Merry Christmas to Wall Street from Main Street

We hope that you enjoy your Christmas bonuses this year, courtesy of the US Taxpayer, who so willingly provided the $750,000,000,000 that funded the TARP program. Never mind that the program was originally sold as a way of avoiding a financial and economic catastrophe, which seems to be materializing anyway. And never mind the fact that the TARP program, which stands for "Troubled Asset Relief Program," was originally meant to buy toxic and shoddy assets from investment banks and other venerable Wall Street institutions. Treasury Secretary Paulson, one of your own, thought of an even better idea than bailing you out of your bad decisions by buying your Ponzi-scheme like mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). In the end, he decided to just invest directly in you guys, and buy stock. Now we, the taxpayers, get to directly have a stake in your success or failure. I'm sure that bailing you out will not, in the slightest, reward your bad behavior, nor will it encourage you to take foolish risks in the future.

You see, Paulson and Bernanke told the Congress and the American people that you are essential to the functioning of the market, and that without you, Main Street would have ceased to function. This despite that fact that the Minneapolis Federal Reserve published a report in October that didn't show any problems with interbank lending. Even though prominent economists have suggested that we could have just used the bailout money to fund completely new, untarnished banks that would have fulfilled your utility-like function in the economy, in the end, Congress decided that you had to be saved, or the economy would stop staggering and drop dead. Well, we're happy to find out that you are hoarding the money, and not lending a dime to anyone but the most credit-worthy borrowers. The fact that your lending to credit-unworthy borrowers led to the whole mess shouldn't interfere with your need to preserve the illusion that your are solvent, after all. And we're also ecstatic that the Treasury and Fed are keeping the details of who received TARP money, and what they are doing with it, under wraps. We wouldn't want the ugly truth to get out, especially during this season of giving.

What a gift! We, the American Taxpayers, have so much confidence in the contributions you make to the US economy, that we were willing to risk almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to save a non-essential part of the economy. Even though the financial services "industry" doesn't produce anything of lasting value, such as washing machines or cars; even though your "industry" has doubled its take of the American economy from less than five percent to over eight percent in recent years for no good reason other than generous bonuses to financial firm employees - despite all this, the American Taxpayer was happy to oblige. After all, we wouldn't want your holiday bonuses to be curtailed just before the Christmas season. A lot of us work in the retail sector, you see, and we need you to have the money to go shopping, so that we can pay our heating bills during this exceptionally cold and dreary, both weather-wise and economically-speaking, holiday season.