Tag: Treasury Dept

All of the political leaders blessed the deal, but the House of Representatives spit it out anyway. The Wall Street bailout is so odious to public opinion, the "people's house" rejected it, 228-205. The fever chart in Wall Street — better known as the stock market — swooned instantly, with the Dow falling 700 points. The political bedlam in Washington is as real as it gets.

As a result of the House Republicans refusal to get on board with an economic bailout package this afternoon, it’s back to the drawing board for the White House and divided U.S. lawmakers – including the Colorado delegation.

Sharpen your red pencils. The government transparency group, Public Markup.org, posted the full text of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 — otherwise known as the $700 billion blank check to Wall Street — to encourage public discussion sans pundits and politicos.

Like Congress as a whole, the Colorado delegation is divided on how best to right the nation’s shaky economy. But as Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C., belittled the Bush Administration’s $700 million bailout package Thursday as a request for a “blank check” from taxpayers, and bickered with each other about “core agreements” of an alternative to the Bush Administration’s economic bailout proposal, Colorado lawmakers took opposing stances on whether the government should intervene at all.

The good folks at PublicMarkup.org have placed the competing $700 billion mortgage bailout plans online to allow the public to read and comment on them while Congress considers its options in the midst of the greed-fueled nosedive of Wall Street.