I admit I am wholly unsophisticated when it comes to any understanding of the banking industry and its ways and means.

That said, when this banking crisis broke, there was a lot of talk about "toxic assets." And I understood that the fundamental "toxic asset" at the base of this crisis were the home mortgages that had just imploded. We were experiencing the collapse of the "Housing Bubble." Widely distributed financial assets (homes) were suddenly valued at a fraction of their recorded valuation. And this problem was compounded by the way this asset had been leveraged in support of debt assumption by the "homeowner" and, additionally, by the way these mortgages were sliced and diced into "innovative" financial instruments.

The solution to the crisis was therefore quite straightforward to me, albeit daunting and quite expensive. Do what it takes to deal with these fundamental "toxic assets," and in so doing we would introduce some stability and needed correction in the "post-Housing-Bubble" market.

Hundreds of billions of dollars later, I see very little that has been done to address the fundamental crisis. Instead, we have allowed the banksters to plunder the Treasury for their profit and gain without insisting that they actually use these funds to target the fundamental problem of the "toxic assets" they carry on their books.

This article explains just how totally screwed we all are as a result of pouring monies into the banks with no strings attached. I have little doubt that the banks will do quite well in surviving this mess. After all, these TBTF institutions have been granted massive infusions of cash to offset their losses. They have been held harmless of any consequences of the crisis by dint of increasing their "earnings" (via our tax dollars and no-interest loans from the Fed) to offset the losses on their balance sheets.

But there is little that has been offered in any of this that provides any relief to either the home mortgage holder or our communities that continue to suffer the consequences of the collapse of the housing bubble. We are now collectively hundreds of billions of tax dollars "poorer" as we continue confronting the same crisis - unchanged - that sparked the collapse in the first place.

It's horrifying, really. Truly horrifying. We're drowning and the lifeboats are unavailable, having all been used to transport the captain and crew to their next excellent adventure.