Dear Henry Paulson,

Isn't this bailout just one big subprime mortgage? Weren't subprime mortgages typified by shoddy paperwork and blind trust? And here you are, giving the American people a three page outline for $700 billion.

Three fucking pages? We had to put more effort into book reports during grade school, and suddenly that's enough to vest you with the greatest financial powers in the history of the world.

You want our money and you're treating it like the last no-down, adjustable rate, give-us-your-finances on a cocktail napkin shell game cooked up by a coked out trader trying to unload a brick of bad credit default swaps on a confused rookie in the bathroom of a plush Wall Street bar.

Aren't you just asking us to insure your fragile house of cards one more time? Aren't you just asking us to take out another bad loan and hope all the right things materialize at the right time as long as it's your pals who have the money?

Aren't they the ones who fucked us in the first place?

Let's call this American 419 scam what it is: One last stab at sucking the US Treasury dry before Hurricane Bush blows over and the stripped, shoddy frame of deceit and greed and toxic mold that used to be the US economy is left to the nation's workers to rebuild, while you assholes tool around the world on your yachts, eating caviar, and dumping all the money we gave you to help us into hidden bank accounts and Chinese startup firms.

As the waters of self-destruction splash over your industrial levees of misdirection, has it ever occurred to you that maybe we want to see YOU get up on YOUR roof after the storm and grovel for US to save YOU?

We've already figured for the last decade how to make it day by day in a Depression, a Recession, or a whatever-you-want-to-call-it when even responsible working Americans can't keep their heads above the water by eating Pinto beans and taking the bus. We'd like to see you crowd into the Superdome.

We'd like to see you experience the uncertainty.

We'd like to see you in the aisles of Big Lots with saucer eyes and small change.

We'd like to see you run to the phone for an ambulance and hesitate because picking up the phone could bankrupt you. Easy. For life.

We'd like to see you not be able to get out of the rain.

And for just a little while, we'd like to watch you tread water, too.

Signed,
America