U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has chosen a former fellow Goldman Sachs executive to oversee the disbursement of the $700 billion blank check Congress and President Bush approved for the controversial bailout of Wall Street financial services companies.

The new head of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, as the congressionally blessed, George W. Bush-approved Wall Street welfare program is called, will be Neel Kashkari.

Who?

Neel Kashkari: he was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs before he signed on at the Treasury Department in July of 2006, shortly after Paulson left the firm to head Treasury.

That's right. Just like his current boss, Henry Paulson, Mr. Kashkari was a top executive at Goldman Sachs, the first of what has become a recent cascade of giant financial services companies collapsing under the weight of their bad investments in mortgage-backed securities and their phenomenally imprudent ratios of borrowed money to equity.

Handing oversight of the disbursement of what might very well be more than a trillion dollars to a former Wall Street executive of a firm that failed massively and, more importantly, had been failing massively for a long time before its over-leveraged, highly risky portfolio started coming apart in a very public way might seem to some observers like letting the fox guard the hen house; but that simile is wrong. This is, in fact, the very epitome of handing the fox clear title to the hen house, along with a brand new kitchen with an industrial-strength taxpayer-chicken broiler oven and a dining room table with seating for every other fox in the whole darned country.

Congress, whose members have raked in $43 million in lobbying money and campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs and its bigwigs since 1989, might as well have thrown in a big bouquet of flowers and a string quartet to provide just the right setting for the reckless Wall Street insiders sitting down to their All-U-Can-Eat smorgasbord of taxpayer money roasted and served to the corporate welfare queens of the new American century.

The word "ridiculous" does not even begin to cover what is happening right under our noses on the Wall Street-Washington D.C. axis of big corporation-big government revolving door corruption. This money grab has all the nuance of a tuba ensemble using dual, 10 megawatt amps. Woe be to any average American citizen when that band comes roaring down the tracks Hell-bent for Jubilee Day at the hog-trough of national debt heading for digit counts that overflow scientific calculator displays.

No one can stop this madness: not the tens of millions of voters, not the hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants, not the thousands of federal judges, not the hundreds of purported representatives of the People in the federal legislature, not the heads of the federal agencies, not the two major party candidates, not the President.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has no need for subtlety, now: he got the money his cronies on Wall Street wanted, he got enough power to dole it out as he sees fit to those high-stakes welfare queens, and now he can put his chosen Igor in charge of slapping together a veritable Frankenstein's monster of consolidated financial power in the hands of the very insiders who killed the industry from which is now being harvested parts for the biggest government-business joint venture zombie in the history of this nation.

And what are the voters going to do about this come November 4? Why, they're going to vote for either John McCain (who has received more than $200,000 from Goldman Sachs and more than $1,800,000 from commercial banks) or Barack Obama (who has received more than $700,000 from Goldman Sachs and more than $2,000,000 from commercial banks), both of whom voted for this cynical horror show.

If there were even a hint of Hollywood-style justice, at the very least, we could get a decent scene where Sarah Palin meets up with the monster in a most undesirable combination of dark hallway, terrifying music, and casting deletions.

Unfortunately, Washington doesn't make horror movies like the ones from Hollywood: for one thing, Hollywood usually eliminates most of the bad actors by the end; for another thing, unlike the show in Washington, Hollywood movies—even the worst of them—always come to an end.


The Dark Wraith yells, "CUT!"