Lawmakers rip Fed's 'bait-and-switch'

Angry??? Then fill the positions on the Oversight Committee and do your jobs.

Who better to make the financial decisions than 535 members of Congress, all of which are economic geniuses? In particular we should allow Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to make them. Barney still has his dice. Sure it turned out when he said he was "willing to roll the dice with sub-prime loans" wrt Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that he crapped out. So what if Alan Greenspan's warnings about Fannie and Freddie came true (Barney thus helped Fannie and Freddie "put the entire financial system in peril" with his gamble). It only cost us tax payers $700 billion (some are now saying $5 trillion). Who cares. This time Barney just might be a winner!

Since when has the master cared about what the slaves think. Every elected official in congress and the white house has accepted money from these very same special interests that are profiting so handsomely from our tax-dollars. All the while that they are making sure that their banking buddies are able to give more credit, I can't help but notice a very distinct silence on the question of how an American population that has been having its pockets sucked dry by job losses, increased prices and investment failures is goingto be able to repay any future lines of credit. I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that no matter how much credit is given, none of it will matter if people no longer have the means to repay it. For a consumer based economy, our elected officials are paying no attention to what really makes this country go. It really is too bad that our politicians pretty much sold the American way of life to wall street for the price of campaigne contributions and now the rest of us are slaves being forced to feed their appetites of greed.

When the money was going to buy assets at least the taxpayers got something for their money - now I know the taxpayers would never see that money but just maybe the returns might have gone towards the deficit. After this switch, taxpayers are giving banks money and get nothing in return. And Paulson (DEMOCRAT) knew that he was going to pull this switch from the beginning and lied to the American people to get the money. This is crazy the economy is tanking because people don't have any extra money to spend so what are the Democrats promising to do...take even more money from us!

To bail out the auto industry would be the biggest mistake ever. The problem is, the industry needs people to BUY the cars! Where, more specifically who would benefit from another bailout of the industry? Just the corporate fatcats! People are buying care - like we just did - but from Toyota and Nissan who provide quality cars with much higher gas mileage. We bought a 2008 Altima 4 cy 2.5SL in August and, get this, while driving home from Washington state where we bought the car, we drove from Reno NV to Las Vegas NV on 3/4 tank of gas!!!! That's over 480 miles and we still had enough gas to get home to Mesquite 80 miles away. Now what american made car can do that??? None nada, yilch! The industry needs people to buy their cars, not a bail out but they also need to provide a fuel efficient car or truck.

My congressman voted against the mess --- it did no good, given his colleagues' hysteria, but at least, history will judge him as sensible. I'll just bet there are a lot of pols who voted for this so-called bailout that really feel like a bunch of suckers. This whole bailout fiasco is the perfect nexus of a major crisis, an election year, panicked decision-making, political self-interest, greed, myopia, and stupidity. Only that can explain how a bipartisan group of Congressmen and an unpopular President could borrow (because our Treasury doesn't just have it sitting there) $700,000,000,000 and give it away to a bunch of civil service bureaucrats who may or may not have any qualifications to manage such a mindblowing sum. If every parent in American completely drained their children's college fund and any other assets set aside for the future for their kids and just blew it on a big party, that sum probably wouldn't even be scarcely a fraction of this bailout. Yet, that is exactly what we just did as a nation --- to spare a few years hardship and give some big corporations some credit, we just mortgaged our children's future with this bailout. With this, the federal government's past 40 years of deficit spending, and the coming government entitlement programs meltdown, our generation has just loaded on the back of every single child living today with an refrigerator, an anchor, and an anvil that they will have to carry. But that's not all, their children, not even born yet, will also bear this as well --- perhaps even double. They are all fated to pay trillions and trillions of dollars in taxes that, from their point of view, will seemingly go to nothing --- what it will be going to though will be servicing this current government's debts and its compounding interest. Or, in other words, ironically, their own parents' incontinence, folly, and carelessness.

The elitist illuminati got everyone all happy about the bailout, well the banks and businesses, then they pulled the ultimate flip flop, and I'm not surprised.