Remember all that missing Cash in Iraq? $12 Billion on innumerable pallets of crisp new $100 bills in nice shrink wrapped bundles weighing a whopping 363 Tons.

Remember all those adjectives? Astounding. Staggering. Incomprehensible. All that cash flushed down the Iraqi toilet.

Well the new toilet is Wall Street and the new amount is $700 Billion.

That's 21,175 Tons of $100 Bills!
That's 42,350,000 Pounds of $100 Bills!!
That's over 622 Truck and Trailer Loads of $100 Bills!!!

That's . . . . .

Words fail.

Nearly 9 years ago, on the eve of passing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the now infamous legislation that paved the way for today’s financial mess, Rep. John Dingell got it right.

“[This bill] fails to recognize that human nature has not changed.  It also fails to recognize something else. The technology that has changed has made it much easier to take money from the innocent and from the unsuspecting. It relaxes protection for investors, taxpayers, depositors, and consumers.

Let us talk about what is wrong with the legislation…Woe to the American people when they have to pick up the tag for one of the failures that is going to occur when competition disappears and prices shoot up and misbehavior or unwise behavior takes place…

I think we ought to look at what we are doing here tonight. We are passing a bill which is going to have very little consideration, written in the dark of night, without any real awareness on the part of most of what it contains.  I just want to remind my colleagues about what happened the last time the Committee on Banking brought a bill on the floor which deregulated the savings and loans. It wound up imposing upon the taxpayers of this Nation about a $500 billion liability. That is what it cost to clean up that mess. Now, at the same time, the banks by engaging in questionable practices wound up in a situation where the Fed and the Treasury Department had to bail them out also at the taxpayers’ expense.  But it did not show.  Having said that, what we are creating now is a group of institutions which are too big to fail.

Not only are they going to be big banks, but they are going to be big everything, because they are going to be in securities and insurance, in issuance of stocks and bonds and underwriting, and they are also going to be in banks.  And under this legislation, the whole of the regulatory structure is so obfuscated and so confused that liability in one area is going to fall over into liability in the next. Taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight, and it is going to cost a lot of money, and it is coming. Just be prepared for those events.

You are going to find that they are too big to fail, so the Fed is going to be in and other Federal agencies are going to be in to bail them out. Just expect that.”

 - Rep. John Dingell, 1999

From Jim Slattery's Blog for Kansas

Speaker Nancy Pelosi
United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC
Fax: 1 202 225-4188

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

I am a disabled physician. During the years I practiced medicine, I devoted myself to serving predominately low income working people, the elderly and the indigent who sought care at the University Medical Centers in Virginia and Kansas. I also served our veterans working with the Veterans Administration health system. I never pursued the financial rewards of private practice because I have always been relatively frugal and my want and need levels, with those of my family, have never been great. Service was always the paramount focus.

My disability arose from contracting a life-threatening, chronic infectious disease from one of my patients. After I was forced from practice by failing health, my family’s income was sustained only by virtue of the investments I had made in equities during my career. Now, many of those equities have been markedly deflated in value, and my family’s economic future is very uncertain. My son has just started college, and our savings for that have also been deflated.

This has all come about as a result of your failure in Congress to protect citizens from the machinations of Wall Street, even in the face of history and so many warnings from thoughtful economists and thoughtful members of the House and Senate. Now you ask me and every other American to absorb the cost of bailing out those whose malfeasance brought us to this disastrous moment.  But I have already paid my part in the form of market losses. Why should I have to pay twice?

I have 11,000 shares of virtually worthless Fannie Mae (FNM).  A year ago FNM was paying a quarterly dividend of $0.50 per share and had a share price that hovered around $60.00. The last dividend, in August, was $0.05 and there will probably be no more. I can’t sell the stock as there is no real market for it. It closed yesterday for $1.66 -- less than 2.8 cents on the dollar.

I think that if the Government of the United States is going to bail out anyone, I should be near the front of the line. I would like you to buy out my nearly worthless portfolio at 40 or 50 cents on the dollar against my cost basis. The cost to the government would only be $350,000, a mere one-half of one-millionth part of the $700 Billion in largess your are intending for the Wall Street moguls whom you allowed to screw the American people out of their retirement assets.  It is only fair, and I will not require any tax breaks to go along with the refund. Just give me my money back and I’ll pay my taxes as I always have -- without complaint.

Sincerely.