Tiahrt: Time to end Wall Street bailout program

One of the countless "Ds," Todd Tiahrt:

"All too often Washington is viewed as a national ATM for bailing out failed companies," said Tiahrt. "We must end this unnecessary spending of taxpayer dollars on bailouts and failed so-called stimulus programs."

Jeetz:

Wrong Tiahrt, the people are the F-ing ATM. Whoever wrote that for Tiahrt somehow want us to believe that Congress is getting screwed over, instead of leading with the fact that American taxpayers are getting screwed over. It's us first, you second, MFer.

Wipe that MF-ing city clean in 2010. And if they don't get it, then wipe that MF-ing city clean in 2012. If they don't get it, wipe that MF-ing city clean in 2014. If they don't get it, then it's time for armed insurrection or a military takeover. We've been civil long enough in this country. Too long.

Both major political parties suck and are destroying this country.

Joe Wilson & Doug Hoffman put the "citizen" back in citizen legislator. In 2010, send these kind of people to D.C. and rid it of troughfeeders, constitution-torchers, scumbags, ass-kissers & trained liars

I certainly haven't enjoyed bailing out these bandits and have railed about it quite often. But when we bailed out those jaybirds I feel it was because it was necessary in order for our economy to stay afloat and even damage the average citizen more if we did not do so.

What disturbs me the most and should be disturbing every congress man and woman, is the proximate cause of the problem. That cause is how we do not regulate business as we should and that has been brought about mostly by politicians who for years have preached deregulate, deregulate, deregulate - all at the prompting of the money monger corporations who want the people to pay the tab for them to do business however they want without consideration for doing the right thing and operating in a manner that has any integrity, honesty, ethics, character to it.

So to me we better be regulating the likes of Madoff, the Wall Street and banking bandits and quite a few more, change the campaign finance laws, get the damn lobbyists out of halls of government and stop letting corporations run our country and our lives. And we need that health care reform more than ever and they better hadn't be using the excuse of the bailouts to stop that reform or we are all going to be in even a bigger pot of trouble. Starts right at your local city council - you better be electing some people who work for you for a change.

to your comment. The regulations for the likes of madow did and do exist, they were not enforced. That's why he's in jail, he violated the rules. The big problem was the lack of honest regulators. It seems the regulators liked being wined and dined by the wall street cheaters and overlooked a few things. Not to mention government lending mandates intended to help low income people get houses they couldn't afford. Those same mandates were used to allow some investors to also over extend.

There were foolish regulations that came out of the 70's that needed to be undone. Before we screw things up again, like is being attempted with health care, let's enforce the regulations we have so we can see where they are lacking. It's similar to imigration. Let's enforce current imigration law, then see where it is lacking. An unenforced law or regulation has no value, just ask al gore with his famous "no controlling legal authority". Translated, "yeah we broke the law, but nobody has the tasking to enforce the law so we get away with it".

This got lost in the shuffle yesterday, and is well worth a read:

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

By Robert Scheer

What’s up with Barack Obama? The candidate for change once promised to take on the powerful banking interests but is now doing their bidding. Finally, a leading Democrat, in this case Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, has a good idea for monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but destroyed the American economy, and the Obama administration condemns it.

Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed’s abject failure to properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on greed. As Dodd’s spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: “The Federal Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms.” But White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from the Fed would cause financial industry “nervousness.” Isn’t that the whole point of government regulation—to make the bandits look over their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely insists that the Fed “is the best agency equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex firms,” despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. There is some irony in the fact that the largest of those complex firms got to be “too big to fail” because of the radical deregulatory legislation that Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation as the Treasury Department’s general counsel in the Clinton administration. Wolin is now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in the five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the disaster began to unfold.

Why is Barack Obama allowing these retreads from the Clinton era who went on to great riches on Wall Street to set economic policy for his administration? The fatal hallmark of this president’s financial policy is that it is being designed by the very people whose previous legislative efforts created the mess that enriched them while impoverishing the nation, and they now want more of the same.

In the Clinton years, Wolin was general counsel to then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, the key architect of the radical deregulation that caused the recent banking collapse. Summers went off to work for hedge funds and banks that paid him $15 million in 2008 while he was advising Obama. Meanwhile, Wolin became general counsel for Hartford Insurance Corp., which had to be bailed out by the taxpayers because it took advantage of the radical deregulation that he helped write into law.

Wolin, Geithner and Summers were all protégés of Robert Rubin, who, as Clinton’s treasury secretary, was the grand author of the strategy of freeing Wall Street firms from their Depression-era constraints. It was Wolin who, at Rubin’s behest, became a key force in drafting the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which ended the barrier between investment and commercial banks and insurance companies, thus permitting the new financial behemoths to become too big to fail. Two stunning examples of such giants that had to be rescued with public funds are Citigroup bank, where Rubin went to “earn” $120 million after leaving the Clinton White House, and the Hartford Insurance Co., where Wolin landed after he left Treasury.

Both Citigroup and Hartford would not have gotten into trouble were it not for the enabling legislation that the three Clinton officials pushed through while they were in power. But even with that law, had Geithner been on the case protecting the public interest while head of the New York Fed, much of the damage could have been avoided.

Thanks to the legislation that Wolin helped write, the limits preventing mergers between insurance companies and banks imposed during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was reversed. Hartford got into banking, and as The Washington Times observed in a scathing editorial, “Hartford … rushed to buy regulated savings and loans just so they could call themselves banks and qualify for government TARP funds.” Wolin collected his millions while the taxpayers were obliged to cover Hartford’s losses.

It is depressing for a columnist who had great hopes for Obama to be forced by the facts to credit editors at the right-wing Washington Times for getting it right when they opined: “Revolving doors between industry and the administration and fat-cat political contributors getting bailed out at taxpayer expense sound like business as usual. This certainly isn’t change we can believe in.” Please, Mr. President, say it ain’t so.

KC Law, great post, a lot of information you will never hear in the main stream media. The only real problem I have is with Dodd now wanting the new regulation, he was part a huge part of the problem, and then had the nerve to take sweetheart deals from countrywide on two mortgages. I trust him about as far as I can throw his fat a$$, hopefully the citizens will take care of the Dodd problem for us.

and I don't care if it is from old laws or new - I want it done.

The Clinton guys are not the only ones with blame - the blame is far and wide and even extends to the average citizen who puts up with this crud year after year after year and they keep re-electing these worthless politicians who are no more working for the average citizen than a man in the moon.

Get corporations and lobbyists out of your government and some campaign finance laws changed and last but hardly least by a long shot, you might want to find some people who know what honesty, integrity, ethics, character, etc. is - do those people exist within many areas of our society??????????? You sure as hell have to hunt them down.

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