintain George W. Bush’s blanket tax cuts to the top 2% of wealthy citizens and corporate giants. Democratic challenger Barack Obama would reverse this situation by taxing the rich and giving significant tax cuts to the middle classes. Even to the point of eliminating income taxes altogether on seniors who make less than $50,000 a year.

McCain of course calls this tax-the-rich situation “Socialism,” as if that’s as scary a word these days as it was back in the ’50s. It is not. All governments receive taxes and use them to support infrastructure, public education and other social programs, thus all government is essentially socialist at heart. The fine points always apply to who pays the taxes and gets the benefits of governmental largesse.

CNNMoney recently published an article about the different tax plans of the candidates, along with a breakdown of just how much your taxes will go up or down according to your income. McCain, Obama and your tax bill is recommended reading for everyone out there who hasn’t already voted, and is concerned about the recession/depression that we now know will last more than a year.

Then get out there and vote on November 4th, as if your way of life depended on it – because it does!

Links:

McCain, Obama and your tax bill
Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
Economists see recession through 2009

It’s true, and should come as no surprise that modern day pirates are responsible for the current mass chaos in the markets. I mean, this is just the sort of things pirates do, isn’t it? Or, so says Peter Hayes, Senior Lecturer in politics at the University of Sunderland.

In Dr. Hayes’ latest paper, ‘Pirates, Privateers and the contract theories of Hobbes and Locke’, the argument is developed and interesting. Not only did pirates practically invent participatory democracy by electing their captain, voting on major decisions and distributing the booty in fairly equal shares, but they were often backed by financiers in distant countries. Which, according to Hayes, makes your average pirate ship roughly equivalent to a modern corporation.

“Pirates had a democratic structure, and relative equality, but they were doing all this to violate the rights of other people,” Hayes says. “The idea of a social contract is that it protects human rights. But what if you create a social contract to say that we’ll observe rights toward each other, but we won’t observe rights for outsiders?”

Hmmm… Maybe Hayes has a point. Or maybe pirates themselves were an expression of the basic xenophobia that has existed ever since early tribal society. But pirates are a more popular romantic icon these days than simple hunter-gatherers, so Hayes can use them as a selling point. Somehow, the robber barons of today don’t elicit the kind of romantic idol-worship or secret sympathies from the vast amount of us in the out-group they’re busy hijacking day to day.

For the most part, they’re disgusting. Which is why when AIG and other failed brokers and bankers take $70 billion of a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout to pad the top privateers’ junkets and golden parachutes, the taxpayers aren’t very happy with it. Off with their heads, I say!

As Congress meets today and tomorrow to grill the principals before Friday’s vote on the $700 billion “emergency” Wall Street bailout plan (which has been in the works for months but strategically dumped on us all as an “emergency”), oil companies have instituted “rolling shortages” all over the Southeast. Some areas have been out of gas for more than a week and a half, and the situation is not expected to ease until Monday at the latest. Some gas – a single tanker at a time – is being delivered to stations along the Interstates and is being strictly rationed unless it’s diesel, one station per county.

State police are managing the gas lines to prevent violence, which did break out last week in the Nashville, Tennessee area when people started cutting in line. Food prices are rising so fast the stock boys at the grocery stores can’t mark up the goods fast enough, and the specter of looming fuel shortages for winter heat – or price increases that will force people to do without – is beginning to look very scary.

Bailout or no bailout – and despite the launch of FBI investigations of Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG – the United States may well be fully in the clutches of major economic depression before winter even hits. Whether or not that translates to global recession isn’t much of an issue to regular people, as we here in our own homes wonder how we will survive. This post and several following posts in a new series will take a look at the steps citizens should take as soon as possible to ensure their families will make it through the next 6 months. If depression goes on longer than that, additional strategies will be necessary, some already compiled as series in this blog and available under the “Our Most Popular” header on the left side of the page.

Here in Part 1 there are two broad categories of concern citizens will have to work around in order to do for themselves, particular to not freezing, not starving, and not getting indefinitely detained or killed. Considerations must start NOW.

Things to Plan Around:

1. Availability of home heating fuel/gasoline.

It is quite likely that there will be rolling gas shortages throughout the next year. We can also fairly assume there will be drastic fuel oil shortages in the northern tier of the country, and that many will unfortunately freeze to death in their homes or die of carbon monoxide poisoning from kerosene heaters, or fires from badly planned fireplace/wood stove installations.

If you live in an area with ample woods with standing or down dead or a brisk firewood market for purchase, or availability of wood stove pellets, get yourself a wood stove. These come in all sizes and thicknesses, some need more protection to floors and walls than others. You will also need stove piping and must plan a way to get the smoke outside your house (can be through a removed windowpane if necessary). Stoves are often available reasonably cheap and in good condition through Craig’s List or other re-sale sources. Do your homework, install it correctly. If the electricity goes out or fuel oil is unavailable, your family will still be warm. AND you can cook on it!

Resource: NASD: Proper Installation, Operation and Maintenance

2. Deployed Troops, Curfews, Travel Restrictions, Rationing.

Beginning on October 1st – next week – the US Army’s Third Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team – all 6500 to 8000 troops – will be re-deployed within the borders of the United States for various police functions. Regular police forces are being deployed for crowd control and peacekeeping functions as well, in managing protests, gas lines and runs on banks, grocery stores, etc. Expect to be challenged every time you go out, be thankful when it doesn’t happen.

Important: In case of travel restrictions, try to gather your immediate family in one place, preferably the place among your extended network best situated according to all considerations. Schools may be shut down due to lack of fuel for transportation and/or heating, if you have college-bound offspring, consider taking a couple of semesters off unless things at the college look stable. Don’t be afraid to call the admin and ask pointed questions, either. You won’t want anyone near and dear to you to be stuck someplace where they have no resources.

What this means is you need to do what stocking up you can immediately, and plan for obtaining the rest of your needs in possibly creative ways. If you have money socked away, withdraw enough to get you through if the bank goes under, all of it if they’ll let you have it. Store ready cash in freezer bags in the freezer. Purchase as much staple supplies as you can possibly afford, NOW before there are serious shortages and before the prices double or triple.

What food supplies you will need to obtain, along with other tools and supplies, will be supplied in Part 2 of this series. Please stay tuned!

Links:
Southeast Gas Update
FBI investigating companies at heart of meltdown
Long Term Capitol
Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?
20 Ways to Live on Almost Nothing
It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: Roadblocks and Interference
Part 2: Food: Eating What You Can Get

Watching Treasury’s Paulson on Meet the Press Sunday made me sick. That pitiful, pleading look, the bizarre non-logic, the reversion to fear, fear, fear… the guy’s a cheap crook in an expensive suit and no, the whole world isn’t going to self-detonate if we let the greedheads take their lumps for being so damned greedy. Let ‘em fail.

Meanwhile, I’ve a fine plan to salvage the housing market as well as the business and jobs outlook. Instead of giving up to $3 trillion dollars (the price goes up hourly) to the crooks who got us into this mess, why not give every citizen $3,000 dollars? They’ll catch up on their mortgages, then FHA (the receiver for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) can refinance at lower rates and more realistic selling prices. Voila! the mortgage market is no longer “bad debt.” And if we’ve got an extra couple of trillion laying around to spend on these greedheads, why don’t we spend it on something useful – like universal health care?

That price tag is less than a third of the price tag the Fed, Treasury or Wall Street has come up with to bail themselves out of the hole they dug, and it would completely solve the asset valuation problem for regular Americans who don’t earn $5 million a year. And it lets the Wall Street failures fail. They earned it, they deserve it. Screw ‘em. The rest of us will be fine with our dividend.

But if you really want to try and understand what they’re all so boogedy-scared of right now, here are some links to excellent overviews that will tell you more than anybody wants to know about how we got to where we are today, and why.

Daily Kos front pager ‘Devilstower’ published a spectacular overview of how we got here in his Three Times is Enemy Action. It’s clear and concise, easy to understand, and will make you furious. His piece is so good that it was picked up by The Nation, which also offers an article by William Greider that’s worth reading, Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle.

Trading insider bonddad offers his usual excellent analysis of the bailout plan being pushed by BushCo (with further links) with Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles, beginning with the relevant observation…

“There’s a plan afoot to screw the US taxpayer.”

Yeah, well. Seems to me that instead of ‘trust’ in the very people who have screwed things up so thoroughly, we should see if trusting We the People might not work better.

If indeed we must in the wake of the failure of the only valuation we’ve had in recent years (real property) find some other means of valuation, giving the “bailout” money to those of us who DO consider our homes and businesses to be valuable would do more to dig us out of this mess than giving it to crooks.

Links:

Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles
Three Times is Enemy Action
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

That’s what Angry Bear says about the government bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced on Sunday, September 7. It will cost the American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars we don’t have. Why? Because more than 1.3 trillion dollars’ worth of those mortgage bonds are held by foreign countries, primarily China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and Belgium, and they want to know if their holdings are any good.

Now, you might be struck by some of those listed ‘foreigners’. Cayman Islands? Luxembourg? Belgium? Well known for hosting questionably legal accounts for some questionable characters, I suspect we’d find a lot of Americans on those lists. Americans don’t count as “foreigners.” Unfortunately, we’d also find a lot of Russian front companies and Middle Eastern Sheiks as well.

We’ve once again been robbed blind by wanton corporate and individual greed, and we are expected once again to bail out the wealthy speculators whose greed led to the failures.

Predictions for what happens now aren’t pretty. The dollar will plunge, inflation will zoom, regular Americans will have an even more difficult time keeping up. While the richest 1% will have their taxes cut and get their bad investments paid off so they can go speculate on other nifty things like food and water.

So buckle up, fellow shoestring budget enthusiasts! We’re going to get our chance to put all our alternative survival strategies to work. If we do it right, what will arise from the ashes of the late, once-great American economy might be strong enough to last awhile.

Links:

Bonddad: Our Foreign Masters Have Spoken
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: A Broader View
The Fannie/Freddie Bail-Out: The Plan and Why Now?