For once - and hopefully not for only a fleeting moment - democracy made an appearance in the halls of power due to  the House's  extraordinary vote yesterday to reject the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Will Congress go to the hard right, load the bill up with corporate tax cuts and pass this bill or will they actually be leaders and make this bill a vehicle for the kind of New Deal-style investments and regulations that are necessary to start rebuilding this country?

"It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people's money being used to pay the fiddler...all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel."
- Abraham Lincoln, January 11, 1837

The Uprising Comes to Wall Street and Washington

By David Sirota

When an individual consumer uses a new credit card to pay off astounding debt from an old credit card, it's called kiting, and in many cases, it is illegal. Apparently, though, when the government does it, it's billed as Serious Public Policy. Because that's what this supposedly prudent bailout bill would do: Force taxpayers to borrow $700 billion from foreign banks to pay off the bad debt of Wall Street banks.

During a crisis that is aimed at preventing interest rates from skyrocketing, nobody has been able to explain how adding almost a trillion dollars to the interest rate-exacerbating national debt would do anything other than undermine the plan's underlying objective. Worse, the U.S. Treasury Department itself admits that the $700 billion number is "not based on any particular data point" - that is, they created it out of thin air because "We just wanted to choose a really large number." Slapping that amount of money onto the national credit card when our government can't even justify the amount is beyond absurd - it is insane.

Meanwhile, it's not even close to clear that this is a problem that requires such an enormous response. As mentioned above, the Treasury Department admits it has absolutely no factual basis for requesting $700 billion - an amount equivalent to about 5 percent of our entire economy.

Additionally, the Washington Post reports that "Banks throughout the United States carried on with the business of making loans yesterday even as federal officials warned again that their industry is on the verge of collapse, suggesting that the overheated language on Capitol Hill may not reflect the reality on many Main Streets." Indeed, "many smaller banks said they were actually benefiting from the problems on Wall Street" and "even some of the nation's largest banks, which have pushed hard for a federal bailout, deny that the current situation is forcing them to reduce lending."

The questions, then, are simple: In the face of this bipartisan opposition from objective experts, why should a lawmaker instead believe the same Bush officials who helped create this crisis with their deregulation, the same Bush officials who just months ago said everything was AOK?

The mantra throughout the week has been that America has "no choice" but to pass Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's $700 billion giveaway - that, in effect, there are no alternatives. But that's an out-and-out lie - one with a motive: Making it seem as if the only thing we can do is hand the keys to the federal treasury over to both parties' corporate campaign contributors.

The amount of brazen corruption and conflicts of interest swirling around this deal is odious, even by Washington's standards - and polls suggest the public inherently understands that. Consider these choice nuggets:

•           Warren Buffett is simultaneously advising Obama to support the deal, while he himself is investing in the company that stands to make the most off the deal.

•           McCain's campaign is run by lobbyists from the companies that stand to make a killing off a no-strings government bailout.

•           The New York Times reports that the person advising Paulson and Bernanke on the AIG bailout was the CEO of Goldman Sachs - a company with a $20 billion stake in AIG.

•           The Obama campaign's top spokesman pushing this deal is none other than Roger Altman, who Bloomberg News reports is simultaneously "advising a group of investors who are trying to prevent their shares from being diluted in the U.S. takeover of American International Group Inc." - that is, who have a direct financial interest in the current bailout.

Add to this the fact that the negotiations over this bill have been largely conducted in secret, and you have one of the most sleazy heists in American history.