Atrios looks at the $700,000,000,000, or more, that the Bush administration wants to give to banks that were huffing risky investment derivatives like 13 year olds sneaking off with a fresh bottle of glue and thinks, huh, underpants gnomes. I can see that. And the 12-figure, 11-zeroed amount of money that's supposed to magically appear to fix the ignominious screw ups of people who were supposed to know better. They were supposed to know better, of course, because this brand of stupid led to both the Great Depression and the Savings & Loan scandals.

$700,000,000,000

Though it fits with the Republican strategy of only having government spend money on things that fail in every respect besides lining the pockets of the wealthy, while Democrats equivocate but then hurry to indulge the kleptocrats.

Now as you may know, everybody who's a US taxpayer just bought an insurance company. Yay, us! But look, it's a lousy one. One that was about to go under. Again, if we're going to nationalize stuff, why should it be the stuff that sucks and gives us no perks? This is sure to be used as justification for not investing in ordinary people, which is an investment that, historically, has paid big dividends.

And why should the decision-making process used to spend taxpayer dollars be so slapdash that the Bush administration wants to refuse all accountability? That question almost answers itself. How else could industry shills masquerading as public servants rob the US Treasury for their cronies in broad daylight while more Americans every day are moving to tent cities? As multiple sources are reporting, this is the Bush oversight plan for issuing a $700,000,000,000 line of credit to the clearly incompetent finance industry elites:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

There are people who have sensible ideas on how to bail out homeowners who are in over their heads without rewarding greedy, wastrel executives for gross negligence and total abdication of responsibility to the public interest. But no one, and by no one, I mean no one who can shake down the nation's couch cushions for $700,000,000,000, is listening.

They really want to give away 700,000,000,000 dollars with no oversight. I keep repeating the amount because I just can't believe it. It's a literally astronomical number, a Carl Sagan number, if you will. This is what it reminds me of, from The Guardian:

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent. ...

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover. ...

Let me try to wrap my head around this again. In 2003 and 2004, the Bush administration, by way of the unaccountable Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA, get it! ha!), gave away 363 tons of $100 bills worth $12,000,000,000 to parties unknown in Iraq. By my estimation, that means a billion dollars in $100 bills weighs 30.25 tons. If we multiply that by 700, it can be determined that the Bush administration now wants to give away, once again entirely without oversight, the equivalent of 21,175 tons of unmarked, $100 bills to the financial services sector.

21,175 tons of $100 bills. No, that doesn't make any more sense, it's no more believable. And I so wish that I was making it up.  

Anyway, have some cartoons. They're not bread, or circuses, or a stiff drink, but maybe they'll take the edge off realizing that the nation is likely to end up on the hook for $700,000,000,000 worth of additional bad debt.