Wall St. Meltdown: Dems push back against Bush's bailout

"We will not simply hand over a $700 billion blank check to Wall St..."
- Nancy Pelosi

Finallllllly... the Dems are showing some spine regarding Bush's $700. Let's hope they don't cave in to Bush and Paulson's "economy is in its last throes" chatter like they did to Bush's "Shock and Awe" Iraq tactics. The Washington Post reports:

Congressional Democrats considering the Bush administration's emergency plan to shore up the U.S. financial system yesterday countered with their own demands, presenting draft legislation giving the government power to cut salaries of chief executives at firms that participate in the bailout and slash severance packages for their top management...

...Democrats sought to add oversight provisions and taxpayer protections to the proposal, which amounts to the largest government intervention in the private markets since the Great Depression. "We will not simply hand over a $700 billion blank check to Wall Street," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

Under the proposal drafted by House Democrats, the Treasury would be required to force faltering firms that want to sell their troubled assets to the government to "meet appropriate standards for executive compensation." Those standards would include a ban on incentives that encourage chief executives to take "inappropriate or excessive" risks, a mechanism to rescind bonuses paid for earnings that never materialize and limits on severance pay

This fiasco developed over the last 5 years, and many people (e.g., Warren Buffett) predicted it accurately at least 5 years ago. Paulson, while he was CEO at Goldman-Sachs, successfully steered his company away from it, however when he got to Washington back in June of 2006, he DID NOT take steps to avert the financial mess we are in now. That's right, what we're seeing now could have been avoided 2-3 years ago, at the expense of the big cats at Lehman who are now being rewarded for their massive failings with a nice fat $2.5 billion bonus. I don't see how anyone in their right mind could hand this guy Paulson a blank check for $700 billion with hardly any oversight. Let's not condone the mistakes of the reckless, greedy few who brought us into this mess.