It's Halloween! As candy, costumes and parties parse the night, we have our own goblins, ghouls and ghosts haunting economic policy.

Our current trickster is Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, with his keys to the treasury purse via the Congress approved bail out

The United Steelworkers President, Leo W. Gerard, spelled out in a letter how the US taxpayer is being robbed blind. He does not mince words. An excerpt:

• If this deal is the model for how you intend to spend the whole $700 billion that you got from the Congress, then it would appear that you intend to reward the institutions that have driven our nation, and it now appears the whole world, into its most serious economic crisis in 75 years with a gift of $350 billion from the American taxpayers, who have watched 760,000 of their jobs disappear over just the past nine months.
• The recipients of the first wave of gift-giving include Goldman Sachs. It has been widely reported that you have surrounded yourself with former Goldman employees as well as individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet it has never been revealed whether in fact you and they have fully divested yourselves of your Wall Street holdings. Doesn’t it seem just a wee-bit of a conflict of interest for those setting the price of the investment to be either so directly linked to the firms receiving the investments or, even worse, direct beneficiaries of the decision to overpay with taxpayer money?
• Your investments do nothing to deal with the causes of the current crisis. Now that even Chairman Greenspan has discovered a “flaw” in his theories, wouldn’t it make sense to have some reason to believe that the recipients of this government largesse won’t just take the money and do it all again? Perhaps there is some reason I do not understand that you have seemingly handed this chicken coop back to the very same foxes who have been pillaging it for the last two decades?
• It has been reported in the media that these firms have no intention of using this money for its intended purpose. Don’t we deserve a commitment that the money will in fact be used for either loans to the companies which are groaning under the weight of the credit crisis and being forced to shed tens of thousands of more jobs or to help the millions of Americans struggling with their troubled mortgages? Does it really seem too much to demand that we get a commitment that our gifts to these firms be used to help revive the economy that they have driven into the ditch?
• Your terms also undercut the more stringent restrictions that the Brits imposed, thus making it clear that not only are you fronting for American wastrels, but European ones as well.

We agree, what is going on right this moment has to be the biggest rip off in American history.

A ghost who haunts economic theory to this day is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman promoted free markets, privatization, deregulation with all of his might until the day he died. Friedman's philosophies became the new multinational corporate religion to return to a period of distorted social Darwinism.

Thomas Friedman is the author of numerous best sellers on globalization. Unfortunately they are complete works of fiction of the economic realities, especially for America's middle class. David Sirota nailed Friedman for promoting the CAFTA-DR trade agreement, where Friedman admitted he knew nothing about the actual trade treaty itself. Friedman has also admitted to not having any background in economics. Unfortunately these books make it to the best sellers list and thus promote and perpetuate corporate generated globalization myths that have little basis in statistical fact or economic theory.

There are many ghouls, ghosts and golbins bedeviling and blocking economic policy in the United States national interest and these are but a few. In the spirt of inclusion, add your own economic ghoul, ghost, goblin in the comments.

Investopedia has a great Halloween piece on the worse investor fraud cases ever, The Ghouls And Monsters On Wall Street .

The horror show continues!