Checking the national debt show's how much money has really gone out the door to bailout the banks and pseudo banks. Under Bush—over $1 trillions, and the bailout has not slowed down under Obama.

Why are they bailing? Bernanke (Bush's man) is right: "We know that failure of major financial firms in a financial crisis can be disastrous for the economy. We really had no choice [but to bail out AIG]." In other words we're being held up.

He continues: "We have been doing what we can to break the company up, to get it into a saleable position and to try to defang it," he said. "If there's a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can't think of one," Bernanke added.

Where's our money going? So far they've thrown about $180 billion at AIG alone. That comes to $400 per person (not per family). The money is used to buy stock in, and to make loans to, companies like AIG and to buy up their not-so-good mortgages. That means that we will get some of our money back. No one has much of an idea, but it looks like maybe half of it. With AIG, quite likely less. They lost $100 billion last years.

How did they do that? AIG is basically an unregulated insurance company that had a AAA rating. By writing insurance for risky packages of mortgages, it was able to give bad mortgage bundles its AAA rating, making them much more valuable. They were paid handsomely for this fraud -- and it was a fraud. They kept no money on hand to pay insurance claims -- there was no real insurance. Full story.

Criminals. At least the top few levels of AIG knew what they were doing, as their term for what they were doing, “regulatory arbitrage,” shows. They did not care that they were risking the world economy, and sooner or later, would almost surely lose. Their huge bonuses would be safe, and, on top of that, we would have to bail them out. This is criminal and if there were every a case when making an example of criminals would do some good, this is it.