It was crazy watching the stock market today.  The Democrat-led Congress was messing around and turning a serious situation into a time of name-calling, blame-shifting, and partisan back-stabbing, while the rest of the world (investors, savers, retirees and employees) lost our investments faster than any other time in history.

After the market closed, groups of politicians fought like elementary school children over the failure of the House of Representatives to pass Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion bailout plan. The S&P 500 index had just plunged to its worst day since the week of the 1987 stock-market crash, wiping out more than $700 billion in the index’s market value.

What this means is that we just spent that “$700 billion” today - and we still didn’t get a rescue plan in place.  Congrats to the Congress, Great Job!!!

Just to clear up a few things: The democrats were decrying the “fat cats on Wall Street”.  Well, these “fat cats” are still rich.  And there must be several dozen “fat cats” in total.  They were worth many millions, and now today they’re just worth several million.

But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, that by making this about a bailout of “fat cats” and not what it cleary was - an emergency rescue of the global financial system - Congress put at risk the investments, deposits, money markets and life savings of MILLIONS of Americans, to say nothing of the people around the world.

Could we have the November election day moved up so we can get rid of some of these worthless Congress persons?

Even a country that is known for having a fractured government (Belgium) was able to put together a rescue of banking and insurance giant Fortis over 48 hours this weekend.  But our own Representatives, when they were faced with the greatest economic threat in the past 70 years, took more than 10 days to hash up this rescue plan (load it down with tons of “personalized” riders), and then REJECTED IT ANYWAY.

Just so people at home who are keeping count can be aware… More than $1 trillion was wiped off the value of the entire US stock market today.

The market (thanks to capitalism and free markets) will bounce back, possibly even this week.  But when we all finally catch our breath and look back over this debacle, we’ll realize it was never about the “fat cats”.  The House of Representatives missed it completely.  It was the small investors and savers around the world that have been left to twist and flap about in the wind as the systemic failures that till now had been merely theoretical takes place right before our eyes.

So, now we finally have an answer to whose fault it is.

Thank you Congress!