More Regulation is not the answer - FRAUD IS ALWAYS ILLEGAL!

Sorry I've been so remiss in posting, but it has been a busy month. I closed on my house last Friday and now we are planning on moving out of here next weekend. I was also on vacation the first week of this month, so I just haven't had much time to do anything, much less blog.

WTF are we doing? Why is our government bending over backward and giving TRILLIONS of dollars to banks, financial institutions and Wall Street when they have committed fraud on a massive scale?

Why haven't I seen a single person in the financial industry get called to Congress for questioning, not to mention a single arrest of ANYONE?

In the past few weeks our government (meaning us, the taxpayers) have decided to guarantee $5.3 trillion dollars of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, loan $85 billion to AIG, and now we are going to nationalize the losses on real estate to the tune of $500 billion (that's the government number, expect the real number to be much higher) to bail out Wall Street?

Where is the money going to come from to pay for this?

Oh, I'm sure our Senators and Representatives will be working very hard this weekend to make sure there are "safeguards" and new regulations to protect us against this sort of thing happening again.

The problem is that this wasn't caused by a lack of regulation, there was absolutely no enforcement of the laws by any of the "cops" that are supposed to be protecting us investors. Congress, the President, the SEC, SIPC, FBI, Secret Service, Treasury Department, etc. etc. did NOTHING to stop these abuses and risky behavior when they were in process! You can pass all the regulations you want, but if you don't enforce the laws you get fraud and corruption on a massive scale.

Fraud is always illegal, you don't need to pass any new laws. If you lie, if you decieve or misrepresent, if you knowingly sell a faulty product in the course of business YOU ARE LIABLE! There it is, end of discussion. Aggressively prosecute the fraud and the markets will stay in line, end of story.

Obama's plan is pretty typical for the Democrats, more regulation to protect us.

If John McCain was smart he would be jumping all over this and call for massive investigations and arrests of those responsible for plunging our economy into a crisis! Republicans have always been the law and order party, just another example of the fall from grace this party has had under George Bush. There's no shortage of people McCain can go after and it starts with the executives of all these companies we're bailing out: Freddi Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG, Bear Stears, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial, Indymac Bank, etc. etc. etc.! How about calling Alan Greenspan to testify, or call out Bernake and Paulson and ask them how they could have said just over a year ago that the subprime problem is "contained" and won't spread to the rest of the economy.

How about a little follow up when predictions made by government officials not only prove to be wrong, but so wrong that our goverment is now spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out private companies nearly every single week!

To hear our representatives talk about this you'd think it was a hurricane. An act of God that no one could have forseen or done anything about. All we can do is come in after the fact and try to repair the damage because nobody is at fault.

THIS IS BULLSHIT!

Many, many people saw this coming for years and have tried to warn our Government about it. Our goverment allowed this to happen because the fraudsters greased their palms with campaign contributions in order to turn a blind eye to what they were doing.

This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. They are both complicit but I blame the Republicans more because George Bush runs the institutions that are supposed to police this stuff.

I'm also horrified to think that Congress is going to railroad through another horrible piece of legislation that doesn't really address the problem with our economy. It will most certainly make the situation worse because it won't be well thought out (because of the urgency of getting something done before they go on recess - because, god forbid, you lose any vacation time because of some stupid crisis) and it will be filled with wierd amendments that don't have anything to do with the actual legislation.

Did you know the housing bill passed a few months ago has an amendment that requires credit card companies to report all of their customer transactions to the IRS? WTF does that have to do with a housing rescue plan?

It will be passed quickly with only limited input from us taxpayers, even though it is us who will be responsible for the bill. It's become pretty standard to introduce huge, complex pieces of legislation on a Friday afternoon and have it passed by Sunday (like the Patriot Act or The Military Commissions Act, Housing Bailout Bill, etc. etc.).

Welcome to the U.S.S.R.A, all the profits will be privatized by the wealthy few - but any losses will be borne by everyone! The government no longer serves the people, it serves the corporations and the foreign governments it owes money to.