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Treasury Secretary (he's former chairman of Goldman Sachs...) excerpted speech on taxpayer bailout of Fannie and Freddie, with accompanying translation:

Jesse's Café Américain: Paulson's Statement on Freddie and Fannie with a Nearly Simultaneous Translation

The biggest fleecing of the US taxpayer in the history of the US was put together in secrecy over this weekend, (after government officials tipped off their pals on Wall Street who "front run" all such tips by buying stock and options on the cheap during the early part of the day, as they did friday, to position themselves before the public can trade the news on monday......) and there has been no comment posted about it at TFP Politics.

The "plan" will cost US taxpayers at least $500 billion, favors PIMCO, Wall Street and foreign central banks like China's, which bought up trillions of dollars worth of MBS with questionably underwritten mortgage loans, and could cost US taxpayers as much as $1-1/2 to $2 trillion, plus whatever influence this scheme has in further weakening the US dollar.

Some US banks held too much Freddie and Fannie, high dividend yielding, preferred stock. With the dividend now cancelled, and the government stepping in front in the line of debt holders (holders of existing Freddie and Fannie common and preferred shares....) by infusing taxpayer's money, in exchange for 79.9 percent of Fannie and Freddie "equity", the common stock is worthlessm and the preferred is worth much less than it's friday closing price of above $17.00. The Treasury announcement encouraged those banks to "call in", to talk about their losses. This is gov speak for, you lost, but let's not make it public for as long as possible. This is an indicator, along with the weekend, secret deal, as the one held in March, to "save" Bear Stearns, that the US Treasury and the Fed have no intention of conducting the taxpayer's business with any transparency, or frankness.

The "plan" favors the US "property party" constituents, the party with two right wings, called the democratic and republican party. The folks who saw big gains, selling unneeded housing units to each other at ever rising prices, collecting windfall profits, sales commissions, and on Wall Street, hefty fees for packaging the mortgage loans generated by this speculative activity, into multi million dollar MBS tranches.

Now, the grandchildren of the bottom 50 percent of American households who owe 46 percent of outstanding credit card and installment loan debt, but who own only 2-1/2 percent of US assets, will be responsible for part of the increase to national debt this mess causes, but these households did not benefit from the run up in housing prices.

The coming depression will force many of these households into bankruptcy, or at least into an inability to make payments on the nearly half of all US consumer debt hanging around their necks.

My advice is to at least look at the Fannie and Freddie bailout, and the way debt and assets are distributed among US households. You might even want to consider that you've been distracted by "the show", the "puppet show" that convinces you that their are two major, OPPOSING political parties in the US.....and, ask yourselves -- does the Fannie and Freddie bailout....with no mention of criminal investigation of those who gutted these two GSE's, the housing market, and the economy, to make them accountable and to seize fraudulantly gained profit, reinforce the idea that the two parties oppose each other, politically, or not?

Does an elite that has no particular allegiance to either party, to any principle higher than their own consolidation or wealth and power, control US politics and finance, or not?