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Robert Scheer, Truthdig: "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? And why should we taxpayers be expected to double our debt exposure when the 10 still-secret bailout contracts made in the first round are being kept from the public?"

http://www.truthout.org/011409S

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Fattening the rats

CounterPunch
by Dave Lindorff

01/14/09

Congress should do now what it should have done back in the fall: kill the Wall Street bailout program. After wasting $350 billion on a program that was misrepresented from the outset, and investing hundreds of billions of dollars in failing financial institutions that it could have bought outright for less than it was investing in them, the Treasury Department, now acting at the direction not of the Bush administration and outgoing Treasurer Hank Paulson, but the Obama administration, is asking for the other half of the Troubled Assets Relief Fund (TARP). Aside from the corrupt aspect of this boondoggle — the handing over of borrowed taxpayer money to the very bankers and investors who created the mess we’re in today — the whole TARP program is premised on a false assumption: namely that the US economy’s problem is a freeze in lending. This is simply untrue. … The real point of the damning report by the Minneapolis Fed’s plucky trio of economists, is that banks aren’t lending not because they don’t have enough capital, but because for the first time in a decade, bankers are being prudent the way banks are supposed to be...

http://counterpunch.org/lindorff01142009.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp



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