Now Cohen Really Needs to Explain His Vote on the Bailout

In the past few days, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve discovered their bailout plan would not work and switched to the Swedish model of recapitalizing banks by "nationalizing" them. It has been a few weeks since the House passed the Bailout Plan. I criticized this plan and I criticized Congressman Cohen for voting for it. I'm not a congressman who has staff and the chance to get briefings by experts. Even if you don't go to a briefing, you can called numerous experts and get an explanation. Cohen's vote is disturbing to me because aside from Tom Friedman, I have no idea who Cohen was listening to outside of Paulson. Which leads me to this question: Why would you trust in Paulson's Plan? 1) He's in the Bush administration and was Chairman of Goldman Sachs. 2) He's been wrong about everything over the past few years, so either he is a bullshit artist or incompetent. Yet, Cohen voted to give Paulson $700+ billion. That plan failed in a remarkably quick fashion. I haven't heard Cohen say yeah or nay about the new plan to nationalize banks. Here's what Cohen's enabling of Paulson's three weeks of failure cost, 2300 point loss in the Dow and trillions of dollars evaporating into thin air, plus around $500 billion leftover in a slush fund for Paulson to play with. That big of a decline decimated lots of middle class peoples' 401K's. I'm not putting all blame of the decline solely on a piss poor and expensive bailout plan. Even if they had done the Swedish model three weeks ago the market would have declined, but I don't believe it would have been as deep or traumatic. So Congressman Cohen, I'm really looking forward to you explaining your vote and what has happened over the last few weeks.