Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation calls out Congress [1] for rushing a bailout for their donor friends on Wall Street who pushed for the deregulation that led to the current crisis.  When Wall Street comes calling, they get $700 billion, no strings attached -- when the average homeowner finds herself in foreclosure Congress drags its heels to help her.  Welcome to donation-driven politics.

 

Vanden Heuvel includes remarks by our own Nick Nyhart in her article, noting the connections between campaign cash from brokerages, banks, and real estate firms that will now buy them out of the crisis they put themselves in:

 

Hard money totals for these sectors during the 2000 election cycle – when the Glass-Steagall Act was formally repealed and the regulatory firewall between investment banks, commercial banks, and insurance companies was brought down – totaled nearly $200 million. With the accounting for the 2008 cycle only partially in, those sectors have already upped the ante to over $300 million. They have supported John McCain and Barack Obama roughly evenly with $42 million in contributions.


With this kind of money deluge, it's no surprise that despite the fact that it's Wall Street who's begging Main Street for $700 billion, a lobbyist like Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable still has the audacity to warn that "any effort to attach other provisions [to the original proposal] would be a deal breaker"; or to tell the Wall Street Journal , "We're opposed to attaching provisions that will turn the bill into a Christmas tree. Building a bridge won't have an immediate impact." (Really, Scott? Tell that to someone who has just lost her home, or is choosing between paying for food or medicine, and might get a job building that bridge.) 

Uch. Yeah, heaven forbid you let the taxpayers who are footing the bill for Wall Street's largesse get anything at all out of the $700 billion they're paying. Oh, right -- they're not giving those millions in campaign contributions.