The photo above commemorates President Bush’s signing of the USA PATRIOT Act just weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That scene – the President signing a gargantuan piece of legislation that fundamentally alters the landscape of our society, with the support of legislators who haven’t even read the bill – is likely to be repeated sometime next week when President Bush signs sweeping legislation that gives away the entire contents of the US Treasury to select financial institutions in the form of a “bailout.”

One interesting tidbit leaked out today. Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson are on record as saying that this legislation must be passed immediately – this is a crisis, and the markets demand action now!

But apparently the bailout bill has been in the works – secretly – for months, without any input from members of Congress (never mind from representatives of labor unions, consumer groups, or other such rabble):

[White House spokesman Tony] Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.

That little gem comes from an inside-Washington newspaper called Roll Call.

Keep it in mind, folks, as the days progress: the Bush administration has been working on their final plan to loot the Federal treasury and reward their friends for months. They did all that hard work in complete secrecy, so that, when the moment of maximum crisis was upon us, they could drop the package in the Congress’s lap, and demand “act now!”

Sound familiar?

Ian Welsh painted the scene nicely over at Firedoglake:

So there was “Goldman” Hank, holding a gun on the economy and staring Congress down. “Give me the 700 billion, or the economy gets it!” he threatened.

(Above, Sheriff Bart (played by Cleavon Little) takes himself hostage in Mel Brooks’s 1974 Blazing Saddles. With Paulson himself a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, the image of Paulson holding a gun on the economy might, in fact, look something like this.)