TARP

Hey if you are Michelle Malkin they are:

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more.

Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out state governments and convert unused TARP bucks into…a government union slush fund.

The article she is referencing is this:

… Pelosi said serious thought is being given to investments in transportation infrastructure, seen by economists as one of the most efficient ways of creating jobs quickly.

She also said money could be used to preserve public-sector jobs such as firefighters, police and health-care providers.

The senior Pelosi aide said this would be distributed by bypassing state governments and providing funds directly to local or regional governments.

How dare that evil Pelosi want to do things like protect firefighters and police and improve our infrastructure!

That goddamn socialist!!!

The funniest part of Malkin’s latest installment of “rantings of a psycho” has to be the timing.

Within 5 hours she went from screeching about some “war” on cops being raged by liberals and blacks, to screaming about the Democrats wanting to save cop jobs. I’ve heard of flip-flop before, but at this pace we are more into rapid somersaulting.

Today’s contestant is Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. On Fox News this morning, Shelby reaffirmed his belief that Obama was taking us “down the road of socialism”. The big thing he blamed?

WALLACE: Sen. Shelby, you say that the Obama administration is taking us down the road to socialism. Explain.

SHELBY: Well, obviously. So, they intervene last fall in the bank crisis. No one has ever done it on that scale before. Now the automobile crisis.

And because seeing is believing:

So now the whole TARP was the work of Obama? I almost forgot that it was Obama who took the unprecedented action of suspending a presidential campaign to work on this issue. Oh wait – that was John McCain. It was also Bush’s TARP program. With lying morons like Shelby out there making the case one can only assume the Republicans really love being in the minority.

This story is from Saturday and I haven’t seen much mention of it:

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled "Facts about Goldman Sachs" – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.

“The Bank” is non-other than Goldman-Sachs, a TARP recipient. So why is a company, which needs our tax dollars to survive, spending big money to try and silence a citizen of this country? Something just doesn’t seem right with that.

Not a real shocker here, but it turns out that a lot of the TARP recipients are lining the pockets of our leaders through political donations:

In recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the political action committee for Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG "counterparty."

With this kind of behavior, it’s no wonder that we are seeing plans that sound good and backed by leading economists fail in Congress. The problem is that we have no real fix for this. Are we going to see lawmakers cut off their own money train? If you think that will happen then I got some ocean front property in Ohio to sell you.

This also isn’t a partisan problem, it’s a systematic one. To right this major wrong we have to look seriously at redoing our campaign finance laws. Of course with the current people in Washington, loopholes are a given. Perhaps the only real way to get something done with the status quo is for some rogue member of Congress to introduce strict legislation limiting these donations, and then going out on a massive media blitz. That would help put enough pressure on law makers from their constituents that it might work.

The better plan is to start cleaning house. We need new blood in Congress who hasn’t felt the taint of the money train, but just to run against an incumbent takes a large sum of money, so there again you are entering this vicious cycle.

What we really need is publicly funded campaigns. Take the money factor out of the whole process. It would level the playing field, allowing more people to run for higher offices and give us an infusion of new thinking. If the public outrage over the AIG bonuses could be rechanneled to this, then we might be able to push fixes for far more problems.

The bill has passed to tax the bonuses at a rate of 90%. The final break down is:

With the exception of 6 blue dog Democrats, support on the left side of the aisle was rather unanimous, but the Republicans split 50/50. Interesting enough is the split in the Republican House Leadership. John Boehner voted against it, while Eric Cantor voted for it. I can’t wait to hear the spin on that.

I posted about it last night. It’s where Republican Eric Cantor tried to say that the Democrats voted to let AIG keep their bonuses. Well now that the actual bill is coming up today, the one that gets back the bonuses and prevents this from happening again, Cantor isn’t sure if he will support it or not.

Again – the Republicans think that these bonuses are fully justified. They are just acting outraged because the people are outraged. During this entire TARP fiasco, right from its onset last year, Republicans have continually blocked legislation to prevent these kind of bonuses. Perhaps people need to start asking the GOP about their opposition to such safeguards up until now.

Well under Bush it appears to have done just the opposite:

The 20 largest banks that received government rescue funds slightly reduced their lending to consumers and businesses in the last three months of 2008, the government said Tuesday.

The Treasury Department said the banks reduced their mortgage and business loans by a median of 1 percent each, while credit card lending rose by a median of 2 percent. The median is the point halfway between the banks that lent the most and those that lent the least.

Ironically this puts Bank of America on the list, who seems determined to get me to sign up with their insurance or credit cards by calling me multiple times per day. They do that despite me being on the national do not call list and telling them countless times to not call anymore. Perhaps Congress can next tackle BoAs constant violation of the law in this sense.

So some of the bailout money could be going to hookers:

Visa, Mastercard or American Express? Or maybe a credit card from JP Morgan Chase?

Wall Street CEOs, lawyers, bankers and media executives chalked up thousands of dollars in prostitution charges on their corporate credit cards -- swiping their cards for $2,000 an hour prostitutes, according to a New York madam who pleaded guilty last year.

Kristin Davis, the madam in question, went public to ABC News this week; ABC will be broadcasting her interview Friday at 10 pm. Davis says she has a list of 9,800 clients, many of whom she says New York prosecutors deliberately avoided when taking her case, even though she offered them her annotated client list.

Ok that sounds really bad, but it’s even worse when you add into it the complaining by Republicans of Obama trying to limit CEO compensation and waste.

Claire McCaskill has come up with a novel idea – cap the bonuses companies that are receiving federal aide can pay out:

Under the bill by McCaskill, an early endorser of Obama's presidential candidacy, employees would not be able to make more money than the U.S. president -- $400,000 a year -- until their companies no longer relied on government aid, such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program that bails out banks.

In an angry speech on the Senate floor, McCaskill said an average of $2.6 million dollars had been paid in bonuses to executives from the first 116 banks that got money from the rescue plan.

"I am mad," she said. "We have bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer ... They don't get it!"

This is awesome and should have actually been part of the original TARP bill. But I am also a little miffed here. I keep wondering how much these companies will spend to lobby against this bill.

The TARP was passed as an emergency life line to troubled banks, but read this:

A small but growing number of community banks are backing out of the government's bailout, which they see as fraught with hidden strings and government interference.

About 20 banks so far that applied for or had been approved to receive about $1 billion combined in taxpayer money have reversed course in the past month and refused to take the money. That's just a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars the government already has spent, but it shows that taxpayers aren't the only ones anxious about the financial bailout.

So they needed this money to stay in business, as the TARP was supposed to be used for, but they decided they didn’t want the money since it wasn’t just given to them. Sounds like these banks didn’t really need the money, but rather wanted it. In other words, the greed that got us into this huge mess is just being amplified with the TARP. Perhaps the feds should go in and check the ledgers of these banks to make sure they really aren’t getting ready to fail.

When banks abuse their bailout funds, the Obama administration takes action:

A Treasury Department official on Monday called Citigroup, which has received $45 billion in bailout capital from the government, to protest plans to accept delivery on a luxurious $50 million corporate jet made in France.

[SNIP]

The Treasury official called the bank to complain and told the executive to find a solution. Among the possibilities would be selling or leasing the fancy flier, since there are penalties associated with killing the contract outright.

In any case, the administration does not want the plane put in service under the Citigroup banner.

Could you imagine the Bush administration doing anything like this? While they were pumping out money to these financial institutions, the executives were walking away with huge bonuses and Bush did nothing.