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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMatt Taibbi's Stunning, New Rolling Stone Article: "Secret and Lies of the Bailout"
Secret and Lies of the BailoutMatt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
January 4th, 2013 4:25PM
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in only temporarily, mind you to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue...
...
...The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout
So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
MORE:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
VIA:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/05/1176631/-Matt-Taibbi-s-Stunning-New-Rolling-Stone-Article-Secret-and-Lies-of-the-Bailout
Bonobo
(29,257 posts)"We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn."
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)in return.
SomethingFishy
(4,876 posts)Just kicked another OP about this, and will keep kicking every one I see.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4055207
Agony
(2,605 posts)Blechhhh!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/09/15/599447/-The-Legacies-of-Phil-and-Wendy-Gramm
"""
In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's campaign.
A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.
"""
Octafish
(55,745 posts)http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3613212
TheKentuckian
(25,023 posts)historylovr
(1,557 posts)Zorra
(27,670 posts)wildbilln864
(13,382 posts)eridani
(51,907 posts)woo me with science
(32,139 posts)dmosh42
(2,217 posts)RomneyLies
(3,333 posts)Read about Taibbi's Big Con here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/06/1176751/-Matt-Taibbi-s-big-con
Hissyspit
(45,788 posts)Neil Barofsky and Neil Barofsky's book provided most of the material for Taibbi's article, from what I can tell.
Barofsky
Neil M. Barofsky (born 1970) is an Adjunct Professor of Law and Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law.[1] He was previously the Special United States Treasury Department Inspector General to oversee the Troubled Assets Relief Program from 2009 until his resignation in February 2011, and a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2000 to 2009.
[...]
Barofsky completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelors degree in economics from Wharton School of Business. He graduated with honors from New York University School of Law in 1995.[2]
[...]
Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (2012). ISBN 9781451684933 OCLC 793575355
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
So those are Barofsky's credentials. It would be hard to find someone who knows more about the bank bailouts than Neil Barofsky.
And what does he think about Taibbi's article?
Must Read MT @mtaibbi: new piece out in the mag on "Secrets and Lies of the Bailout."rollingstone.com/politics/news/
Neil Barofsky (@neilbarofsky) January 6, 2013
Case closed.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)SomethingFishy
(4,876 posts)actually stood on the right side of this might get a grip and a clue.