It's obvious by now that the bailout will not be stopped. It's just in the details now.
Will there be any oversight and transparency?
Will executive pay be limited?
Will there be any foreclosure relief?
However, one thing I'm not hearing anything is an action that was a key point of the Fannie/Freddie bailout. That is: the practice of lobbying.
Excuse my populist outrage, but under NO CIRCUMSTANCE should companies who accept a taxpayer bailout be allowed to lobby the government. Absolutely not.
My jaw dropped when I read the New York Times today. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by the audacity of it all, but I was. The companies that were just a week ago fighting for their very survival are now lobbying to get the greatest profit at taxpayer expense.
There's a front page story entitled "Big Financiers Start Lobbying for Wider Aid."
The article puts it better than I ever could:
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.
Emphasis added.
There's no shame here. None whatsoever. These companies see that the taxpayers are going to start covering the fuck-ups of Wall Street when it comes to the financial market, so hey, why not cover their other bad investments as well?
But really, these guys are just talk, right? Lawmakers wouldn't listen these Corporate Welfare queens, right? Ha.
The scope of the bailout grew over the weekend. As recently as Saturday morning, the Bush administration’s proposal called for Treasury to buy residential or commercial mortgages and related securities. By that evening, the proposal was broadened to give Treasury discretion to buy "any other financial instrument."
It gets worse. Here's something to raise conservatives' hackles:
There were signs of the industry’s fingerprints on drafts of the legislation released over the weekend. While an earlier draft said that only firms with headquarters in the United States could sell assets to the government under the program, a later version said sellers could include any financial institution.
I'm afraid there's not much intelligent analysis I can offer here. I'm mostly blinded by rage. The sheer audacity of these companies is staggering. They were just days ago fighting for survival, now they're whispering into lawmakers' ears changes to proposals to earn them new windfall profits. Excuse my French, but FUCK THAT.
Again: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE SHOULD COMPANIES WHO ACCEPT A TAXPAYER BAILOUT BE ALLOWED TO LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT.