A Corporate Welfare To Work Program For Wall Street

So far the Fed has doled out something like two trillion dollars of essentially free bailout money to various uber rich firms and according to news stories today they are refusing to tell who is getting the money or for what. That is pitiful and needs to be changed since it is our money they are handing out in this largest ever example of corporate welfare. It is sad that these corporate welfare queens are driving around in cadillacs on the public dime and breeding more high paid executives who will only continue that cycle of public dependence without any kind of accountability.

We, the middle class of America, can no longer afford to put food on their tables out of our pockets (which is exactly what we are doing) or make the payments on their luxury cars and their million dollar homes and ask nothing of these Wall Street Losers in return. If you or I lose a job and our unemployment runs out or for some other reason we have to go on welfare did you know that the government puts a lien on your home for the amount that you get from welfare? Oh yes and no one ever said that was socialism, did they? Since we are making this incredible investment in these companies and since we are at least supposed to be getting some ownership in the companies in return it occurred to me that there might be ways to capitalize on these investments. To put these corporate welfare queens to work if you will.

One way to do this would be to use all of the ownership in these companies as well as their toxic real estate assets as security on which to issue bonds for the reconstruction/renovation of the electric grid and as seed money to finance new renewable energy projects. Why not? During WW II we sold War Bonds so these would be Green Bonds. So far we should have 2 trillion dollars in commercial assets to use to issue these bonds on. Ok, so a lot of these assets aren't worth a whole lot so we issue discount bonds at 50% of the value of the assets and we still have one trillion dollars to work with. Then add into that the 700 billion a year we will be saving when we do wean ourselves off of imported oil and you realize that we do indeed have plenty of money at our disposal to rebuild our energy infrastructure even in these difficult financial times.

If the automakers want a bailout too then lets require them to build plug-in hybrids and set some government labs to work helping them to design really environmentally friendly vehicles that can run most of the time on battery power provided by clean, renewable energy sources. We converted our industry to making Jeeps and tanks during war time so why not do it again in a different way to suit the needs of this "war" to save our future and the Planet?