If I remember correctly, they were given money at the request of George Bush's Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson. Some trillion or so. He was not a politician, he was the former chairman of Goldman Sachs, one of the recipients of billions of dollars, and he told all those politicians that if they didn't get the money, the US was looking at 30% unemployment. Now, how exactly is it that the supposed anti-socialist GOP, the party that socialized trillions of dollars of losses incurred by Goldman and the rest, is now claiming the rest of us, who are the victims of this fiscal disaster, need to pull ourselves up by their poverty-stricken boot straps, while their banking buddies who finance their campaigns, get free public money? Why is it that we are to blame? What I see is an economy wrecked by over-speculation by these banks, who used our own money to gamble with, resulted in the current economic wreckage. Yet those who got ruined by them, are, in your opinion, to blame? How does all that work? And how exactly are these banks atoning for wrecking the economy? How have they helped those they put out of work? Or those they put out of their homes? How are they paying us all back for the mess they made?