The Senate's Bailout Endorsement: Whose To Blame
 Friday, October 3rd, 2008  by Connie T.

I was pretty surprised to find a personal response in my inbox from one of my Ohio Senators to the scathing letter I sent off this week regarding the Senate's endorsement of the $700 billion - $3 trillion bank and Wall Street bailout. Not that the reply put me at ease whatsoever.

He understands my anger, he wrote, at the thought of bailing out people who made a lot of money making bad business decisions. However Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "made a strong case for the need to act quickly to prevent further damage to our economy." He pointed out that Ohio has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs over the past seven years, and our unemployment rate has spiked.

No, there is no Wall Street in Ohio, but "we cannot gamble on even greater economic dislocation," my Senator wrote.

Of course, there is no justification to me for this bailout. At the end of the day, the federal government should never get involved in the supplementing of any business's income. That is not a free market system; nor is it a democracy. We'd be better off as a nation to go back to trading and bartering than for our government to print off money at will to selectively hand out to large corporations and financial institutions. At least then the people would have a choice in what we are getting, and we wouldn't be slaving away to contribute to capitalism in America. This is the Fed supporting the concentration of wealth. It's beyond unacceptable.

Ohio, and states all over the nation, have lost manufacturing jobs because giant corporations have cut corners by sending manufacturing overseas to China and elsewhere. They are cutting corners because their raw material is costing more, and it's costing more because the dollar has fallen. The dollar has fallen because of our national deficit, and our national deficit is there because we're printing money we do not have to pay for a nearly $600 billion war in Iraq. (We won't go into the reasons for that, since obviously the why's don't add up.) It's a giant domino effect that isn't that difficult to put together. So the solution is to print off even more money than the staggering war costs over these past five years? No...that's contributing to the problem.

Let me tell you what's shocked me in all of this. Every single Democratic Senator that has made a fuss about the decision of the George W. Bush administration over these years voted for in favor of Bush's bailout proposal. Dianne Feinstein; Christopher Dodd; Joe Lieberman; Joe Biden; Barack Obama; Harry Reid; Hillary Clinton; Patrick Leahy; John Kerry. They all voted for it.

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter whether or not this bill would save America from an economic apocalypse, or whether it will have the adverse effect and send us spiraling into another Great Depression. The bottom line is that our Senators are in office to represent the will of the people, not what they believe to be the best for the people against our will. When 93% of Americans make it clear that they don't want the financial "rescue" measure to pass, the Senate is not supposed to be voting for it. Period.

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