Black Box Report

Across the nation, victims of predatory mortgage lenders and homeowners who were barely getting by before job loss or medical emergencies forced them to face foreclosure, are crying out to their leaders in Washington, "Please, won't you do something to help...the automotive, airline and energy industries? Billions in corporate tax breaks for them, if you don't mind?" Well, lucky them, their calls were heard by the august members of the United States Senate:

Congress pretending to rush to the aid of "homeowners" with a bill so stuffed with pork, lobbyist favors, and corporate tax breaks that the homeowner is an after-thought.

Like the ironically-named Clean Air Act or the Helathy Forests Initiative, the Senate's version of the Foreclosure Prevention Act had provisions taken OUT that would've, y'know, prevented foreclosures:

In the spirit of working together, Senate Democrats stripped from the FORECLOSURE PREVENTION ACT a provision that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to intervene to help struggling homeowners. That move was key in getting the support of Senate Republicans to pass the bill.

Because Democrats are still a minority, even when they're a majority:

The U.S. House of Representatives, which features a high level of party discipline and where liberals are basically in the driver's seat, produced a pretty good bill to provide relief to people hard hit by the crisis in the housing markets. But over in the U.S. Senate where you need Republican support to pass a bill, and where Democrats with a questionable commitment to progressive values like Max Baucus hold immense sway, the bill has become party central for corporate lobbyists with all kinds of random giveaways to this industry and that larding the thing up.

At least it was bipartisan. And to partially make up for the help their not giving to homeowners, they offer this latest episode at the feeding trough as an instructive parable on how you should go about wetting your whistle:

Once again, our government continues to think dishing out corporate welfare to failing big businesses is going to help the financial issues of individual families. It is almost like asking those families to bail out the people who employ them...
Perhaps, the only way for me to benefit from my tax dollars is to start a huge company destined to fail so that I can be bailed out as well. Sort of like the scheme from "The Producers".

Springtime for Bear Stearns and equity?

There is still hope with the House version of the bill which sets aside more help for homeowners and cuts out the corporate goodies, but only if people act like they care:

The economic crisis is just another opportunity to raid the treasury on behalf of the big corporations. Like 9/11, Katrina, etc., making the vastly rich vastly richer. What else would you expect?
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There is still time to fight this -- but only if we can get the public to start acting like citizens participating in their government instead of consumers watching a TV show.

Because we can't all be featured on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.