The latest bailout plan by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is destined to go down as the greatest scam in the history of the United States. Just last month CitiGroup was doing so well that they were going to buy Wachovia,by assets the sixth largest bank in the country. According to Reuters,Wachovia held $122 billion dollars in morgages which were “distressed”. In the second quarter of 2008 Wachovia lost $9.11 billion dollars. If CitiGroup had bought Wachovia they would have assumed all of the debt of that banking colossus. The debt was in the tens of billions of dollars,but this didn’t deter CitiGroup. If Wells Fargo hadn’t swooped in and snatched Wachovia away on October the 3rd,the merger of Citi and Wachovia would have taken place.

We are now expected to believe that a company that was strong enough in October to be able to ignore the debt that a merger would have brought it,is in November so broke that they must be bailed out. Damn,that must have been one bad month! According to today’s San Francisco Chronicle CitiGroup has a 2 TRILLION dollar balance sheet. Yet they need our help!

I used to live in New York City and they used to sell a T-shirt there that read,”New York-Only the strong survive”. This is true in banking. When many banks got in trouble earlier this year,they were devoured by Bank of America,Chase-Morgan and Wells Fargo. If Citi-Group was truly in trouble,they should have let others acquire the bank. Instead our government is going to give them 20 billion dollars in a bailout and guarantee more than 300 billion dollars in mortgages and assorted other assets!

This is by far the most outrageous of all the bailouts. What’s amazing is that both parties are going along with this. Both Bush and Obama are going along with this. The nation’s coffers are being plundered and not a peep from anyone. These guys are no different than the pirates off the coast of Somalia who are hijacking ships and holding them for ransom. At least they have the decency to call themselves pirates. In America pirates are called “economists”.