Why rush to throw another $350 billion of taxpayer money at the Wall Street bandits and their political cronies who created the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression?
Because time is money, perhaps?
And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the ten still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?
Because nobody can stop them, of course.
You see, BAC the imperial presidency, coupled with a go-along-to-get-along Congress makes all this possible.
Add to that the fact that previous administrations are never taken to task for their crimes and there is virtually no reason NOT to rip off the nation, is there?
Why the Rush on TARP 2?
We don't have time, President-elect Barack Obama's key economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, insisted in a letter to Congress on Monday, promising that the new infusion would not be squandered as was the first installment.
I know that's a big load off my mind.
But given that Summers is personally as responsible for this meltdown as anyone, why should we trust him on this?
Possibly a better question is
what should we do if we don't trust him?
Yes, it sounds wonderfully bipartisan that Obama is backing President Bush's request for spending the money now, short-circuiting congressional inquiry, but it was just that sort of bipartisan politics that created this nightmare.
Why...it's almost as though there isn't a whole lotta difference between the parties except for issues that don't matter..
like god, guns and gays.
How insulting that we must now accept Summers' assurance that the Obama administration will "move quickly to reform a weak and outdated regulatory system to better protect consumers, investors and businesses."
They don't care about us enough to actually insult us. We're too insignificant for that.
This from the guy who, as President Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, pushed the deregulation legislation making the subsequent financial crimes of Wall Street legal.
I know I'm shocked
-- shocked! -- do you hear me?
The "toxic derivatives" that we taxpayers are now forced to purchase from the Wall Street hustlers were deliberately shielded from all government regulation, thanks to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Summers got Congress to pass in the closing days of the Clinton administration with the same urgency that he now pushes for the new Wall Street handout.
I've been given to believe that most of the derivatives market is completely unregulated.
I know I felt ever so much better when Greenspan, upon being asked, what part he thought he played in this mess responded:
" I trusted the bankers".
I'm sure that you must have felt about the same sense of relief that I did upon reading that.
Back then, Summers was a disciple of Robert Rubin, who just last week resigned from his director's position at Citigroup, the financial conglomerate that grew to unmanageable and corrupt proportions thanks to the empowering legislation that Rubin initiated when he was Clinton's first treasury secretary. Rubin has been paid more than $115 million plus stock options at Citigroup, and despite his horrid record is a close Obama adviser.
It's almost as though you believe that the Foxes aren't the best people to guard the chickencoop, BAC.
It is one of the great swindles of US financial history that Citigroup was bailed out with $45 billion in a deal that could eventually cost taxpayers an additional $269 billion to guarantee those toxic assets that would have been illegal if not for the legislation backed by Rubin and Summers.
You don't feel responsible to the bond holders of Citigroup? I know I do. I'd clean out my bank account to help those poor bondholders if I had anything in it. I CARE about the poor superwealthy...what with they paying so much taxes and all.
How did Obama allow himself to become ensnared with the very same folks who are the most culpable?
Ensnared? You gotta dance with them what brought ya' to the ho-down, partner
His treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, is another Rubin protegé, who, as head of the New York Fed, worked tirelessly with Rubin to concoct the Citigroup bailout. When candidate Obama gave his major economic address back on March 27, he couldn't have been clearer in condemning the deregulation that Rubin and Summers had engineered:
"Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one--aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight. In doing so, we encouraged a winner-take-all, anything-goes environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy."
Yeah, that sounds about right.
He was referring to the deregulation legislation that Summers hailed on the day that Clinton signed it into law as "a major step forward to the 21st century." Now Obama is relying on Summers to reverse a disaster of his own creation. It's like returning to the same surgeon who almost killed the patient in the first operation to once again cut open the body to repair the damage.
More like direct the disaster such that it falls on those who don't matter.
That would be us, of course.
What we need is a second opinion.
Okay, they're ugly, too.
Where is the openness and accountability that Obama promised?
The Window at the FED is open and the taxpayers are accountable.
Why not pause for a few weeks for congressional hearings on how to spend the new money?
Why bother. Do you really think anyone in Congress understands this stuff well enough NOT to allow them to rip us off?
I mean, seriously..
do you?
We don't even know where the last batch went.
They're so rich, there's just no tellin' where the money went!
On Monday, the Treasury Department finally agreed, and only after a subpoena threat, to turn over to Sen. Carl Levin and his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations the ten secret contracts that it signed with top Wall Street firms in the first round of the bailout. Unfortunately, the subcommittee has no plans to make those contracts public, according to a Levin aide quoted in The New York Times.
I remember reading Kafka when I was young and thinking it was fiction.
That is outrageous. This is our money we're talking about. Why don't we get to read the fine print in what will end up being trillions of dollars in taxpayer obligations? Because we are suckers, that's why, and the folks who swindled us into this disaster can count on it.
Tell us, BAC, what
exactly do you expect the American people to really do about it? Write the Congressmen?
Why the Rush on TARP 2?
When Obama spoke of "change", he was obviously talking about what's going to be left in the US Treasury after he and his band of thieves get done giving away all the dollars to the rich.
That's about it.
You and I are old enough to remember when
change actually had some intrensic value.
Why...I remember silver coins. Imagine those.
Even pennies are fake now, for God's sakes!!
