To the editor:

Friday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced that the Republican administration is instituting a bank bailout program that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

I find this disturbing that the Bush administration is bailing out the fat cats running these failing institutions. These institutions are in trouble because of bad business decisions, questionable judgment, shaky ethics and out-and-out greed.

The people in charge of these institutions will not feel any of the pain. In fact, many are walking away with millions of dollars in golden parachutes. However, their clients will feel the pain and so will we as taxpayers, paying for their mistakes. Did they share their profits with the taxpayers when they were making huge profits during the run-up to this crisis? The plain answer is no.

Several years ago, I was laid off, through no fault of my own, from a Japanese company where I had worked over 19 years, steadily rising in the ranks when the operation was relocated to California. Indeed, I was chartered with shuttering the office, selling off assets, turning the lights out and locking the doors.

I have been working for 38 years and in all that time prior to this layoff, I was only out of work once, 24 years ago for a grand total of six weeks of which I collected unemployment insurance for a total of four weeks.

This layoff, however, was to be different. The economy was bad. Despite my diligent efforts, it took quite some time to land another position.

Coinciding with the layoff, my dad became ill. My wife went to work after being an at-home mom for 10 years. We were without health insurance for the first time in our lives.

I worked a full-time job - trying to find a job. I signed up for every job search engine I could find and reviewed the results daily, prospecting for leads. I attended networking meetings, took courses to improve my skills, went to job fairs and scoured the newspapers.

All this while caring for my children and my ill father, taking him to doctor appointments, seeing that he ate, providing personal care, keeping up his apartment and being his health care advocate. Unfortunately, my father passed away after 10 months.

During that time, Congress was considering whether to extend unemployment benefits past the initial 26 weeks for an additional 26 weeks. The Republican-controlled Congress did everything they could to prevent this from happening by constantly adding the extension to other bills they knew would not pass.

I appealed to Senators Judd Gregg and John Sununu, and Rep. Jeb Bradley to let the unemployment extension come up for a vote on its own. If it didn't pass on its own, well, then I would have to accept that. I even wrote Senate Majority Leader William Frist, asking the extension be allowed to come up for a vote on its own. His response was "We perceive the unemployment issue to be one of lack of motivation by workers rather than lack of good jobs." Amazing!

So now we have the Republicans bailing out these huge institutions and the people that ran them into the ground. These are the same Republicans who would not help the millions of little guys like myself a few years ago with what would have been a pittance compared to what they are now giving their rich cronies.

I guess the Republicans have not changed much since Herbert Hoover, who is famous for explaining during The Depression why the government would pay to feed pigs, but not to feed people: pigs were "capital."

Only in America!

MARK HARGREAVES

Derry, N.H.