The full plan is here, Go Here to sign.

1. APPOINT A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO CRIMINALLY INDICT ANYONE ON WALL STREET WHO KNOWINGLY CONTRIBUTED TO THIS COLLAPSE.

2. THE RICH MUST PAY FOR THEIR OWN BAILOUT.

3. BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE LOSING THEIR HOMES, NOT THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BUILD AN EIGHTH HOME.

4. IF YOUR BANK OR COMPANY GETS ANY OF OUR MONEY IN A “BAILOUT,” THEN WE OWN YOU.

5. ALL REGULATIONS MUST BE RESTORED. THE REAGAN REVOLUTION IS DEAD.

6. IF IT’S TOO BIG TO FAIL, THEN THAT MEANS IT’S TOO BIG TO EXIST.

7. NO EXECUTIVE SHOULD BE PAID MORE THAN 40 TIMES THEIR AVERAGE EMPLOYEE, AND NO EXECUTIVE SHOULD RECEIVE ANY KIND OF “PARACHUTE” OTHER THAN THE VERY GENEROUS SALARY HE OR SHE MADE WHILE WORKING FOR THE COMPANY.

8. STRENGTHEN THE FDIC AND MAKE IT A MODEL FOR PROTECTING NOT ONLY PEOPLE’S SAVINGS, BUT ALSO THEIR PENSIONS AND THEIR HOMES.

9. EVERYBODY NEEDS TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH, CALM DOWN, AND NOT LET FEAR RULE THE DAY.

10. CREATE A NATIONAL BANK, A “PEOPLE’S BANK.”

Looks like the House is gonna fail to pass the bailout bill, by 20 or more votes. Watching the votes trickle in is almost as interesting as watching the Dow Jones fuck off. Down almost over 600 right now. 

UPDATE: With time now expires and most of the NV votes coming in, it stands at 205 yea, 228 nay. Along party lines, its looking at Democrates voting 140-95 for, and Republicans voting 65-133 against. But that will change as the day goes on, as normal House rules have been suspended in order to try to get this bill passed, as every Congressman’s stock broker gets on the horn and asks WTF. 

UPDATE II: Well the bill has officially failed. Sorry about your retirement fund. Luckily I’m broke as fuck so I don’t really give a shit. 

Interesting article from the Sunday Herald about the massive debt write-downs and ensuing goverment bailouts of private banks currently happening throughout Europe and the US, a scenario predicted rather aptly by our old friend Karl Marx:

The quaint idea that loss-making companies should fail, to ensure the health and vitality of the capitalist system, has quietly been discarded. The banks, we are told, are “too big to fail”, which means that they have to be taken into public ownership - like Northern Rock - or have their debts underwritten by government, like Bear Stearns, which comes to much the same thing. The central banks are also cutting interest rates to try to boost banking profits, and this is making currencies such as the dollar increasingly unstable.

Which takes us back to Marx. The crisis that is rocking the world is a classic example of the kind of shocks and dislocations that Marx said were an essential feature of a competitive capitalist economy. The falling rate of profit that results from too much investment piling into new technologies and commodities forces capital to engage in a constant search for profit.

Athough the US government has long had an unspoken policy regarding commerical banks that were T.B.T.F. (too big to fail),  the recent bailout of Bear Stearns marked a new broadening in scope of this failsafe, one the New Yorker deems “Too Dumb to Fail“:

T.B.T.F. has become a generally accepted, if unwritten, rule in the financial world. Two weeks ago, though, it was given a new twist when the Federal Reserve acted to save the investment bank Bear Stearns, orchestrating the company’s sale to J. P. Morgan Chase by providing Morgan with up to thirty billion dollars in financing to cover Bear Stearns’s portfolio of risky assets. Previously, the government had intervened to protect only commercial banks—which take deposits and issue traditional loans, and which are heavily regulated. (Another first: the Fed is now allowing investment banks to borrow from it directly.) The Bear Stearns deal means that the T.B.T.F. rule now applies to investment banks as well. Suddenly, the federal government is committed to saving a whole lot more companies than it was a couple of weeks ago.

And though the New Yorker story quoted above goes on to praise the bailout of Bear Stearns as being an altogether positive for the long term health of the world financial markets, it does make an especially salient point about the precedent being set:

Rescuing failing companies obviously runs the risk of creating moral hazard—if we insulate people from the consequences of their irresponsibility, they’re more likely to be irresponsible in the future.

Stay tuned…