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Audience: (Laughter and applause from a Code Pink supporter skeptical of Secretary Paulson.)



Code Pink woman: And what's your net worth?



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is one of the most important irrevokable economic decisions we will ever make. Let's make it in a state of panic."— Stephen Colbert"The fox is guarding the hen house."— A heckler mocking Treasury secretary Henry PaulsonHow long were you CEO of Goldman Sachs?I don't need help from the audience, I can ask the questions on my own... "I'm not going to fire you; you can still be called Congress. But you don't have any power."— Jon Macey, Yale Law School professor and deputy dean, providing an allegory for Secretary Paulson's proposal"As of now we [journalists] are, as a group, behaving just as we did thelast two times the administration sought to rush through a hastilythought out, ill-conceived plan. Why in the world are we being sogullible and naive?"— Former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston "What the proposal actually did...was explicitly rule out any oversight, plus grant immunity from future review... [I]f Paulson can't be honest about what he himself sent to Congress... there is no reason to trust him on anything related to his bailout plan.""If you think the Bailout of All Bailouts...won't saddle American taxpayers with billions, if not trillions, of risky obligations, you don't know politics... Never before in the history of American capitalism has so much been asked of so many for...so few." Reich , former Secretary of Labor"We are talking about ten thousand dollars per household, and that moneycannot simply go into a black hole of bad debt.""Americans can no longer trust the economic information they are getting from this Administration... Secretary Paulson's market predictions have been consistently wrong in the last year.""Normally, this is a process that would take months — years."Instead, the law is being worked out, live on television, over the course of a few days. NPR , quoting the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, Scott Talbott"This is scare tactics to try to do something that's in the private but not the public interest. It's terrible."— Allan Meltzer, former economic adviser to President Reaganand Carnegie Mellon professor of political economy, quoted in the New York Times"Watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening.""Many economists argue that taxpayers ought to get more than avoidance of the apocalypse for their dollars: they ought to get an ownership stake in the companies on the receiving end."— New York Times front-page analysis by reporter Peter S. Goodman"Seriously, is there anybody out there willing to write George Bush a blank check?""No 'cash for trash.'"— Dennis Kucinich, proposing Americans should also take partial ownership of any institutions receiving bailout money.I think it's embarrassing to the United States of America. There is a lot of blame to go around."— Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "For anybody out there living in cave, let me just say this. Congratulations. You've apparently made the soundest real estate investment possible."— Jon Stewart