I was willing to ride out the aftermath of Congress’ bailout of the Wall Street investment banks in silence. I was willing to sit still and take it until I heard that AIG was getting another handout after they spent nearly half a million of their first 85-billion-dollar “care package” on a celebratory corporate retreat at a spa. That’s when I accepted the bitter truth: everyone involved in this mess is hopelessly corrupt. The failure to demand reform in exchange for these massive infusions of cash only encourages fraud and waste. Any good parent can tell you that. Our Senators and Congressmen can no longer stop themselves from pandering to the highest bidder. They’ve acquiesced to ethically-questionable demands so many times that their puppet-masters will never take “no” for an answer again.

If you are angry and frustrated at the way the U.S. government has handled/is handling the current economic crisis that is draining your 401(k) account/pension fund, if repeated efforts to tell them what you want have gone unheeded, there is one more course of action left to you: fire them. Get registered to vote now if you aren’t already, go to the polls on November 4th, and vote for anyone who is not an incumbent. Throw the bums out!

Let me make one thing clear: uttering the words “I take full responsibility” doesn’t mean anything unless the person who utters them resigns his job and disappears into obscurity, never again to be trusted to handle money that doesn’t belong to him. The phrase would mean even more if the utterer had to liquidate all his personal assets in order to repay the taxpayers even a small portion of what we are having to cough up in order to prevent a worldwide economic depression. I don’t want to hear any more sob stories about how much it costs a Wall Street investment banker to live on the same island as his office. I don’t care. If he hasn’t been socking away some of his gargantuan salary into a tidy nest egg all this time, he deserves to be homeless and starving and warming his hands at a burn barrel.

After Enron tanked, I said, “I won’t be happy until I see Ken Lay in an orange jumpsuit.” I never got to see that. Shortly before he was to go to prison and start serving his sentence, Lay died of a heart attack. I think I know what really happened. I think Ken Lay sold his soul to the Devil in return for Enron’s meteoric success. That success was brief, however, as are all the Devil’s boons. He’s the one creditor you can’t stiff, and Lay knows it now. His rise and fall should have served as a warning to other would-be tycoons, but obviously, they didn’t get it.

I’m not just blaming executives and management at investment banks and mortgage lenders. I’m blaming Congress. I’m blaming the American public who believed that infinite riches could be based upon thin air. We are all to blame and we are all going to pay for our arrogance and apathy, but I want some of us to pay more than others—each according to his means, in other words.

If you don’t know the names of your elected representatives, go to USA.gov and look them up. Make a list. Take the list to your polling place on Election Day. Every name on your list that appears on the ballot is an incumbent, hoping that you will re-elect him to his undeserved office. Vote for whoever is running against him. Whatever came out of that incumbent’s mouth during the campaign should be ignored. He’s lying. No matter what he said he is going to do for you, don’t believe him. If he does manage to keep his campaign promises, trust that in order to get any such legislation passed by his pandering toady fellow legislators, it will be wrapped in thick wads of pork that will enrich people you wouldn’t like. (Don’t feel confident because I am using only masculine pronouns in order to avoid cluttering my prose, Ms. Pelosi. This rant applies to you, too.)