Moving On From The Massive Bailout
 Monday, October 6th, 2008  by Connie T.

We fought it with everything we had...and so many of you sent your own letters to the House of Representatives, the Senate, and your Congressmen. But in the end, we lost, and on Friday the House approved the largest government bailout in the history of the USA: now closer to $800 billion dollars.

No sooner than it was passed did President George W. Bush whip out his pen and sign the measure. The final vote in the House was 263-171. The Treasury Department will be using the massive taxpayer funds to purchase bad mortgage-related securities, both domestic and foreign.

Economy experts say that within weeks, loans of credit can be extended to US consumers again that previously couldn't be. Which is somewhat baffling considering two of the problems we've faced are consumers spending beyond their means, and banks extended too much credit.

Government intervention on this scale into private markets was, until now, unheard of. What we found really discouraging about all of this is how many newspapers, newscasts, and media supported this legislation and deemed it "necessary" nearly overnight when over 90% of Americans did not want it to pass.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas didn't mince words, calling the bill what many average citizens see it as: "How can we have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down?" he asked, and resisted the pressure to change his vote.

Since this is a done deal now, we have to try to look at the bright side of things. For one, after making our call to Congress and sending off letters to the Senate, we got responses from so many of you saying that you had no idea a person could just call up their Reps like that, or how you were inspired. Of course we can, and we should! And a lot of you got involved that haven't been before, so do not get discouraged: we feel tides changing. On Friday, the website for contacting the House of Representatives took several minutes to load, with a message posted that we should let speak for itself:

Due to an unusually high amount of emails currently being submitted through the Write Your Representative feature (above), you may experience a slow response or error message when attempting to send emails through this system during hours of peak demand. We apologize for this inconvenience. Our technicians are working to fix the problem. Thank you.

We received, by the way, personal responses from one of our Senators and our Congressman.

Also, this year is an election year for Senators and members of the House, so make sure you know how your Rep(s) voted.

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