| Merry Christmas, everyone! Hope everyone is having a great holiday. I'm now off to drive to Louisiana for my cousin Beth's wedding :)
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| Neat chance to donate some money to charity and have a chance at a Super Bowl ring:
https://www.celebritiesforcharity.org/raffles/RaffleID_SuperBowlRing.cfm
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| For those who are fans of Tad Williams' work (in particular the Otherland series):
http://pc.ign.com/articles/915/915261p1.html
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| I haven't yet listened to the actual audio of the Treasury Dept conference call referenced in this link, but the notes someone took from it are bothersome enough. And makes me even more glad that bailout was defeated. I wonder if the Treasury dept ever saw this as anything other than an easy way to steal lots of money for their friends for when they leave public office and have people to give them multi-million dollar jobs. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2008/09/mussolini-style-corporatism-in-action.html
I also read about 1/3 of the actual bailout bill (http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/images/09/28/ayo08c04_xml.pdf), and I have to agree that the taxpayer protection provisions are an absolute joke. None of the oversight seems to have any teeth to it. It is funded purely by changing the law increasing the national debt. If the assets bought by this plan go into the toilet, it only requires the President 5 years from now to draft a plan for doing something about it. The 'golden parachute' clause doesn't really define what it means, nor does it do anything about existing contracts. Only companies that get more than $300million in help from this bill can't put them in new executive contracts for a period of 2 years. At first I thought this was better than the first draft being proposed by the Bush administration, but it really isn't.
I agree that something should be done because this situation has been so poorly mishandled that consumer confidence is shot even more to hell, and that alone will send us farther into recession. But not something that essentially takes $2000 from *every single man, woman, and child in the country* and gives it to the rich with no provisions for helping the housing problems that were the source of this whole mess. It's just rewarding those who caused the problem in the first place.
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