You’re absolutely right when you say “the fix was in”. And it’s in again, I’m afraid. I read from a couple sources that the banking lobbyists have poured some $5 Billion dollars into the crafting of the reform legislation. Dodd said today the bill is designed to “appeal to various interests”.

The whole problem is one of risk and leverage. In an ideal economic model, banks would stay below 9:1 debt/asset leverage, and have a very strict risk evaluation. Most small, community banks, that are under state oversight, follow this. It’s these nationwide & int’l mega-banks that are stumbling around at 30:1 to 50:1 leverage, then tossing risk out the window by playing games with ratings companies to make their loans look good on paper.

Meanwhile, there’s already another bill Congress is drafting for the Dept of Agriculture that takes us back to subprime mortgages with 0-down and low interest rates. These guys are completely insane and all need to be voted out. We’d be better off just having a lottery instead of elections. Put people in Congress for one year and then have another lottery and so on.

While it sounds like a better idea, I have grave reservations about the Senate bill being better than the House version. Keep in mind that the FDIC is also funded by the banks themselves, however, in the past year, additional funding has come from Uncle Sugar.

If we look at what happened in September, 2008, $50 billion would not have very much. AIG cost us $185 Billion. The first half of TARP’s $350 Billion went mighty fast, too. Then you have the ’shenanigan factor’ where Bank of America, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs were allowed to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from the Federal reserve discount window at 0.5% interest rate and use that money to pay back the TARP funds. Who can forget when the Fed just merely added some digital zeros to BoA’s balance sheet so they could buy Merrill Lynch (not to mention BoA buying some other firms, including the China Construction Bank, with TARP $$$).

I look at at this as ‘keeping a foot in the door’ clause so that the banks will still have a ‘lender of last resort’ us taxpayers, to fall back on. The next few articles will continue to shed more light on the details of the reform bills. None of it is pretty.

Amway is a scam, and here’s why: Amway pays out as little money as they can get away with, so they support the higher level IBOs ripping off their downline via the tool scam.

As a result, about 99% of IBOs operate at a net loss, while the top 1% make several TIMES more from their Amway tool scam than from the Amway products. This was made illegal in the UK in 2008, but our FTC is unable to pull their heads out of their butts to stop it here.

Read about it on this website: http://thenetprofitgroup.yolasite.com and forward the information to everyone you know, so they don’t get scammed.

You don’t think the latter is better, since it provides that any “bailouts” are funded by the entities who ask for them? Of course, I don’t know much about the other provisions in either bill, but just on this particular point, it does seem the Senate Bill avoids using taxpayer dollars. Assuming you have your facts right in what you quote above.