Bailing out the super rich for causing this mess, using your dime, where is the outrage.

We shouldn't confuse pro-business with corrupt business. We have too much government passing laws that always have unintended consequences and Wall Street lobbying and corrupting our government to pass laws for their own greed.

Without the government protecting Wall Street through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac we wouldn't have Angelo Mozilo selling all those loans to banks and others from borrowers who couldn't pay. Same thing happened with the S&L crisis. Without the government guaranteeing deposits those crooks wouldn't have had the money to loan in the first place.

FDIC and the likes should be privatized. Then the @!$%#s at FSLIC would have made sure the S&L could have made good on their deposits. The same general problem has just occurred with the sub-prime mess although somewhat different. In this case everyone was making so much money from growth and cash flow who gave a @!$%# if the loans didn't get paid off.

One of the Bear Stearns billionaires ended up with a mere $20 million after we taxpayers bailed them out rather than billions. The article in the WSJ actually seemed to want you to feel sorry for him.

Mozilo walked away with about $60 million before he was fired. He should have been shot. Who know what he stole before that.

Excerpt:

Wall Street is usually described as an industry, but it shares precious few characteristics with the metal-fasteners business or the auto-parts trade. The big brokerage firms are not in business so much to make a product or even to earn a competitive return for their stockholders. Rather, they open their doors to pay their employees -- specifically, to maximize employee compensation in the short run. How best to do that? Why, to bear more risk by taking on more leverage

WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE PEOPLE?????

I remember that 'We the people,' bailed out the banks and mortgage companies back in the early 1990s to the tune of fifty billion dollars. We don't seem to learn. How about legislation making lobbying illegal??

credit cards?

check out this dvd movie:

"maxed out"

The credit card companys are making a mint off of people who are trying to make their minimum payments, and will be paying for the rest of their young lives.
that is why they pray on college students, or hang around college campuses..

In that movie, "maxed out" you will see 2 moms who's young children..
college aged killed themselves due to their finances, and credit cards.
they (the banks) want you to pay minimum payments for the rest of your lives..
so do your very best to stay away from credit cards or the banks will nail you with interest payments up to your eyeballs.

and also see this one too,
"In debt we trust"

good luck to you all.

The reason that there is not more outrage is that people don't know what the hell is going on. Few of us (me included) know anything about what banks do or where our money goes. It is all per centage points and service fees and very small print. Hell, most of our payrolls charge us money to get paid. There are a thousand syphons for each little pot, and by next Friday we are all broke. Most of us want to have savings but don't have money to save. Most of us just want a house and car and @!$%# that works. But it's all middle men and credit points and APR and discount cards and handling fees. It is a confusing bunch of crap.

Then we get someone telling us, hey we will make your life easier, here have this loan and get your dream.... I didn't get screwed on a mortgage, but there are a coupld of car dealers I wouldn't mind seeing publicly humiliated. Sorry for the rant. My point is no matter what anyone says, the banks and corporations have been screwing us for years, and now we are bailing them out. I don't need a law degree to figure that out.

It is not the fault of government regulation or gullible people. The greedy jerk @!$%#s need to eat some crow.

I'm not even sure if I would ban corporate lobbying. I can see genuine non evil reasons to want to do this.

I can see both sides of this ledger and being somewhat equal I would tend to forbid it all except for real persons.

It's really not "lobbying" that is the problem.. it is bribery.. they just do it subtly.. give them jobs or take them out so much they supliment their lifestyles. and hense make their paychecks go further since they don't have to buy their own dinners.

I think the most money goes to the campaigns to get them reelected.

It's not a simple issue but just the same something needs to be done...again.

This may not be a permanent link, but The Economist has some good background information about the two F.M.s

f you want to know how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have survived scandal and crisis, consider this: Over the past decade, they have spent nearly $200 million on lobbying and campaign contributions.

But the political tentacles of the mortgage giants extend far beyond their checkbooks.

The two government-chartered companies run a highly sophisticated lobbying operation, with deep-pocketed lobbyists in Washington and scores of local Fannie- and Freddie-sponsored homeowner groups ready to pressure lawmakers back home.

They�ve stacked their payrolls with top Washington power brokers of all political stripes, including Republican John McCain�s presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis; Democrat Barack Obama�s original vice presidential vetter, Jim Johnson; and scores of others now working for the two rivals for the White House.

The former CEO of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines stole about $100 million before he was fired for a $6.5 billion accounting scandal.

If you haven't seen the article from Rolling Stone called, 'It's a Class War, Stupid', I would, strongly, urge everyone to read it. When it comes to the last phrase of this article '...where is the outrage', I contend that it is being deflected with distractions about 'Illegal immigrants and gay-marriage' which play to a another groups fears and insecurities and who are looking for someone else to blame. Another good article is which addresses how this diversion is playing out is, 'In election 2008, don't forget Angry White Man' by Gary Hubbell. Between the two articles and some others, you can get a pretty good idea of where the outrage is.

Yep - privatize the gain - socialize the loss. What a scam! And the scams continue. the Journal is right - where IS the rage? Most people - other than the super-wealthy - are just hanging on, if they're able to do that: trying to pay for food, gas and (maybe) housing.

God help us all.

Glass-Steagall repeal.

People just don't understand and aren't educated enough. The public schools teach everyone that the Fed and the system of banks is what holds the economy together, and that we can't hope to understand what they do, only that it's for our own good. Trust them.

FDR and his successors have set them up as an Ivory tower of salvation, and now we're reaping the benefits. But the Ivory tower is slowly crumbling.

This seems to be par for the course during an economic downturn.

If you want to visually look at a very simple illustration of one of these bubble mechanisms, and how they are harvested, you can look at this chart below of the stock market and the Real Estate Investment Trust Funds. It works like a vacuum and a rat trap. A captive audience is intentionally endowed with a problem. (rat trap). In this instance the bait for the trap was the lure or gift of money being made in the dot com stock boom. Much hype and fanfare was bestowed on the possibility of making a fortune in internet stocks and day trading. Many people took the bait and leveraged their entire net worth in hopes of securing their future in the stock market. When the trap was successfully filled with unsuspecting victims the plug was pulled on the market. The trap had been sprung. Thats right markets don't just happen like you have been taught. Markets can be manipulated by the people that own and run the market. But nobody owns the market right? Think again. Use your thinker. Somebody decides how it runs, when it runs, its rules, etc...Those people can make it do what they want. Simple huh? In spite of what you have been taught its true. Use your own thinker. Now people were in excruciating levels of painful debt, and desperately looking for a way out of the trap. People needed a solution.

Now comes the "vacuum" or the "harvest" from the trap. The solution had already been carefully thought out and planned in advance by the international banking community, et al... This is the part where the debt was created to be "monetized" later and turned into power and leverage. It became something valuable for the international bankers, some corporations, and the government, and their cronies in various ways. The lending establishment was waiting in the wings to offer second and third mortages on property as a means of increasing debt. Lenders are not stupid. They knew that these loans might not be stable. The lenders at the very top of the pyramid didn't care if the loans were stable or not. The people at the top of the pyramid create, own, and control the flow of money. They don't care if the smaller banks under their umbrella go belly up or not. They will simply "bail out" or "come to the rescue" of these smaller banks, and in doing so they essentially buy the debt of the smaller banks, and they acquire the labor and energy of the people in debt. Now the smaller banks, and its customers (debtors), are "beholdin" to the lenders at the very top of the pyramid.

I find it hilarious that Bush will go on about the free market saving everything then issue bail outs.
The people that caused this are taking the tax payer money. Someone should have realized that giving that many mortgages out to people that could not afford a house would be big trouble come time to renew the houses, but no one did, as an example. People are benefiting from this. You'll see smaller banks swallowed while the big banks get hand outs. You'll see this stuff happen in all sectors of the economy. Sadly the average person is in trouble and is not getting the hand outs they need to help themselves. The situation is messed and I can only hope it will change soon. It will end one way or another, either through democratic action or by violence.