Now that a Spanish judge is making our congressmen look like clowns because we can't even prosecute our own war criminals, (and that includes Pelosi, she was briefed) you would think they would try to avoid looking like venal clowns as well.  Those bail-outs didn't just happen.  They were bought and paid for. The financial services industry spent $114.2 million on political contributions in the 2008 election. They got back $295.2 billion from the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).  That's an extraordinary return of 258,449 PERCENT.

The big recipients of campaign money from the bailed out banks are:

Rank    Candidate    Amount
1    Obama, Barack (D)    $38,102,702
2    McCain, John (R)    $28,159,757
3    Clinton, Hillary (D-NY)    $20,128,350
4    Dodd, Chris (D-CT)    $6,031,918
5    Coleman, Norm (R-MN)    $2,754,220
6    McConnell, Mitch (R-KY)    $2,387,708
7    Cornyn, John (R-TX)    $2,051,098
8    Sununu, John E (R-NH)    $1,771,380
9    Biden, Joseph R Jr (D-DE)$1,644,336
10    Baucus, Max (D-MT)    $1,597,925

Members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Senate Finance Committee and House Financial Services Committee all by themselves received $5.2 million from TARP recipients in the 2007-2008 election cycle.

So on top of the $1 trillion we have now spent on a war which was waged because we were told Saddam was ready to launch a WMD in "as little as 45 minutes," and that we would see "a mushroom cloud," we are now footing the bill for years of gambling on financial instruments which Long Shot Harry wouldn't have taken a bet on. One party picks your pocket while the other one holds you down.  Then they trade places.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.  One problem with the Greatest Thefts in History we have been seeing in the last ten years is that it's hard to understand how much a trillion is.  Think of it as roughly $10,000 per family of two adults one-and-a-half children.  They weren't happy stealing a $1,000 per taxpayer at a time, which is what a $100 billion Star Wars program represents.  Now it's the big time, grabbing your childrens' futures, and your retirements, by the tens of thousands.  Yee haw!  

Not everyone is hurting...well, it depends on what you mean.  When you are in the top 1 percent that the Wall Streeters and CEOs are in, it means you buy a smaller villa or, darn it, have to settle for the 40 footer instead of the 60 foot yacht.  Too Much: The weekly Newsletter on Excess and Inequality reported that last September:

several top Wall Streeters purchased villas in The Colony, a new Caribbean luxury project touted as Jamaica's "most expensive gated oceanfront development on record." The villas run up to $7 million each and carry a $72,000 annual fee that gives owners 60 days of butler, chef, and maid service. The best part: Villa owners pay no taxes on their properties, thanks to a complex financing deal that involves an "offshore special purpose vehicle" based in the Cayman Islands, the notorious super-rich tax haven

Donald Trump has been bragging that, sure, he's lost plenty of net worth, but what do you do when you're depressed?  You go shopping!  It's bargain basement time in the stock market!

"We're going up," says Trump. "We're buying things we couldn't have dreamed of buying two years ago. And we have a lot of cash."

Wouldn't that ten or twenty thousand dollars be nice to have right now?  The way the pie is divided in America and how it got there is neatly summarized in these two charts, from the Too Much Newsletter on Excess and Inequality:

The top one percent, the Trumps and Wall Street guys, have a third all to themselves.  The next richest 9% has the next third.  And 90% of the country - that's us - get to share that last third. Here is the Too Much folks' chart:

It wasn't always this way.  It started with Ronald Reagan, and it got worse no matter what party was in power, Bill Clinton or any Bush.  Here's how the top 1 percent's share of income has changed:

But back to the wonderful world of TARP.  Some examples of how investments in congressmen broke down:
Institution || Contributions 07-08||TARP Payment ||Return on Investment from Congress

Bank of America Corp || $6,000,000  || $45,000,000,000||309335%

Citigroup Inc.     || $4,799,678 || $50,000,000,000  || 401194%

AIG    ||       $929,770  ||   $40,000,000,000  ||  376556%

JPMorgan Chase & Co.  || $4,778,638  || $25,000,000,000 ||245754%

Prepare for the onslaught of stories in the major media about how the super-rich feel your pain. They are not feeling your pain.  They are feeling your pockets.  They'll come around in 2 years and ask you for your vote, then leave you in the morning.  Let's get rid of the Incumbent Party, the War Party, like a bad boyfriend.
The New Broom Coalition

There's more...

This diary at DailyKos from a woman who got laid off along with 2/3 of her company yesterday is going to become increasingly regular news. For all that I've been swimming in the schadenfreude at watching the banks collapse and multimillionaire CEOs humbled, mass layoffs of ordinary people like this, as well as the evaporation of retirement savings for people unlucky enough to be retiring in a downturn, were inevitable and they give me no joy.

I didn't relish that end of things when, at the end of the dotcom bubble, my Silicon Valley firm essentially shut down completely. The product and one tech support guy were sold to another company and the rest of us were let go. (I'm not sure I should be kidding about their selling the tech support guy. I heard earlier this year that he still works with the remnants of the product as it exists today.) It took quite a while to find another job and my income has yet to recover its 2001 peak.

Not that this empathizing will make you feel better if you got laid off recently. Only another job is really going to help with that and I wish you good fortune. I'm just saying that I snark out of bitterness, as opposed to a glibertarian lack of concern.

But seriously, Pets.com? AOL being worth more than Time-Warner? The business climate in 2001 was a fantasyland, a delusion. It couldn't have gone on like that and (in theory predictably, though no one wanted to listen to the people who did predict it) it didn't.

All the ordinary people who'd built their dreams on the jobs that couldn't last, all of us took a bath. And how were we supposed to know any different? The media and business press were unctously lapping up quotes from tech CEOs, idolizing their lifestyles, luxuriating in E-Trade advertising dollars, and crowing about how business had changed forever. Ha.

It could have been worse, though. We might have lived in a developing country run under the iron thumb of the International Monetary Fund; that was something to be thankful for then, and something to be thankful for still today.

In fact, both the IMF and World Bank are now singing a different tune about the proper response to financial meltdowns, talking about the need for more government oversight, saying that African countries who've refused to integrate with world financial markets will be hurt the least. A stunning admission of reality on their part. Robert Zoellick of the World Bank is quoted in that article describing the current crisis as having "confused" people about free market principles, but countries subject to IMF riots over the years haven't been even remotely confused about the rules of global finance: whatever benefits the big, developed nations is good, period.

Hence we've had trade protectionism for the US and its allies, paired with the merciless extraction of capital and raw materials from developing nations. In fact, hop below the fold with me and let's step through the standard 4 1/2 step IMF crisis recovery plan that will never be fully implemented in the US on account of how no one wants torch-bearing mobs burning stuff down in America del Norte.

There's more...