In February of 2000 Hank Paulson, then CEO of Goldman Sachs, testified to the Senate Banking committee requesting that they reduce restrictions on the financial services industry, allowing investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, to leverage themselves upward of 20 to 1 — to risk more than 20 times what they could bare to lose.

The request went denied then in 2000 by a regulating body still containing many members appointed by Clinton but was approved only four years later by the regulating body installed with the Bush administration.

Now, Secretary of Treasury Hank Paulson, a Bush appointee himself, asks the American people to pay for the results of those misguided and destructive business decisions and the ineptitude of officials, who realized too late the danger approval posed.

America confused, bewildered and driven by fear, agrees begrudingly to a 700 billion dollar bailout plan for financial institutions — the death of Socrates all over again.

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If I told you these circumstances were all that were neccessary to undo the great promise of America, you would likely have doubts. You, stubborn and loving of America, would with all that you were say “No. America is greater than that.” But my friends, there can be no doubt now, that we have traded all we once were away — we have become all we had ever hoped to avoid: Rooted in corruption; heartless and descrimitive; deluded beyond perhaps all sense of hope for a future.

We have given the Doctor Frankenstein’s of this particular American monster absolution.  Whats more we have placed them back in control of the laboratory to further ruin the great experiment that is the American dream.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety; Benjamin Franklin saw the soul of America and understood its fragility — our most recent actions will serve to prove him right. It is not what we have bought with these banks full of debt, but instead what we have had to sell of ourselves first in order to ever take ownership.