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Taxpayers pay for the bailout, subsidize the lobbying, underwrite the campaign donations. Then they are taxed by banks through fees and rates that work as regressive taxes. They will be taxed again to pay for the deficit. They will be taxed again when the value of their money declines from the inflation these trillions of dollars will inevitably cause.
Does anybody understand exactly what the Federal Reserve money is used for, exactly who received it, exactly what taxpayers receive in return and exactly how much money has been spent?
Where's the transparency?
Can anyone justify the number of senior Treasury jobs that remain unfilled, or the pay-for-play schemes surrounding state pension funds?
Everyone should read the lengthy story in Monday's New York Times about the career of Mr. Geithner. Did he do his job well, or disastrously, at the New York Fed when he failed to regulate the firms while they were causing this crisis?
Mr. Geithner is without doubt a great power-networker, who spent much time at the N.Y. Fed in endless networking events with the financial powerbrokers who were creating the crisis that Geithner was failing to prevent.
Geithner was not reforming the system, protecting the customers or opposing the abuses that endanger our national solvency. He was cultivating the support of financial powerbrokers who were, and remain, his true constituency.
What does it tell credit card CEOs that the president's chief economic adviser falls asleep at a meeting where he should have been defending taxpayers and consumers like a lion?
The Republicans have virtually nothing to offer except hoping the president fails without serious ideas of their own. The Party of No has earned its 21 percent approval rating. But, as a matter of conscience and concern for my party and my country, I must break ranks.
What is happening is wrong. A whole generation will pay the price for what we do today. The cost will be enormous and incalculable. Both parties owe the next generation far better than either party offers today.
No bank should ever be too big to fail. Instead of taxpayers subsidizing mergers, regulators and legislators should break up any bank so large that its failure endangers the nation as a whole.
It is inexcusable and shameful for even a Democratic House to pass a bill to allegedly combat abuses against citizens, and make that bill effective a full year later, which means all of those abuses will continue for least 12 more months. To call this a consumer protection bill is an abuse of language and a fraud against consumers and voters who do not want these abuses continuing for another year, and supported by Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress for another year.
Banks given trillions of dollars to lend should lend. Those of either party who tolerate these abuses are betraying the largest financial trust ever given to public officials in the history of the nation, the world or any generation.
Link: The Hill
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