If Obama was a leader, a man of action, who believed in change, why didn’t he stand before the President, the leadership of the House and Senate, Fed Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson and say:

THIS DEAL STINKS AND IS BAD FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!

Here’s my plan …

• Characterize the solution as a “workout” not a “bailout” with no special or hidden provisions. Everything above board, no gentleman’s agreements and no favoring special interests.
• No expansion of the Department of Treasury with a new bureaucracy to buy and manage toxic debt.
• No ceding of power to a single man with unlimited power and no judicial review.
• Suspend mark-to-market accounting and replace it with a three or five year rolling average to prevent the impact of legislatively-mandated accounting which guarantees losses in the early life of derivatives. This will prevent the automatic insolvency of many financial institutions as the rebuild their balance sheets.
• Eliminate FAS 140 and any other accounting trick that allows you to keep risky investments or other assets and liabilities off the parent’s balance sheet. All subsidiaries would face a full consolidation of their financials for regulatory purposes.
• Money would be supplied in the form of fully collateralized loans at Treasury (6-month) plus two percent. Collateral will can consist of assets of any class that have been correctly valued.
• Reconstitute good loans into covered loans for sale on the open market.
• Dissolve derivatives with little or no value with an open auction.
• Set rules and regulations for the creation and marketing of derivatives.
• Prohibit the use of derivative securities being used for core capital requirements and specify limits for derivatives to be held by pension and mutual funds.
• Regulate hedge funds as unchartered banks.
• Require financial reports quarterly.
• Limit excessive executive compensation for companies using federal funds in workout mode.
• Seek the repatriation for bonus funds earned by executives which were conditioned on the sale of derivatives or toxic paper.
• Prosecute wrongdoing whenever possible.

Well you get the idea … there are any number of things he could have said or done. He has smart advisors and yet he stood there and, once again, symbolically voted PRESENT.

This is not the type of man or leader I want to see defending this nation and rebuilding our fragile economy.

-- steve

P.S. John McCain defied the President, the leaders of Congress, the Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to say that, as the leader of the Party and its Presidential Candidate, he did not make this deal and neither did the top Republican leadership – and the current deal stinks.

That is courage! And that’s why we need a McCain in office. We may not agree with him on each and every issue and many may not like him personally – but the socialistic alternative of Obama, Pelosi and Reid are unacceptable.