To answer the question first…..yep…looks like the banks will get their cash cow…..

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the department is considering a “range of options” for its financial rescue plan, with the goal of preserving the private banking system.

“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” he told reporters today in Washington.

“We are putting together what we hope will be a comprehensive plan for helping repair the financial system and bring recovery as a critical component to the president’s commitment to get growth going again and bring the economy back on track,” Geithner said.

Under the plan, which Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is expected to announce within the next two weeks, the government will buy up virtually worthless mortgage-backed securities and other “toxic” assets held by the banks and provide guarantees against future losses for much of their remaining assets. It will also continue to inject cash directly into the banks.

Well aware of popular opposition to the Wall Street bailout, the White House and the media are engaged in a calculated campaign to soften up public opinion and pave the way for a taxpayer handout to the financial elite even bigger than the $700 billion already doled out in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was rushed through Congress last autumn with the support of then-presidential candidate Obama. The total cost of government cash infusions, loans and guarantees to the major banks and financial firms, already estimated at $8 trillion, will soar even higher, by far eclipsing the money allocated in the so-called stimulus and recovery program.

Indeed, one of the purposes of the stimulus package is to provide political cover, in the form of aid to “Main Street,” for the offloading of Wall Street’s losses onto the American people. Meanwhile, the stimulus plan, which does nothing to halt the destruction of jobs or the wave of home foreclosures, but includes lucrative tax write-offs for business and funnels government projects to private companies, is being weakened further at the behest of Wall Street and congressional Republicans. It is now reported that Obama has dropped a provision that would allow bankruptcy judges to lower the principal and ease mortgage terms for distressed homeowners.

The new bank bailout, like every measure that has been devised in response to the financial meltdown, will be tailored entirely to the interests of the financial aristocracy. Under the terms of the plan, as outlined in various press reports, the bad assets accumulated through speculation and fraud will be transferred to a “bad bank” owned by the government. The government will buy these assets not at their actual market value, which is pennies on the dollar, but, according to the Financial Times, on the basis of a “valuation model,” guaranteeing premium prices for bank executives and big shareholders.

It is all too easy……that is,  to get the American people confused enough to allow Wall Street a free hand.  They, the Obama group, keep saying that all will be transparent with the website revcovery.gov.  How wonderful…the only problem is that it is not up and running yet….so transparency will have to just wait a little longer.