“Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them…. Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.”

-Thomas Paine, “The American Crisis”

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)

I’ll let everyone else add to the vitriolic discussion over the 700 billion-dollar-bazooka at njrereport.com, housingpanic and the other blogs. It is sad to see that a good many of the regular posters at those sites have more financial sense than King Henry and Ben Bergabe combined. Frankly, I’m also too busy and too mentally exhausted to generate a coherent post that covers the range of my opinions and feelings about the events of recent days. Suffice it to say, I’m using the words “rage”, “disgust”, “disappointment”, “disillusionment”, “criminal”, “idiot” and “expatriation” a lot in my current conversations. You know things are coming to a head when a guy like top homebuilding analyst, Mike Morgan, admits on conference calls that he goes to Sam’s Club every week to add to a growing personal hoard of food and water.

So, we’ll let the smart folks parse the financial ramifications of the Big Bailout. However, the less-examined issue is: why is it that the blogosphere saw this whole mess coming for over two years, called every shot perfectly…yet the mainstream media (MSM) has been completely blindsided by recent events? Has the MSM just been completely co-opted by corporate America? Are they now synonymous with corporate America? Are they no more than a stealth tool of mass narcotization, providing the cover of presenting entertainment as news so that investment bankers and their government enablers can rob us blind?

We now have the spectacle of a Federal Reserve chair and Secretary of the Treasury bum-rushing Congress like a teenager begging for the car keys on a Friday night. According to King Henry and Bergabe, imminent doom awaits us…unless they are given 700 billion, with no conditions, no oversight and no accountability. And, by the way, can we please give it to them NOW?

The US faces a possible Biblical generation (that’s 40 years) of economic pain, in order to execute a plan that reads like it was drawn on a cocktail napkin. Failed investment bankers and their minions are preparing to slink away- under cover of darkness- with billions in ill-gotten fees and commissions. But if you turn on CNBC after 5 PM, what do you get? Cramer, one of the investment criminals’ biggest cheerleaders? Kudlow? A former cokehead, whose denial has now turned itself on the precarious state of our economy? Donny Deutsch (no words can describe this moron…although “Elmer Gantry” always comes to mind when I see his vacant, smiling rictus of a face)?

Say what you want about the bubble blogs- and 90% of their content may be pure drivel- but the best of them contain the only truth available about the criminal enterprise that is about to rob our country, throw us all into poverty and saddle future unborn generations with crushing debt.