Most regrettably, the folks that have been most adversely impacted by inflation and the mortgage crisis, and what is now evolving into a deflationary spiral (since tens of millions more U.S. consumers are focused on paying down debt, or just struggling to make ends meet due to inflation, to the point where most discretionary spending by the middle and lower classes in the U.S. is now but a memory of years past), are the same people losing out against rapidly increasing unemployment rates while simultaneously seeing the value of their homes decreasing by (a national average)  what's now exceeding 30%. (See more about this after recapping just how quickly the status quo meme has changed, since Congress approved the  $700 billion "bailout" just a few days ago.) These folks needed our help, yesterday, just as our government's myopically focused upon bailing out the status quo and maintaining the basic services of federal, state, county and municipal governments--in other words, everyone other than the taxpayers, directly, themselves.

Around the stroke of midnight, late Friday, the U.S. government informed all of us that they were in the process of concluding their shell game, thereby mortgaging the futures of this country's citizens for generations to come, and now they were telling us, officially, it would be at amounts far, far greater than numbers they were peddling to the press just days and/or weeks ago: "Cost of U.S. Crisis Action Grows, Along With Debt."

To make matters far worse, as of late last night, it is now a matter of our government's typically-vague-but-public record throughout this fiasco, that our supposed $700 billion bailout, as "estimated" from roughly 10 days ago, has now formally ballooned into what will be, at the very least, many trillions of dollars, authorized and spent (or scheduled for disbursement), a little more than three weeks prior to our next president's election, and more than 90 days before they're sworn in.

The deeds have been done. There is no turning back. No matter who takes office on January 20th, our new president's (for many terms beyond just the next four years) hands will be tied by a mountain of debt equivalent to what will probably end up being an amount greater than the entire, annual gross domestic product of the United States, by the time everything is said and done over just the next 90 days.

Here's how it's playing out:

The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts--the ones that were only supposed to cost us $25 billion--are now officially set at $40 billion per month:"Fannie, Freddie to Buy $40 Billion a Month of Troubled Assets."

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Federal regulators directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start purchasing $40 billion a month of underperforming mortgage bonds as the Bush administration expands its options to buy troubled financial assets and resuscitate the U.S. economy, according to three people briefed about the plan.

Fannie and Freddie began notifying bond traders last week that each company needs to buy $20 billion a month in mostly subprime, Alt-A and non-performing prime mortgage securities, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are confidential. The purchases would be separate from the U.S. Treasury's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Bold emphasis is diarist's.

Municipal, county and federal bond offerings--bond offerings listed by various arms of government throughout the U.S.--are being postponed, or are simply failing in the marketplace. This is due to a basic lack of faith in the U.S, market, in general, but it's further exacerbated by the reality that there's very little timely disclosure by municipalities and state governments, in terms of enabling investors to make a realistic determination as to the creditworthiness of the offered entity; and this is even much more greatly compounded by the meltdown within the monoline insurance firms--those companies that write the insurance policies that are used to make these types of bonds much safer than those issued in the corporate sector: "Muni Investors Kept in Dark as Finances Unravel."

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) --

Lawmakers and regulators preoccupied with the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression means investors will have to continue with a disclosure system that didn't give them Detroit's 2006 financial report until this March. Hearings in Congress to address new rules for the $2.66 trillion market that the Securities and Exchange Commission calls inadequate were canceled last month and have yet to be rescheduled.

"We have the worst disclosure standards in the world's capital markets,'' said Tom Weyl, board member of the National Federation of Municipal Analysts and vice president for municipal research at Boston-based Eaton Vance Corp., which manages about $18.4 billion of municipal bonds. ``This is something everyone is turning a blind eye to.''

--SNIP--

Investors in $90 million of water bonds issued by Cleveland in 2002 received no warning that the AAA rated bonds were headed for a default in August after a unit of FGIC Corp., which insured the securities, had its rankings cut between February and June.

As a result, Dusseldorf, Germany-based WestLB AG, which had an agreement with Cleveland to buy any bonds that went unsold at weekly dates to reset interest on the securities, stopped acquiring the debt from investors wishing to sell. The city has said it is seeking to refinance the debt.

This story is being repeated again and again throughout this country, at every level of government, right now, as the: "Cost of U.S. Crisis Action Grows, Along With Debt."

California, Alabama and Massachusetts are urging the Fed and Treasury to include their securities in rescue plans designed for banks and businesses. The $2.66 trillion U.S. market for state and city bonds has been all but frozen since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., weighed down by losses in mortgage-backed bonds, declared history's largest bankruptcy on Sept. 15.

Corporate bond offerings--paper issued to fund both day-to-day corporate credit needs as well as longer-term expansion--are at a point where they're almost nonexistent. Here, the government must step, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars--to just keep basic commerce afloat. Also from the same story (as the link, immediately above):

Payments the government allocated to keep vital companies solvent are beginning to look insufficient.

AIG, the giant insurance company that was taken over by the government in mid-September, said this week it may access $37.8 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in addition to the $85 billion the government already loaned it to stave off bankruptcy.

--SNIP--

The companies and regulators are recalculating the value of all of their assets to factor in price erosion. That may mean the government will have to spend more to keep...firms solvent.

Earlier this week the Fed announced it will create a special fund to buy commercial paper, the credit that businesses use to finance payrolls and other ongoing expenses. The Treasury will deposit money into the Fed's New York district bank to help set up the new unit. A Fed official said Treasury funding for the program could be ``substantial.''

So, our government is ramping up its T-bill offerings, it's primary source for borrowing funds to keep our house of cards afloat; and because we're going to be flooding the market with Treasury notes, we have to increase the amount of interest we're paying on these finance vehicles, just so they may be sold in the market in the first place. This means dramatic increases in the amount of funds required to pay down this debt.

But, through all of these "bailouts" focused upon Wall Street, the lending/banking community and related members of the status quo, we are losing sight of the massively growing segment of our society, perhaps upwards of 100 million Americans, whose time is up right now. These 100 million folks don't have the luxury of waiting until our next administration comes into office, and they're sure as hell not having their anxieties resolved by the sloth-like and (up until most recently) actions of the current administration.

Folks may comment on the recent shift downward in oil prices over the last few days, and how that may be alleviating some of the suffering and angst of our population.  But, for the average older American, they're seeing their home equity dropping in value dramatically from quarter to quarter now; while prices for basic commodities (food, etc.) are skyrocketing, all while retirement investments are losing thir value unlike anything this country's seen since even before that fateful October day in 1929.

Here's a link to a story about this (and, I'm not even referencing the daily headlines of people opting for suicide as opposed to accepting home foreclosure, however, I have blogged about this extensively in the past week) that appeared as the lead in my hometown daily newspaper paper today, here in Westchester County, NY (which is already the most highly-taxed county in the entire U.S., and adjacent to much more rural and conservative Putnam County, from where the following was reported): "For Putnam seniors, hard times arrived before markets crashed."

CARMEL - About 100 Putnam seniors, some with childhood recollections of the Great Depression of the 1930s, gathered yesterday at the county Office for the Aging in Carmel to talk about how to bear up in hard economic times.

Many of these county residents live on Social Security, and so the talk was not about this week's precipitous drop in the stock market or the freezing of the world credit market. It was about how to survive the winter when there isn't enough money to pay for heat, electricity, groceries and the prescription medicines that keep them alive.

"We are not whiners," said Claire Rosalino, 71, of Lake Carmel. "We are not beggars at your door. We paid our way, but now we need help."

--SNIP--

But most of the 90-minute meeting focused on "how to prevent a tragedy in Putnam as the energy crisis looms..."

"We don't want our seniors to face the starve-or-freeze challenge..."

Summing it all up, it's becoming more and more self-evident that our current administration is spoon-feeding us (and even our representatives in Congress) inaccurate projections with regard to a massive hole into which we're all falling from which it will take generations to dig us out.

But, on top of that, between the deflationary spiral which is just commencing (which will lead to more unemployment and foreclosures in oncoming months and even years) and the overall cost of living going through the roof, an even greater, more pressing crisis is materializing in our neighborhoods right now. It's becoming an immediate fight for survival--one that cannot wait until January 20th--for those 50 million not enrolled in any healthcare programs now, combined with up to another 50 million more Americans that are having an increasingly difficult time figuring out how they're going to keep a roof  over their heads, food in their refrigerators, and heat and electricity in their homes through Christmas (let alone another month beyond that).

For them there is little hope. For them, a Wall Street, corporate or municipal bond government bailout sometime down the road, does nothing to support their efforts to stay alive and to allay their deepest fears right now. And, that's because the same administration that ignored the regulations that were in place in the financial services industry--regulations which were put there to prevent exactly this type of thing from happening--is the same administration that's treating 100,000,000 of its citizens' struggle to survive not even as an afterthought now. Because for our government to be handling it as an afterthought, they'd at least have to consider this impending reality facing this huge portion of our population in the first place.

Considering how badly we were manipulated by Secretary Paulson's shell game over the past six weeks, where we were nothing less than lied to by our own government with regard to their absurdly off-the-mark projections as to what it would take to support this bailout now, this diarist finds it hard to believe that the immediate jeopardy of 100,000,000 of us is even on Washington's radar now.

It's up to all of us to put the fate of these 100,000,000 Americans at the top of the MSM's and the general population's thoughts right now. For 100,000,000 of us--right now--it's not about Obama vs. McCain. It's not about Wall Street vs. Main Street. It's about survival.