I wrote a letter to Sen. Norm Coleman and he wrote and responded back. This is the letter I sent back in response:

Sen. Coleman, thank you for your response. It is indeed a very difficult situation our country is facing. I started to somewhat understand the reason for the bailout until I heard that AIG threw a $440,000 retreat party for its executives just a week after asking for a bailout. This has gone from crazy to completely insane! Now today I read they are asking for billions more! The CEO of Lehman Brothers was reported to have handed three of Lehman Bothers executives $20 million each as a “special payment” while the company was folding and he himself raked in about $450 million over the last several years and his wife had been buying art pictures for millions of dollars a pop.

A Washington Mutual CEO received $20 million for only working for the company for less than three weeks. Then I read stories about a man in Southern California who shot himself, wife and kids because he was so financially distraught that he couldn’t take it anymore and another about a 90-year-old woman who shot herself in the stomach as the sheriff’s department was coming to drag her out of her home that had just been foreclosed.

There have been reported to be 500 homeless families in Massachusetts with an additional 1,800 families in homeless shelters there. And that’s only one part of our nation. Why are we bailing out Wall Street and not our own Main Street?

I no longer believe in the country I was once so proud to be a part of. Democracy, in my mind, disappeared the day Congress turned a deaf ear to the cries of the people shouting “Don’t bailout Wall Street.” Now the fat cats in Wall Street seem to be partying while the average American people suffer, and we have to pay them on top of it with our tax money. In my opinion, the bailout was aimed in the wrong direction. There are people dying and suffering on the streets of our country, families being torn apart over financial crises, children confused and hungry, so we bailout these big companies for what? So they can throw expensive retreats and continue living in their mansions eating fine food and buy pieces of art at the price that could practically feed a whole town? I no longer believe in America!

Jody Johnson

Albert Lea