Dude, where's my $700 billion?

Swindled again. Shocker.

There's something seriously wrong with this.

"It's amazing how quickly you can get through $350 billion," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group based in Washington. The problem with the way the money flowed out, from Ellis' perspective, is that there's no way to say what it's done to stabilize the economy. "There is a black box where that checkbook is, and we can't see into it," Ellis said. "Once the money leaves Treasury's hands, we have very little knowledge as to what the heck we're getting for the billions of dollars."

The financial sector has always been a generous donor to political campaigns, and it gives heavily to both Republicans and Democrats. By the 2008 election, with Democrats firmly ensconced in control of Congress (and heading for control of the White House), commercial banks had split their $34 million in campaign contributions almost evenly to both political parties. Investment firms, many of which are converting themselves into commercial banks to grab some Treasury funds, gave far more -- $141 million this year -- and have been spreading the wealth around to anyone with power in Washington for years.

Chances are they'll keep getting their way, too, even after Obama takes power. His pick for Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, was one of the prime architects of the government bailouts of Bear Stearns and, later, AIG, and may have been one of the main reasons why Lehman Brothers didn't get the help they did. One reason Wall Street reacted so positively to Geithner's nomination was because it had already been dealing with him for months on exactly the same stuff he'll be in charge of in office. (He seems to like doing it, too. "We live for this," he told a college friend in the midst of the financial collapse. "We live for these kinds of crises

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