Could someone please explain why our tax dollars are being used to bail out foreign banks? I don't even want to bail out investors who made poor bets in this country, let alone Saudi Arabia.
I'm watching Rep Brad Sherman on C-Span right now and he is giving an in-depth speech on the bailout and, according to him, roughly half of that money is going across our borders.
Check out the video of Sherman here.
Here is the report from After Downing Street:
"Hundreds of billions of dollars are going to bail out FOREIGN INVESTORS. They know it, they demanded it, and the bill has been carefully written to make sure that can happen." - Brad Sherman, D-California"
That's right folks. You are going to have $700 billion - about 25% of the total federal budget - put on your personal credit card (via taxes forever) in order to bail out foreign investors.
Oh, and the best part of it is that the underlying assets involved do not even have to be in the United States!
Here is the definition of a "troubled asset", right from the bill:
"(9) TROUBLED ASSETS.—The term ‘‘troubled assets’’ means— (A) residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before March 14, 2008, the purchase of which the Secretary determines promotes financial market stability;
and (B) any other financial instrument that the Secretary, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, determines the purchase of which is necessary to promote financial market stability, but only upon transmittal of such determination, in writing, to the appropriate committees of Congress."
Notice that conspicuously missing from the definition is the requirement that the asset's underlying thing (that is, the property that was mortgaged, etc) lies within the United States. Also note that Treasury must tell Congress if they add "new types" of debt, but that Congress has no right of review or censure.
I must say I'm a bit frustrated with the silence on DKos regarding Obama's support of this initiative. We need the kind of accountability that Michael Moore spoke of yesterday in his diary. Obama has supported this from the beginning, regardless of any new provisions. The golden parachutes are now camouflage parachutes and raising the FDIC limit to 250k means nothing. Nobody reading this has over 100k in a bank account, and if you did, I trust you'd have the common sense to spread it out across several accounts.
This isn't a time to make fun of congressional republicans for bailing on the bailout either. You can rip on Boehner all you want because he was just making excuses for not being able to sell this to his fellow republicans, but partisan bickering is not what we need when it's likely that over 90% of America is opposed to this bill. We finally agree on something. Celebrate it!