From the guy who brought us Monopoly, Bailout Edition, comes the top “10 Better Ways to Use the Bailout Money”:

Watching the news lately has made me fear for my wallet. It seems that almost every day brings America an exciting new round of recession-edition Monopoly, in which Henry Paulson gives yet another mismanaged company a Get Out of Bankruptcy Free card, then argues that the player using the car gamepiece is “too big to fail.”

 
There’s an excellent Chance that all this money is coming out of the national Community Chest
 

There are many who believe that the debt-laden avalanche of clusterfucks we call “bailouts” will not only fail to fix our current economic situation, but will actually make it worse, and make the coming recession longer. As someone who thinks that blindly handing trillions of dollars to companies that can’t make money is kind of like blindly handing trillions of Nintendo Wiis to quadriplegics, I happen to be one of those aforementioned “many.” So if propping up a bunch of fundamentally flawed companies will make things worse, what could we do with the money that would be more effective?

I’m so happy you asked….

Read the full top 10 list here.

At least people are paying attention, I suppose…

NEW YORK – “Bailout” and “change” were crowned on Monday as the words of 2008 after a year in which a huge financial crisis hit the United States and Barack Obama celebrated a historic victory as the first U.S. black president.
 
Merriam-Webster Inc., the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary, said “bailout” — meaning “a rescue from financial distress” — was the word that received the highest intensity of lookups over the shortest period of time.

John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., said this was not surprising given that the word ubiquitously featured in discussions of the presidency and fiscal policy.

He said the presidential campaign also produced voluminous hits for words like “vet,” which ranked second in the 2008 list, “bipartisan,” “misogyny,” and the word used to describe both candidates on the Republican ticket, “maverick.”

He said one of biggest event-related words of the year was “socialism” which came third in the list of the 10 top lookup requests.

Courtesy of Reuters.

I still think that the government might have angered fewer people if they had simply renamed their proposal to something like the “Save the Children Act of 2008″.  Then, nearly every member of Congress would have never even read the legislation.  They would have all been cheerleaders for it and lambasted those who actually took the time to read the bill.

This way, the media wouldn’t have picked up on the story, and John Q. Public wouldn’t be so upset about corporate executives receiving billions of their taxpayer dollars.  All Congress needs is a better P.R. campaign to make us entirely ignorant of their theft policies.

Rob from the poor and give to the rich seems like an interesting plot for a movie… maybe starring a mysterious figure who runs around the woods in tights…

BusinessWeek is reporting that BayernLB has just received more taxpayer-funded bailout money from the German government:

BayernLB has already earned itself the unenviable accolade of becoming Germany’s first bank to request help from the government bailout funds. On Friday it added a massive bailout package to its trophy shelf: a €30 billion lifeline will be thrown to the ailing business.

To restore it to health, Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer said the Munich-based BayernLB would be granted €10 billion ($12.9 billion). He also said the bank requires lending guarantees to the tune of €20 billion. Of that he said he would seek €15 billion in interbank lending guarantees under the federal plan.

Germany’s second biggest regional bank has been hit hard amid the financial domino effect. First, the US subprime lending crisis and subsequent credit crunch left it, and many peers, with hefty write-downs. Then, BayernLB’s problems deepened with losses generated by bank failures in Iceland.

(Original article here)

Dennis Kucinch spells out the “bait and switch” that was pulled by Henry Paulson and the corrupt administration:

Kucinch states, “This is a major economic matter that isn’t being appropriately addressed by the Bush administration and by his treasury secretary. Congress was sold a phony bill of goods…  Now you’ve got money for bank consolidation, money for parties and for bonuses.  What’s going on in America?”

Hit ‘em hard, Dennis.  The media seems to like you now that you’re not running for president…

The global economic storm continues to rage and national governments seem about as commanding in these conditions as small boats tossed around on a tumultuous sea. The week began with an emergency bailout of Citigroup, the world’s biggest bank, by the United States Treasury. A few days later the Federal Reserve released news of an $800bn credit market intervention. This was followed by a €200bn European Union-wide stimulus package from the European Commission. And expectations are rising that Barack Obama is planning an even bigger spending plan for when he takes office in Washington next year.

 

Yet the discomforting truth is that no one can say with any confidence that these various rescues and interventions will have any effect on the underlying crisis. Everything policymakers have thrown at the emergency thus far has had a disappointingly small effect. Our leaders appear to be surviving on a diet of hope. Nowhere is that truer than in Britain.

The Government presented its own contribution to the EU stimulus package in the pre-Budget report this week. But the real story of the PBR ended up not being the widely trailed £20bn stimulus, but the alarming projected borrowing figures…

(Read the rest of the article here, courtesy of The Independent)

I don’t fully agree with this guy often, but here’s Bill O’Reilly speaking against the auto bailout of the Big Three: