The 700 Billion Dollar Bailout - The Great Wall Street Ripoff

The mainstream media has given us countless hours of coverage over the weekend about how important this Wall Street bailout bill is. President Bush and the Democratic congressional leadership are in favor of it. When both sides agree on a bill, you know that something must be fishy.

Do any of you know where this 700 billion dollar figure for the bailout came from?

Why 700 billion?

Why not 500 billion or 900 billion?

The truth might shock you:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury department spokeswoman told Forbes.com. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Just wonderful, eh?

Well it looks like they are going to get their large number.

The bailout bill has finally been unveiled and a vote on it is scheduled for today.

The bailout bill was developed very secretively, and Congress is being given only 18 hours to look it over before voting on it.

In fact, house leaders invoked a "martial law" rule in an attempt to push this bill through.

Representative Burgess of Texas is one of the most outspoken critics of how this bill has been pushed on members of Congress.....

“I have been thrown out of more meetings in this capital in the last 24 hours than I ever thought possible, as a duly elected representative of 825,000 citizens of north Texas” said Congressman Burgess.

Mr. Burgess also added this chilling statement: “Mr. Speaker I understand we are under Martial Law as declared by the speaker last night.”

So what do Barack Obama and John McCain think about all of this? Of course they both support it.

So what does Wall Street think about all of this? They are lining up like rabid dogs ready for a fresh meal:

"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

"Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury's proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions."

Meanwhile, one journalist who has followed the financial system for over 30 years says: "Now I'm truly scared."

While all of this is going on, the big fish on Wall Street are gobbling up the little fish. In one more example of this, Citigroup has agreed to buy Wachovia's banking business for about $2.16 billion.

But of course if we don't go along with this Wall Street bailout plan we are being threatened with a stock market collapse and the next "Great Depression".....and who would want that?

The truth is that the American people are being looted, and we better wake up while there is still time.