Spent

It looks like Wall Street is going to get a huge infusion of capital this week, to the tune of $700 billion dollars. No one, including Henry Paulsen, knows if it will shore up the markets, but in order to avoid some greater disaster, America will put $700 billion on our national credit card. It doesn't seem to make sense, borrowing money, to lend to the banks so that they can lend it back to companies and individuals. If we don't borrow this money, our savings as individuals are at risk. I'm not sure I understand it all, I mean, the money I put in my retirement account was real money that I had earned, not money I had borrowed from my employers. The money that I put into my personal savings account was not money I borrowed from my home equity line of credit, it came directly out of my paycheck. How is it that my savings are in danger, when that was real money that I put in the bank?

I've been so nervous lately about the economy, that I hardly ever read my favorite blog, Tomdispatch. I don't know what possessed me to seek out more bad news today, but I cruised by to check out what Tom had to say about all of this, and yikes! I'm feeling more nervous. Because not only are we about to borrow $700 billion dollars to bail out the system that Americans so depend on, (work, borrow, spend, and work some more, work until you freaking drop) but in all the media noise about this huge bail-out, no one, except for Chalmers Johnson said a word about the $612 billion dollar defense authorization bill that passed just last Wednesday.

On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)

So...let's see...$612 billion plus $700 billion...$1.312 billion dollars spent in less than two weeks? Oh and the $612 billion doesn't include all of the money we will need for Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be more supplemental bills during the year, and next year, and the year after that, until we are out of Iraq, and then into some other war. 25 billion to the automakers, 85 billion to AIG, and I'm still waiting to find out exactly what Fannie and Freddie are going to cost us. Oh yeah, I almost forgot Washington Mutual, the latest bank to be seized by the Feds. And you can't really blame this all on Republicans. Democrats hold the majority in the House, and yet, they never even blinked at handing over $612 billion dollars for guns and tanks and stuff that is not going to help the American tax-payers.

We are so completely F-ed. Isn't there a Democrat in Congress who can do simple math? Where is this money supposed to come from?

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