American politicians sound so great. Wonderful words, lots of them, that sometimes sound so great that I might even vote for them, if I thought they could be trusted.

Trust. It's what makes relationships, businesses, and even nations work. When someone isn't trustworthy, there's no sense dealing with them - contracts will be violated, loopholes found, theft will occur. You just can't deal with dishonest people and come out unscathed. When people can't be trusted, trouble follows. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty because we have to always be watchful for the untrustworthy who crave power.

The beauty of the Constitution is that it recognizes that humans can't always be trusted and thus sets up limitations to the power of government to keep it small, to keep its power diffuse and contained, with numerous checks and balances to limit what one corrupt man can do. But we've jettisoned much of that. Now we allow one man to declare and wage war, without authority. We allow a group of nine to essentially create laws, redistribute wealth, and even turn the sanctity of life on its head, and we think our only hope to restrain judicial license is to hope for judges to die so new usurpers can be appointed. Now we are asked to place the future of this nation into the hands of one man with obvious ties to the biggest special interests on earth, a man who tells us that he needs a $700 billion credit card without oversight so he can do whatever it takes to fix this crisis - because his company, his friends, his allies need our money, and lots of it.

Man, this takes all the fun out of conspiracy theories. All that conspiracy theory stuff about hidden agendas, secret oaths, politicians taking money under the table, the secret influence of the mega-rich on government, the dark machinations of the wealthiest in the world, the gruesome power of the big bankers and their cronies expressed through tangled webs of alliances - it's all heady and exciting stuff, and it may soon be gone forever, if we don't act fast and demand that these guys start being secret again.

Frankly, all the mystique is gone when the former CEO of one of the companies that runs the financial markets and got us into this mess comes before Congress and tells us that "Dah boyz up dah street need $700 billion protection money, and they need it now, no cops, no oversight, nuttin, just fork it over now, or you're all gonna suffer. Jus' get me da money, and it will all be good. Trust me.." No need for a sleuth to scurry around sorting through slivers of evidence to solve a midnight crime without witnesses - this is robbery in broad daylight by a gang that feels no need to hide. He is asking the government to put a gun to our heads and demand about $3000 from every person in the country to bail out the greedy now that they are in a bind, and the President and so many politicians are falling over themselves to go along with it - but with little tweaks here and there so they won't look too obvious. There's even a little debate about how to handle the future profits - profits?? - from flushing your billions into a Wall Street cesspool that no sane businessman would touch. Americans are outraged, but we're told to simply trust these very smart people in Treasury and the Fed who know how to handle this, the same gang who got us into this mess. Just trust them because they are much smarter than the rest of us. That's what I head Tim Ryan of Treasury saying this morning on Squawkbox. Fascinating.

The massive corruption that has led to our current financial crisis will not be solved by handing the guilty all our wealth and giving them our financial future in the form of a credit card with a limit beyond imagination. No, that's not going to fix the real problem at all. But a few hundred crooks behind bars would be a healthy step. Throw in a truly independent investigation of the Federal Reserve Bank and their operations for fun to tell us what foreign powers or special interests have access to the secret decisions that are made and who has financial interest in their dealings, or . . . Ah, there we go, some of the mystique is back. Mmmm, I can almost taste the excitement of a night in the Skull and Bones crypt with some eerie Gaddianton-like oaths on the menu.

Yeah, at least have the decency to keep this stuff secret and mysterious, not blatant and shameless. $700 billion without oversight to the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who simply says "Trust me"? Couldn't you at least wear a black hood and talk with a heavy foreign accent when you make this ransom demand so we have to speculate about who this frightening agent of darkness is? Like I said, it takes all the fun out of conspiracy theories.

Back to the shadows, now!
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