Hank Paulson

By David Swanson

Michael Moore's movie motivated me to bring this out. Here's a theme song for Capitalism that I wrote at the time of Paulson's Plunder. Here it is sung by Timbrewolf:

By Dave Lindorff

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue"
the US financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his
own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several
trillion dollars and counting, the Obama administration is announcing
plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to
investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the
so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal--getting these zombie banks to start lending again--is not going to work.

By Dave Lindorff

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left, but
also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the US
government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on
the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion “black box” that is completely
protected from public and even congressional scrutiny, and on large
swaths of the Pentagon budget, which are kept hidden allegedly for
“national security” reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine
attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the “government knows
best.”

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the 5-member TARP oversight committee, told the Senate Banking Committee that Hank Paulson paid banks too much for their worthless troubled assets last fall. How much too much?

Treasury paid $254 billion for assets worth approximately $176 billion, a shortfall of $78 billion.

In other words, Hank Paulson and George Bush stole $78 billion from taxpayers to directly enrich the banksters. When will the prosecutions begin, and when will we get the stolen loot back?

(NOTE: This article appears in the current issue of the magazine Treasury & Risk)

By Dave Lindorff

Key members of Congress were stunned to hear Federal Reserve Board
Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson say on Sept.
18 in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill that the country was “days
away” from a complete financial meltdown—one that could lead to
Depression-like runs on banks, widespread violence and ultimately even
to a possible declaration of martial law. It was a vision of
Armageddon, but, of course, 10 days later, the House rejected a Wall
Street bailout package sent over by Paulson, only to pass one in a more
limited form—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act—a week later that
gave Paulson less power and only half the money he wanted.

By Dave Lindorff

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 (AIG was worth only a few billion
dollars in total at the time that the government bailed the company out
with an initial investment of $85 billion and Citicorp today is worth
less than the $45 billion the government has invested in that failing
firm), 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).

By Dave Lindorff

The real cost of the Bush Administration’s trillion-dollar bailout
of Wall Street is becoming painfully apparent as the incoming Obama
administration attempts desperately to make a case for its own
$800-billion economic stimulus package, while warning about “trillion
dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.”

By Dave Lindorff

A brief conversation I had earlier this week with a car dealership
executive while standing in a post office line demonstrated simply both
why the bank deregulation and consolidation process of the past two
decades has been a screw job for ordinary people, and why the
Washington bailout has been both a taxpayer rip-off and a failure (if
it was even intended to work!).

I was chatting with the guy standing behind me who works at one of
the 14 dealerships in a Philadelphia-area regional family-owned chain
of GM dealerships called Bergey’s. Noting that a number of big dealers
like Knopf (a Chrysler Dealer) and McGarrity’s (Ford) had been closing,
I asked this Bergey’s manager if the problem was that the banks had
frozen lending, making it hard for people to buy new cars.