The Point about TARP, the Auto Bailout and Sanders

[think]

17. Choosing extremely flawed legislation like TARP over trying to find GOOD solutions to huge problems

isn't called living in the real world. It's called fear and political expedience.

The Inspector General overseeing TARP had this to say about TARP:

Neil Barofsky on the failures of TARP

By Jeff Horwich
July 23, 2012 | 4:05 AM

~Snip~

Barofsky: Well essentially, they wanted me to back down, I think. Every time I started to raising some concerns, the pushback I got was remarkable. I remember within the first couple of days, I started hearing a refrain that I heard over the course of a couple of years -- from the Bush administration to the Obama administration -- saying “Neil, we hear what you’re saying about your concerns about fraud and potential abuses in this program but really you don’t have to worry about it because these are banks, they are not going to risk their reputations by taking unfair advantage and possibly profiting off of the taxpayer.”

Horwich: You write a lot about your disillusionment with the Home Affordable Modification Program -- TARP money that was supposed to go to banks to help people stay in their homes. In your view, what happened to it?

Barofsky: Well, the program has been an abysmal failure; supposed to help up to four million people, even today it’s only 20 percent of that number and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get much better. We confronted Tim Geithner about this and his response was very telling. He wasn’t talking about how the program could be improved to help homeowners. He said the program, would help and I quote here “foam the runway for the banks.”

And by that he explained the banks could deal with a certain number of millions of foreclosures over a certain period of time but anything more than that could put the financial system and those banks in jeopardy. With that in mind, there’s little surprise that the program has been such a failure for everyone other than the large banks....

http://www.marketplace.org/2012/07/23/economy/neil-barofsky-failures-tarp

This is what happens when lawmakers choose expediency and vote for bad laws. The big banks got theirs and the American people got screwed. Bernie Sanders knew the TARP program was flawed and that's why he voted against it.

Just because YOU weren't one of the millions that got screwed doesn't mean that the TARP program was a good thing. Overall it was horrible legislation for millions of Americans and awesome legislation for corrupt banks that should have had it's top leaders prosecuted and the banks broken up. Now the too big to fail banks are even bigger than they were before the crisis.

And during that time Goldman Sachs lied to congress, lied to it's clients, and was convicted of breaking US law while it's CEO became a billionaire.

How in any way shape or form is that JUSTICE? How is that good legislation?

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