as well as your Congressional rep.
I know I'm not alone in being utterly disgusted at the ongoing bailouts on Wall Street, at the prospect of being required to take the responsibility for debt that on a personal level I worked hard to avoid. As a parent, I am especially worried for the increasing burden we are putting on our kids for this debt.
And if we here are about electing more and better Democrats, then we'd better put their feet to the fire and make them act like Democrats.
I had already contacted my representative, John Sarbanes, yesterday, but this diary spurred me to modify that letter as I sent it to my Senators.
Dear Senator,
I am writing to you to express my displeasure at the recent bailout
of Wall Street excesses. While I certainly understand the
seriousness of this situation, it is beyond comprehension as to why
the DEMOCRATICALLY led Congress is falling again behind the Bush
administration to bail out people who once made ridiculous amounts
of money and now are unwilling to accept the outcome that they knew
was potentially the risk.
People are losing their homes, and we do virtually nothing to help
them, yet we prop up a broken system.
Privatizing the gains, socializing the risk. This is not
acceptable, and it is not the mark of good governing.
Today I read that this bill contains the following language:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Senator, this is absolutely unacceptable. It is a repudiation of the system of checks and balances that is essential to our constitutional form of government. Acceptance of ANY provision that includes such language is an abdication of the responsibility of Congress to provide oversight and represents power that should not be granted to ANY administration.
If this kind of bailout is necessary, it MUST be accompanied by
transparency and by carefully considered regulations that will
prevent such a situation from happening again. Otherwise it is
nothing but a giveaway, an upward redistribution of wealth.
There are those of us who have worked hard in our lives, who didn't
make bundles of money off the Ponzi schemes of debt manipulation
that these banks have manipulated, who tried very hard to minimize
our exposure to this mess that we saw coming, and now have to wind
up paying for it anyway, while the perpetrators will get away scott
free. That is absolutely unacceptable.
And it is particularly unacceptable from Democrats.
I urge you to do the right thing. No bailouts without transparency
and regulation. And absolutely NO abdication of the responsibility of Congress to provide oversight, and NO abdication for the provision for judicial review.
If this bill passes in its current form, it will be just one more nail in the coffin of our constitutional form of government, over and above the absurdity of saddling the 'average' taxpayers with an incredible debt load without providing for any structures to keep this from happening again, and to ensure that the perpetrators of this mess will also be held liable.
Please contact your own congress critters to express your own concerns.
We need leadership from our Democrats now. We don't need capitulation.