The draft for the proposal of how we are handing out 700 billion to Wall Street is here. It's not fun reading, as I point out in the post below, but it's important reading. Very important reading, and you should read it together with Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism. Atrios singled out this one part of the draft and it is shocking indeed:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Get it? The agency is God. It alone has the right to decide how to spend 700 billion of our money. It alone. And no, you have no recourse if you don't like what the agency did with your money.
This is also an interesting snippet:
(b) Necessary Actions.--The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation:
(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;
(2) entering into contracts, including contracts for services authorized by section 3109 of title 5, United States Code, without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts;
The bit I have bolded means that they can do whatever they want with the contracts, including giving all of them to their best friends.
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A Post-Script: I am aware that all these things may have been added to the draft as a Game Move so that the Democrats can remove them and feel as if they averted an even greater evil while letting the crony capitalists get their bailout package pretty much the way they wanted it in the first place. Nevertheless, we are not playing simulated computer games about dragons and monsters. We are playing with real lives here and I'm going to give boils to anyone who plays with other people's lives as if it was something on the computer.