Your brother in law, the one who drives a Lotus and wears a pinkie ring, just showed up at your doorstep. It seems his fast living has led him down a bit of a rat hole, and there are some bad guys chasing him who will break his legs (and yours) if you don’t help him out. He really hates to ask this, but can he borrow your savings? Not some of it. All of it. Or else.

Sound familiar? Yep, Wall Street has done it again. Years of making home loans with ridiculous terms to people who clearly couldn’t afford them has left them in a little, ahem, bind. If we, the American taxpayers, don’t bail them out to the tune of some $700 million, we’re all going to get our legs broken.

If it takes a huge bailout from us to stave off disaster, then so be it. I don’t like it, but it’s better than the global financial meltdown they’re promising as an alternative. But not so quick, Wall Street. If I’m going to give you a massive amount of my own money (some $2000-5000 per American family), then I’m with Robert Reich—I want a few things in return.

First of all, I want a seat on your board. If we’re going to open up the national coffers to bail out corporations, then I want proportional representation in every boardroom that benefits, to make sure there’s at least a chance this doesn’t happen again.

Also, I’d like my government to enact some oversight and stop just letting these guys run around willy-nilly with scissors (or our money). Any idiot could have told them that making loans to people who can’t pay them back is bad business, but somehow in the twisted world of 21st-century finance, that turd got spray-painted and sold as a gold ingot. If these CEO’s can’t manage things any better than that, they need the grown-ups to set some ground rules for them.

What’s more, if you need my help to bail you out, then I expect to be remembered when you hit the jackpot again. And you will. If we pony up a few hundred billion now, American taxpayers ought to be the first ones bellying up to the money trough when times get good again. Seems only fair, doesn’t it?

Oh yeah, and to all you overpaid execs who lived high on the hog while your idiotic ideas and lack of management skills led us to this point, a simple request: you screwed up, so take some responsibility. It’s time for you to do without your stock options and golden parachutes until this mess passes. And once we’ve managed to right the ship you ran aground, you only get paid if you keep it afloat. We seem to be all about performance-based pay for teachers, how about a little of the same treatment for corporate bigwigs?

The next time somebody you know yelps that the free market can take care of all that ails America, remind them of this moment. It’s not the first time the government has been asked to step in and fix things when the market screws them up, and it won’t be the last. Like it or not, we need government, at least enough of it to protect us from the numbskulls who get us into predicaments like this. Pass it on: NO BLANK CHECK! And for a much better-informed and more eloquent version of this post, see Robert Reich’s message.