Voting against TARP was bad enough.

[JohnnyRingo]

With Bernie supporters in full damage control this week over his denial of funds that bailed out the auto industry, they find themselves ignoring a fatal fact: that sinking the TARP bill would have plunged the nation into full blown depression. That alone would have certainly taken down not only the auto industry, but a slew of other great American companies as well.

I know Bernie loves his country and have to assume he knew his vote against TARP would be overridden by his congressional peers, but still it displays a certain degree of political immaturity and flawed tunnel vision. Sanders voted against the TARP, and subsequently the money that would go to bail out GM, only because it would rescue his prime political bugaboo: big banks and Wall Street.

As Bernie himself put it: "Let their Wall Street buddies bail them out". If Bernie Sanders would govern the White House with such malice and singular focus toward a single entity of government that he would fail the entire economy to smite a few fat cats he has no more foresight than Republicans who filibuster the budget deadline to foil a sitting president.

Sure, after the financial bailout new regulations to counter the Alan Greenspan era of irresponsibility were needed, but TARP was an undeniably much needed tourniquet that allowed Obama to bring the country back from the cliff of ruin and Bernie is on record voting against it.

I get that his supporters see this as a setback and are frantically manning the bilge pumps of a sinking campaign, but it'll take more than shouting people down and blaming Clinton this time. If Bernie can't take the heat from Hillary Clinton, how can he hope to survive the billion dollar GOP onslaught in November?

[metroins]

1. Bernie does not compromise

Some people see that as a good thing, I personally see that as a bad thing.

The most Partisan Senators:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/07/and-the-most-partisan-senator-of-2015-is-bernie-sanders/

I personally want a President who will have bills passed; they might not be perfect, but at least we further the cause. This isn't a dictatorship, the Right Wing is about half of this country. We have to take some of their bad ideas with us.

[Adrahil]

2. Bingo. NT

[djean111]

5. So - which of Hillary's faves do you think we should applaud as "buypartisan"?

Weakening the safety net? More and more war? More H-1B visas? More fracking?

Exactly which bad ideas do you think that Hillary and the GOP will cooperate on, gladly, and with ease? And will those affect you, or just "other people"?

[Buzz Clik]

7. I'm trying to see how your post is on topic, but I cannot. So, we can only conclude ...

... this is just the standard response when Sanders is called out for something incredibly obvious.

[djean111]

10. This is directly from the post above mine, and I was asking about it -

I personally want a President who will have bills passed; they might not be perfect, but at least we further the cause. This isn't a dictatorship, the Right Wing is about half of this country. We have to take some of their bad ideas with us.

Ringing declarations are swell, but just which bad ideas are YOU good with?

[peacebird]

76. Bingo. Hillary is all about herself

[Nuclear Unicorn]

83. "buypartisan" <--- STEALING!

[procon]

11. Exactly. Remember how rigid and inflexible GWB was?

And look where that got us! It would be lovely if everything could be laid out in terms of simple black or white issues, but the world is an increasing complex and difficult place where even the most seemingly easy decisions have far reaching consequences. These presidential candidates have to think on the fly and be willing to set aside their own personal interests and switch their views in order to make the hard decision that comes with the highest office in the land.

[TTUBatfan2008]

23. GWB had plenty of help...

...from people like Clinton voting for the Iraq War, Patriot Act, and on and on.

[procon]

24. You've got it bad. Be well. nt

[TTUBatfan2008]

33. I don't have anything bad.

I just realize that there has been plenty of bipartisanship that has screwed over the people of this country.

[Carolina]

54. and Bankruptcy Bill

http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/05/clips-elizabeth-warren-takes-on-hillary-clinton-and-alan-greenspan/

[yodermon]

14. In a sane an rational congress, yes, compromising is good ALTHOUGH one shouldn't campaign on what a

great compromiser they are.

Obama is the most fantastic, diplomatic, "let's figure this out together" type president ever EVER ever, yet look at how he has been obstructed and vilified as SOCIALIST COMMUNIST argle bargle!!!11! by the loony right.

HILLARY will be Obstructed.
BERNIE will be Obstructed.

I would rather have someone advocating and staking out true Liberal Positions instead of offering up mushy compromisey positions (e.g chained CPI, no public option, etc) which will ALSO be attacked and blocked as communist; that is how the political frame of reference has shifted to the right over the decades; the 3rd way Democrats trying to stake out the mushy middle and then being painted as ultra-left ANYWAY.
grr.

[Demsrule86]

52. How nice for you and Bernie

But I would rather have millions of people employed and an improving economy rather than the principle of losing autos and millions of people's life savings.

[JDPriestly]

61. Right! Bernie will be a tough negotiator.

[thesquanderer]

19. He wasn't trying to sink TARP, he was trying to fix it.

Please see my post at http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511442855

[metroins]

20. You're looking for words that are not in my post

I never said he was trying to sink TARP.

[thesquanderer]

21. Sorry, yes, that was in the OP and should have been directed there.

Though on the topic of compromise that was the subject of your post, the last three paragraphs at the link do address that, thanks.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511442855

[JohnnyRingo]

22. He voted against it.

That's the inescapable bottom line.

When blood is gushing from an economic artery there's no time to go back and get a second opinion or mull over whether we can use a cold compress or a gauze wrap. A tourniquet was desperately needed and applied, no thanks to the senator.

"Trying to fix TARP" indeed. That's a spin at jet turbine speed.

[thesquanderer]

27. Did you see the post I referenced?

Sanders' problems with TARP, and discussion about how to fix it, is there.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511442855

It's not spin, it's what he was saying at the time. That was his position even before the vote, not spin after the fact

He also tried to get an amendment passed that would include a way to help finance TARP with a temporary surtax on incomes over $500k individual, $1 m for couples. But of course, Republicans being Republicans, there was no need to find a way to finance a bank bailout. The only things that have to actually be *paid* for are Dem programs that help ordinary people.

[JohnnyRingo]

77. "Republicans being Republicans".

What you're saying is that Sanders' "fix" had less chance to succeed than that of a Labor Day snowman. No shit.

That's the reason a bipartisan emergency spending bill that would satisfy both parties had to be quickly crafted before the economy swirled irreversibly down the drain. "Bernie Tried" isn't much of a campaign slogan, but I'm hearing that with greater frequency as the days go on. Will that be his final legacy of four years in the White House?

[thesquanderer]

79. No, that's not what I was saying.

re:

"Republicans being Republicans". What you're saying is that Sanders' "fix" had less chance to succeed than that of a Labor Day snowman. No shit.

No, that's not what I was saying. Remember, when this happened (Jan 2009), the Dems had a majority in the House and Senate. So the idea of something better was not so automatically a lost cause.

[JohnnyRingo]

85. ...until you tried to sell the Democrats on it.

You're assuming the blue party would have voted in lockstep to tax the wealthy and crash banks. Pinch yourself, you're dreaming.

[thesquanderer]

93. I'm not assuming anything.

Obviously it would have been difficult, at best.

I'm just saying that, with Dem majorities, the idea of trying to get something better wasn't quite as impossible as something like that would seem today.

TARP was problematic. A lot of us here in 2008-2009 were not exactly big fans.

But *something* was going to pass.

So what did Bernie's "no" vote mean? As I said in the post I linked you to:

Congress was not just going to throw its hands up and walk away. There were two possibilities. Possibility one, which happened, was that the bill passed despite his vote. Possibility 2, if Sanders had gotten his way and prevented it, is that he would have had the opportunity to try to make it better, in the ways he had proposed. Either way, the auto industry gets bailed out. It's not like if the TARP vote had failed, Congress would have given up. There were enough votes, enough urgency, and enough consensus to be assured that nobody was going to simply walk away on this, negotiation would have continued...But there was going to be a bailout, one way or another.

[JohnnyRingo]

108. That's a big "if"

"If Bernie got his way and the bill failed...."

It didn't fail, and if it did I don't know why you think a more punitive bill would have been successful. Besides, I don't think time was on our side on this. With the economy bleeding out and billions being erased from the stock market by the day, there was no time to spend weeks discussing if a cold compress would be better than a tourniquet.

Certainly when Bernie found his campaign in trouble over this misstep he didn't arrange for meetings, power point presentations, second opinions, and focus groups, he had his team spring into action on damage control that very next day. Then again, this is his campaign, not something mundane as the US economy.

[thesquanderer]

109. Again, I'm not saying a more punitive bill would have been successful. I don't know.

I'm only saying that, from the perspective of the auto bail-out, Sanders' "no" vote on the TARP disbursement was a no-lose scenario. There was no way a bail-out was not going to happen. Either the bill was going to pass despite his "no" vote, OR, if it didn't, there would have been further negotiation. Realistically, those were the only two possibilities. Congress was not going to just go home and forget about it.

[JohnnyRingo]

111. Since my GM pension was at stake...

... I was paying pretty close attention to the auto bailout, and it wasn't the done deal you seem to think it was.

People like Mitt Romney and a large portion of Congress wanted GM to restructure without what they politely called "legacy costs". I and the other union workers were that legacy cost. They assumed that without the burdensome union contracts that the company would be snatched up in short order without govt aid.

The problem was that the country was in a deep recession and money was tight. GM tried hurriedly to sell newly the acquired Hummer brand after the bail out was secured to streamline the company. Hummer was it's financial gemstone at the time with military contracts. Penske made an decent offer that was deemed acceptable but even then was unable to find a bank that would take a chance on what they saw a risky endeavor. The deal fell flat on GM's greatest asset.

It was this mistaken notion that GM could be easily sold in a free market that prevailed among Republicans at the time who wanted to crush the UAW anyway. The auto bail out would never have happened as a stand alone bill in that atmosphere. It had to be tied in with something Republicans desperately wanted.

[thesquanderer]

112. I agree, it would have been tough to pass an auto bailout completely on its own.

After all, the independent auto bailout Sanders had voted for previously did not pass. So I'm not saying it would have been disassociated from TARP.

But if the bill Bernie voted against had not passed, as I said, there would have been further negotiation, Congress was not going to give up at that point, everyone knew *something* had to pass. Further negotiation would not have removed the auto bailout, since they had already come to terms on that, and it was not the sticking point. The arguments were about whether the Wall Street parts could have been strengthened, to shift it from an essentially "no strings attached" bailout to one with more accountability. This was the argument that was going on at the time, and not just from Bernie.

Please see http://www.savingtoinvest.com/should-remaining-350-billion-tarp-funds/

So it is a safe bet that we were going to get a Wall Street bailout that included an Auto Industry bailout, no matter what.

Clearly, it is wrong to say that Bernie was against the bailout (he was obviously for it), and impossible to conclude that, if "Bernie had had his way" (based on that TARP vote) then the auto industry would not have been bailed out (since it seems inevitable that the auto bailout would have appeared in whatever version of TARP was going to pass, regardless of that particular vote), which means that the Hillary camp's claims to the contrary were, to put it politely, disingenuous.

[JohnnyRingo]

113. I understand your point

...and I respect your view. I may not agree with a slam dunk on the Auto bail out, but I can't say with certainty that it wouldn't have happened either.

[Adrahil]

3. Completely agree.... and no one is mentioning that.

That fact is, as distasteful as TARP was, not doing it would have been insane. It would have made the Great Recession a true Second Depression.

[JDPriestly]

47. Negotiating a better deal was possible and could have been done.

Bernie is a tougher negotiator than Hillary or the weakling Democrats in Congress.

And that is why Obama has had such a tough time.

Bernie would have negotiated a tougher, better bail-out bill.

Voting for the TARP as it was written without a bail-out of any significance for homeowners and with provisions that did not limit the compensation of Wall Street and hedge fund managers who made the deal into a bonanza for their personal accounts was downright naive and stupid.

Bernie is a good negotiator. He proved that early on in Burlingon, Vt.

That's why the Democrats of Vermont voted 86% for the nomination of Bernie Sanders in the Vermont primary.

[Adrahil]

50. There is always a better deal...

But when your facing disaster, sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.

As for being a good negotiator, didn't he try for a better deal? I recall hearing from him. What happened?

[notadmblnd]

58. Yay! More No, we can't from the Hillary crowd

[JDPriestly]

65. The corporate Democrats in Congress panicked. Many of them were more worried about

their on investments than about the fate of the working people of America.

That's what happened.

The Democrats in Congress and Obama failed the working people of America.

When rich people come to you hat in hand, you exact a price for bailing them out.

Congress did not do that because its members were worried about their own financial futures and not about the American people.

That's what happened.

The members of Congress who voted for TARP had a conflict of interest that prevented them from exacting a higher price for the bailout.

And those who vote for and support Hillary have that same conflict of interest in many cases.

The interests of the American people should be first and foremost for our Democratic members of Congress and president. Right now, and since 1980, they have not been.

[Carolina]

55. Bingo

Funny how HRC folks defend Paulsen's TARP.

[dchill]

4. Or, as Hillary put it, "Let the banks fail."

She didn't mean that, of course.

[Buzz Clik]

6. Bernie took the opportunity to vote both ways. ALL career politicians do it, even Bernie Sanders.

Yes, it's hard to imagine, but Mr. Perfection's paint job has a lot of rust.

[NCTraveler]

8. Sanders isn't big on compromising.

The problem with that is when you have almost zero clout, and you aren't willing to compromise, you don't get anything you want.

How did the visa situation work out as he voted against it and a pathway to citizenship for millions and millions of people?

[JDPriestly]

45. The problem is that when the Democratic Party doesn't stand up for what is right

and fair for ordinary American working people, it has zero clout.

The Democratic Party leadership has already compromised too much when it comes to giving in to Republicans rather than fighting for the interests of working Americans.

The immigration bill should not have provided for starvation wages for farmworkers in America.

That is precisely the kind of issue that Democrats should not sell out on.

I'm with Bernie.

The Republicans need to understand that they have to give in and compromise with us, not the other way around.

That is what Bernie is talking about when he talks about a political revolution. If all of us ordinary people pay attention and scream loudly when the Republicans treat our next president the way they have treated Obama, then we will be dictating the compromises, not the Republicans.

A vote for Hillary is a vote for a weak president who does not and does not want to fight for the interests of ordinary Americans.

The middle class and poor have fared very badly under the governments we have had in the last 35 years, whether Republican or Democratic.

We want to change that.

The Princeton study on who has been getting the bills passed, the rich or ordinary Americans, which showed that the legislation and the government's actions have mostly and almost entirely favored the very rich and that we the people are not getting the government we want and need is pretty damning for the compromise that Hillary offers.

The Republicans do not compromise. Why should we? We would be the majority if we were stronger in negotiating for what is right for the American people and not just for the super-rich.

[NCTraveler]

46. Close to fifteen million people would be citizens today.

How are those protections you mention working out for them?

Sanders vote had zero to do with protecting them.

[alcibiades_mystery]

9. The TARP bill was bitter, bitter medicine

I don't know anybody who wasn't grinding their teeth at the outrage of it - these rich fucking bastards sink us, then we pay them to stop from drowning. It was soul-crushing, smash a table level bullshit. I don't care that we got "paid back." It was one of the most horrible moments in this nation's history.

But it had to be done. We would have drowned. It was medicine, however bitter.

It should have been followed up with Dodd-Frank times a Billion: complete dismantling and reconstruction of the securities industry, massive reinsertion of regulatory mechanisms that made them scream bloody murder. It wasn't, and that's a damn shame.

But TARP had to be passed. It is a stomach-churning, sickening fact.

I don't particularly blame Sanders for voting against TARP. Like I said, bitter, bitter medicine. I also think Sanders placed a strategic vote: he allowed it to come to a vote (he voted for cloture), then asked the leadership to step away, knowing it would pass. That's actually the right way to do things, Senate-wise, if you think the bill needs to pass, but you just can't fucking stomach it.

[JDPriestly]

44. We needed bailouts, but we did not need TARP.

It was a poorly negotiated bill.

Hillary like Congress at the time does not know how to use power to correct wrongs.

When crooks like the guys on Wall Street come asking for your help, you don't give them bonuses and perks and life-long employment. You demand a price.

Our Congress and the Bush II and Obama administrations did not exact a high enough price from the Wall Street crooks for the bail-out.

I'm with Bernie 100% on this. And I think his judgment and decisions on the TARP are proof if his vote on the Iraq War was not proof enough of his qualifications for the presidency.

We should have demanded total reform and strict limitations on the compensation and double-dealing and conflicts of interest and all the other bad conduct on Wall Street in exchange for the bail-out.

We should have bailed out the auto industry and certain other parts of the economy separately, and there, we should have protected the interests of workers and retirees much better than we did.

At the time TARP was being negotiated, I and many other Americans made suggestions that would have, for example, have kept a lot of Americans in their homes and out of bankruptcy court.

Bankers should be partners with their communities. When a bank is so large that it cannot fathom the damage that its policies could do to its community, to its neighbors across the country, rich and poor, it needs to be broken up.

The function of a bank and of investment in our country should be not just to enrich those at the tops of the banking hierarchy but also to serve the public and our country's interests. If the bankers can't profit and do well for themselves as well as for their communities, then why should we entrust our savings to them? There is no romantic reason for us to hold the hand of bankers who are stealing our money with the other hand.

TARP was the opportunity to reset, recalibrate the relationship between banks and community. In the panic to respond to a situation that should have been dealt with months if not years before, we made huge mistakes in the drafting of TARP.

Was a bailout necessary? Yes.

Was TARP the right bill? No.

Bernie is right on this.

The auto bail-out should have been separate from TARP. And TARP should have been better negotiated and much earlier.

And Clinton should not have signed the bill that did away with Glass-Steagall. Nor should Gensler, Bills aide and Clinton's adviser have snuck the Commodities Futures Act in the omnibus budget bill.

The Clintons are to a great extent to blame for setting up the chessboard that eventually led via Bush II's totally negligent governance of the banking sector to the 2008 crash.

[alcibiades_mystery]

71. I don't disagree with you that we should have gotten a better deal

I do, however, remember the circumstances as being on a spiraling airplane.

Now, we might say that's even better leverage to wrest concessions from the people who sent us into a nose-dive, but I do think some of that is 20/20 hindsight. In those days (it was merely days, really) it seemed an utter emergency. I think that's why Bernie voted for cloture.

We absolutely should have gotten a better deal out of the situation. But the ground-approach? It was scary.

I'm with you 99.9%, in other words.

[JDPriestly]

73. I isn't 20/20 hindsight. I wrote my Representative immediately.

And there were negotiations. Originally, the Paulson proposal was unconstitutional, obviously so. It was horrible. Couldn't have been passed.

The Democrats missed the ball in that they were not prepared for the obvious meltdown that was coming.

I remember looking over my documents in July or August because there was so much talk about the failing banks. I think the French bank Paribas was in trouble. I vaguely remember that.

That we were in a terrible housing bubble was very obvious to me early on when Bush was pushing the idea of an "ownership society" or some obnoxious, misleading slogan like that.

I attended an open house down the street from my house long before TARP. The price was extraordinarily high in my view compared to what I had paid for mine some years before.

I remember talking to a neighbor and saying that that price made no sense because while housing prices were rising at a very rapid speed, wages were not going up.

People cannot pay higher prices for housing unless their wages rise. It just takes common sense to figure that out. You don't have to be a genius to know that.

Congress was sleeping on the job. They should have been prepared for Paulson's hysterical appearance at their door. They weren't.

There is no excuse for the lousy job of negotiating TARP. A bail-out was necessary but not TARP. And the auto industry bail-out should have been separate from and negotiated prior to TARP. It should have insured that the rights and interests of people working in the auto industry and retirees from that industry's interests were protected before those of investors and buyers of stocks in the companies.

The Democrats were asleep on the job in negotiating TARP.

Yes. It is precisely when there is a crisis that we need a tough negotiator on the side of working people and the middle class and the poor. That's why we are supporting Bernie.

He's tough. He's honest. And he is on our side.

[Gothmog]

12. Clinton's charges are true

[JDPriestly]

42. TARP was a terrible bill. We needed a bail-out, but not TARP.

Bernie was right to vote against it.

More proof that Bernie is fearless and knows how to negotiate.

Hillary -- offering to compromise with the Republicans in Congress. How foolish can you get?

Obama tried to compromise. You cannot compromise with Republicans. It is a stupid idea. You outsmart and outargue and outfight Republicans. You do it by going straight to the voters.

Bernie can outsmart, outargue and outfight Republicans. Hillary cannot.

Hillary's politics are out-of-date and unrealistic when it comes to dealing with Republicans. She is not on the side of ordinary American people, and when she takes money from the wealthy and corporations and who knows what foreign interests (we will probably never know in this day of multinational corporations), she owes them.

When you vote for a president, you are in a sense, voting for your advocate, for your lawyer in government. The last thing you want is someone who is actually working for the side that is against you. Hillary will work against ordinary Americans.

When she accuses Bernie of voting against the TARP, and when we learn that, in fact, he voted for an auto industry bailout but not for the bailout that was offered of the banks, we think Hillary is sneaky, using old time political methods that don't work in this age of the internet and not really the person we want negotiating and speaking for us.

I will not vote for Hillary as the lawyer for the American people. She has too many conflicts of interest. She is too willing to compromise the interests of the American people. She is not on our side.

No president gets to win in every negotiation, but Hillary is going to lose a lot if she is elected. That could really hurt the Democratic Party.

Bernie is our last chance to get a president who will fight for us. I hear that over and over and over.

Bernie is our last chance for decent government.

It's true. I feel sorry for the Hillary supporters because they are being duped.

[Gothmog]

43. I strongly disagree with your analysis

We were really close to having a systemic crash of the banking system. TARP was needed.

Sanders is an one issue candidate and the US is not an one issue nation



The TARP fund was the only source of funding available for saving the auto industry. Without TARP, we would have no US auto industry

[Carolina]

62. Hillary is a ONE issue candidate

She is all about HERSELF.

She cared so much about the country when she vote aye for IWR, the Patriot Acts (I & II), the Bankruptcy Bill.

Then there's her 2-for-1 Clinton legacy with Bill: DLC, NAFTA, Telecommunications Bill of 1996, Welfare Reform (not), overturning Glass-Steagall, keeping Alan Greenspan at the Fed, placing the then Mr. Goldman Sucks himself Robert Reuben as head of Treasury and hiring as financial advisor that abominable Wall Streeter Larry Summers (who lost a $billion from Harvard's endowment!). The triumvirate that wrecked the economy, the Clinton BFF's



HRC's history is about her ambition. She's in it for herself, she plays sexist gender politics, she lies about her alleged record, she changes her mind with the political winds, she panders, she pads her pockets, and she is concerned with one issue candidate: HERSELF.

[Demsrule86]

49. No compromise was available.

It was Tarp and save the banks and autos or bust...and take millions of jobs and the saving of ordinary Americans with the depression that surely would have taken place had Bernie got his way.

[bahrbearian]

13. Tarp just delayed the collapse till Hillary gets to be President.

Remember to big to fail , is now bigger .But a new war will fix the economy.

[LAS14]

15. My thoughts exactly. nt

[fredamae]

16. Here....."Whistleblower Neil Barofsky on TARP Bailout"

Who benefitted again?

I lobbied my "reps" (and maybe yours too) to VOTE NO.......

[ibegurpard]

17. TARP fuelled the rise of the Tea Party

Congress supported it against their own constituents' wishes.
Necessary or not (and that's debatable) you are running AGAINST popular opinion on this.

[yodermon]

18. THANK GOD IT PASSED!!

who remembers that?
good old OPERATIONMINDCRIME if i remember correctly.

[vintx]

35. Explain please?

[Fumesucker]

72. A notorious DUer from long ago who turned out to be a Freeper troll after many thousands of posts

Another one of those who fooled no one except those who wished to be fooled.

He was thrilled about TARP, "Thank God It Passed" was his reaction...

[vintx]

97. Anyone who still doesn't see through that load of crap

has to be somehow invested in not seeing through it.

It was obviously a setup and we got the shaft.

[JDPriestly]

41. TARP should have been more carefully written and negotiated.

We needed a bailout, but TARP basically gave the banks a lot of money and asked very little in return.

It was the high point of corruption in our government, the high point thus far in our century.

Congress sat there, helplessly acquiescing to the greed and illegal conduct that drove Wall Street and is, probably unbeknownst to us, still driving it.

TARP was an extremely flawed bill. I am glad that Bernie had the courage and the integrity to vote against it.

Did we need economic reform and a bail-out of Wall Street? Yes. But not TARP.

We needed to use the leverage of the moment to reconstruct and rebuild our financial system.

I assure you, what we failed to accomplish in that moment when the banks were begging, we will have to accomplish at some moment in the future when it will be even more difficult to do so.

TARP was not the bill we needed.

Bernie was right on this. When bankers come begging, it's time to make them heel.

[JohnnyRingo]

48. One thing we do know...

Bernie's campaign is roiling in hot water over this.

We know this because his people have sprung into immediate action to affect damage control. They aren't having meetings, consulting focus groups, calling for power point presentations and weighing the pros and cons of a response over a period of days or weeks, they're just acting now to staunch the bleeding before it's too late and the campaign swirls down the drain in two battleground states.

This is about his political career however, not something as mundane as the US economy.

[CajunBlazer]

25. You're absolutely right

I don't think that Hillary wanted to mention what would have happen if TARP had not passed because it would have upset too many people across the nation. However, as distastefully as it was,. had the entire bail out bill which Bernie voted against failed to pass, the country would have been thrown into a depression that might well have been worse than the great depression of the 1930's.

It isn't just me saying that, though I have a good background in economics; the same has been said by almost every major economist from the most liberal to the most conservative. Yes, some of those companies saved were those that caused the problems in the first place, and I hated that, but it had to be done. Money for business loans (and personal loans) had completely dried up. Most small and middle size businesses rely on lines of credit to pay their employees and stay in business until they are paid for jobs completed. Without access to business loans most would have had to declare bankruptcy. The economy would have gone into a downward spiral. The bailout bill got the money flowing again, but it still took the country seven years to recover and it isn't totally there yet.

So, Senator Sanders, with his all consuming dislike for big corporations, and especially those that caused the problem, voted to put the US and the rest of the world into a depression. Rather short sighted, wouldn't you say? I would call his tendency to put ideology above the practical needs or the nation down right scary.

[JDPriestly]

39. TARP should have been more carefully negotiated.

It gave too much money, but not just money, more importantly, it gave too much power over how the money was spent to the few on Wall Street.

TARP was not properly negotiated. There should have been tough provisions limiting banker and hedge fund manager compensation as a trade-off for the bail-out. There should have been a well-funded, public investigation about the causes of the crisis. There should have been larger sums of money dedicated to the bail-out of troubled mortgages. More Wall Street management should have been fired.

The bill was negotiated by captured parties.

The first provisions that Hank Paulson recommended were not in my opinion Constitutional in some respects.

The bill was a mistake as passed.

Should there have been relief and investment in our banking sector and for homeowners at the time? Yes. For the auto and other industries at the time?

Yes.

But Bernie was right to vote against TARP which was designed to rescue the perpetrators of economic wrongs, misdeeds and the subsequent collapse of the economy and not to correct those wrongs, misdeeds and prevent the collapse of Wall Street from dealing the terrible blow it dealt to ordinary people who lost their homes and jobs.

TARP was the way to help Bush II's and Obama's and the Clinton's cronies on Wall Street. And the auto bail-out should have been a separate and better written bill.

I agree completely with Bernie's protest vote of no against TARP. That bill was not at all what it should have been.

And most Americans still don't know what hit our country. And the guys who did the dastardly deeds are still in charge and making billions.

That's a lot of what Bernie's campaign is about, and it is what is fueling both the Bernie and Trump revolts against the Party bigwigs on both sides.

[CajunBlazer]

74. Politics is the art of the possible

The TARP plans was what was possible at the time given the positions of Republican and Democratic Congressmen at the time. Bernie has explained his vote on various bills by saying that there are often good things and bad things in the same bill and that he voted for the bill because to the good things despite the bad things.

TARP such a situation. Economists of every political leaning were saying a bailout bill was the only way to save the country from depression. I followed the situation closely because I have a background in economics. Had we not rescued the very organizations that cause the problem in the first place (much as I hated having to do that) the economy of the country and the world would have gone down the drain.

Bernie had a choice he could vote for the bill and save the country years of depression where we would have had record unemployment and pain for our citizens or he could obey his ideology and vote against it. He chose the later and he cannot be forgiven for that. Bernie not only voted against the auto bailout, he voted against the government stepping in and preventing a world depression. Heavens knows, even though financial disaster was averted it has still taken forever for the country to recover and we aren't quite there yet. This is what progressives expect their government do - step in when there is a crisis. This is what Bernie Sander was unwilling to do and why he is not qualified to be President.

[Nonhlanhla]

107. +1

[basselope]

26. Voting against TARP was the RIGHT VOTE.

TARP was the bill supported by the corporations. There were SEVERAL other options that would have saved us from depression, not cost the government money (Yes, TARP lost money, despite the claim that it made money).

If you look at the state of the world today, we are more at risk of a financial collapse than we were before and Dodd Frank can't do DIDDLY about it, because by the time you are using the "tools" off Dodd Frank, it is already too late.

Saying TARP was a good thing is like saying the Iraq war was a good thing.

[Human101948]

31. Yes, absolutely correct...there were other options...Hillary supporters never admit that...

They buy the propaganda put out by the one percenters who had a lot to lose that Armageddon would have been jupon us if they weren't made whole again ("Make American whole again" says Hillary. Well, the one poercenters were first in line and the rest of us are still waiting.)

[yourpaljoey]

28. TARP never should have passed

It was time to do what Iceland did: throw bankers and brokers into prison and, carefully, reset the system.
We missed our chance. (I think maybe you need to study these things, don't you?)

[earthside]

29. The Bush Banker Bailout Bill

That is what Hillary is now trumpeting?

There were alternatives that would have relieved the 'troubled assets' of the mortgage-holders that were screwed by Hillary's Wall Street pals.

Instead almost all of the help went to save the banksters and the speculators.

If there had been a few more courageous Senators like Sanders who were trying to look out for us regular folks, we might have gotten a much more fair and much more people-centered rescue package.

I've seen it here on a couple of issues today: Hillary's minions arguing the Repuglican position on the bailouts and arguing for Drill Baby, Drill! on fracking and fossil fuels.

I guess you can never quite take the Goldwater out of the Goldwater Girl.

[JDPriestly]

37. "There were alternatives that would have relieved the 'troubled assets' of the

mortgage-holders that were screwed by Hillary's Wall Street pals."

Excellent. Might I add, by Hillary's and Obama's and BUSH II's Wall Street pals.

It took a village of very wealthy, very self-centered, very greedy people including Hank Paulson to write and pass the TARP.

That's that.

Thanks for your post.

[NobodyHere]

30. You've convinced me

I'm going out and voting for Bernie today.

[JDPriestly]

32. The problem with TARP is more complex than the OP states.

TARP was pretty much a take-it-or-leave-it bail-out for the banks including for the bonuses to the bankers that sunk the economy. Some bankers were replaced in deals that accompanied TARP, but the TARP deal was not negotiated by someone who wanted to make sure that the banks did not mess themselves up again.

In fact, TARP was barely negotiated at all. The banks got the money. Their borrowers lost their homes.

Before you post about TARP read the history books about how FDR extricated the US from the Great Depression.

The conduct of the banks that lead up to the Great Depression was investigated by the Pecora Commission. Wrongdoers were prosecuted. The causes of the Great Depression were discovered, ferreted out and laws were passed to prevent such an occurrence ever again.

And those laws, especially Glass-Steagall worked. We had recessions, but none so severe as the recession in 2008.

IT WAS THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION THAT SIGNED THE LAWS THAT PERMITTED THE RECESSION OF 2008 TO OCCUR. THE REPEAL OF GLASS-STEAGALL, THE SLIPPING OF THE COMMODITIES FUTURES ACT INTO A MANDATORY OMNIBUS BUDGET BILL IN THE LAST PERIOD OF CLINTON'S ADMINISTRATION ULTIMATELY RESULTED IN THE CRASH OF 2008.

It was the Obama and Bush II administrations that did not negotiate with Wall Street well. It was the Obama administration, like it or not and I know this hurts, that did not adequately investigate and report to the people on the causes of the 2008 recession. It was the Obama administration and the Attorney General that Obama appointed that did not adequately prosecuted violations of law that led to the 2008 recession.

This is really tough stuff for Democrats to admit and deal with. But Obama took a lot of money from Wall Street for his campaign.

MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT HAPPENED IN 2008. iT'S COMPLICATED, AND MOST AMERICANS ARE IN THE DARK.

Please see the movie The Big Short a couple of times at least. There are books on this issue. I don't expect very many people to read them.

TARP was a swindle for the American taxpayers, especially those who lost their homes.

When the vote was coming up in Congress, I e-mailed my Representative with ideas for saving homeowners who wanted to keep their homes as well as the banks. It would have been demanding to negotiate such a deal in administrations in which all of the financial and economic appointments were pretty much pro-Wall-Street if not actually employed by Wall Street before or after working for the government.

It wasn't until Elizabeth Warren got into the Senate and began to fight for the interests of borrowers that we got a little but not enough consumer-friendly legislation on banking and finance in Congress.

And I repeat that I think that the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill that was passed with a lot of help from some very well established Democrats goes too far to protect lenders.

Lenders, bankers, are partners in the loans they make. Lenders, bankers, are lending money that belongs to their friends and neighbors and family, to the community, and they have a responsibility to the community to lend it only to people who will be able to pay it back and can prove they can pay it back.

Had bankers been held to the standard I am describing here before the crash of 2008, we would not have had the crash. The housing bubble would not have occurred.

But that would have required our governments under both Clinton and Bush to be honest in reporting on the state of the economy.

I hate to tell you this, but we were already in a bubble in the later years of the Clinton administration, the dot.com bubble.

It was quite apparent. When your doctors and your lawyers are talking about their stock tips before operations or hearings in the court and not thinking about their patients and clients and their work, you know there is a financial bubble.

I advise people who think TARP was a great idea and who want to understand more about what happens in bubbles and recessions to read about the crash of 1929. One of the more colorful characters at that time was called Sell 'em Ben. Find a book with him in it it because it may be more readable than the drier texts.

Anyway, I'm with Bernie on TARP. It was passed too quickly and was very flawed. The bail-out for the auto industry as a separate bill would have been better. We needed much more reform of Wall Street and the commodities and other financial sectors than TARP demanded in return for the money. TARP was a bad bill.

Bernie is right on this and was right on this.

Please read your history of the Great Depression.

[JohnnyRingo]

51. Everyone agrees with you except economists

Even with clear 20/20 hindsight the vast majority of economists cite the TARP as saving the country from a massive depression.

Arguing that everything would have turned out fine with total or delayed action is akin to climate change deniers dismissing the findings of scientists to suit a political agenda.

Sanders screwed the pooch on this one, and it'll come with a political cost, regardless your tenuous rationalizations.

BTW: A stand alone auto bailout would never have passed a deeply divided Congress with one side intent on shredding union contracts, and we both know that. Bernie couldn't even get his own anemic bill through The House.

[beedle]

56. How did it save the county?

The banks horded the money instead of using it for its intended purpose.

It would have been put to better use had it been handed out to use as shims to steady chairs with one short leg.

The economy suffered for years because the banks refused to loan out the money, so the money was basically useless.

The economy slowly recovered in-spite of not having the stimulus money circulating in the economy ... not having the money because it was never given to the banks is no different than not having the money because the banks hoarded it in their vaults.

Economists can say any damned thing they want, but claiming that a stimulus that never made it pasts the odd hedge fund mangers bonus "saved the economy" is just stupid.

[JohnnyRingo]

80. It spawned the recovery.

Sure it wasn't in a great socialist fashion, but it put the NYSE back on an upward trend. It didn't work as many would have wished because the big banks swallowed up smaller unstable institutions until they were on safer financial ground. Much needed consumer confidence took a while longer.

It could have been more just, but it had the same desired result.

[beedle]

82. That's nonsense

Big unstable banks, buoyed by tax payer billions, stayed alive and used the money to buy up smaller institution consolidating the 'too big to fail' banks into even bigger 'too big to fail' banks.

The markets did recover, but wages for regular citizens suffered severely. Low paying jobs replaced high paying jobs.

And all that was done with none of the TARP money being used (other than for purposes that actually hurt the economy in both the short and long term.)

Having unstable institutions, institutions whose sole purpose in life is to screw over the little guy in the name of profits, is hardly something I'd call 'saving the economy'.

[JohnnyRingo]

87. I'm more secure now than I was in 2008.

My GM pension arrives on time every 1st of the month, gas prices are low, and I'm finally not worried about discretionary spending. Letting the country sink into a depression might have been a comeuppance for the fat cats, but at the expense of millions who could not weather the financial storm.

Who are you talking to that says the country hasn't seen a recovery since the Great Recession? Maybe it's not all Leave It to Beaver reruns, but we're better off now than we were in those uncertain times and consumer confidence has returned. Ask Amazon.

[beedle]

34. Why was the bailout necessary?

And what did the banks do with the bailout money?

Seems that Hillary supporters have the same selective memory as do Republicans.

The first thing the Banks did with the money they received was to hoard it. Meaning that other than benefiting the banks themselves directly, the TARP money might as well have been put under Obama's mattress.

2008: https://www.propublica.org/article/banks-hoarding-bailout-money-1017

2009: http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/03/banking-federal-reserve-business-wall-street-0203_loans.html

2010: http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/morning_call/2010/09/many_banks_still_hoarding_tarp_funds_as_deadline_nears.html

2011: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/some-banks-hang-on-to-bailout-billions/?_r=0

Yeah, obviously had Bernie caused a month or two delay on getting the deal right, that would have been a real disaster --- for the fucking CEOs of banks and hedge fund managers and their big fucking bonuses.

[tabasco]

36. Iceland didn't bail out their bankers

and they seem to be doing just fine.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

57. There would have been chaos. I am not a big fan of chaos in a nation...

There would have been chaos. I am not a big fan of chaos in a nation where everybody and their mom are packing heat.

[tabasco]

63. I'm not a big fan of life in a plutocracy. n/t

[DemocratSinceBirth]

64. I will settle for a plutocracy over being shot in the head by some guy ...

I will settle for a plutocracy over being shot in the the head because some desperate person who has lost everything sees me as the only thing between him and her and eating in a dystopian Mad Max nightmare.


I would add I am practically broke but if the shit hit the fan I don't believe a desperate person will take the time to find out...

[tabasco]

75. Then go with the flow, bro.

Not exactly the fighting spirit of Muhammad Ali.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

38. Yep. It's far more profitable to collaborate with the capitalists and accept their investments.

See ex-dead broke candidate for evidence.

[Vinca]

40. It warms my heart to know that my measly taxpayer dollars which I might have used to upgrade

my furnace went, instead, to someone at Goldman Sachs who received a six figure bonus for destroying the economy and probably bought a nice condo on a beach somewhere. Would it have been so horrible to have had a stand alone bill for the auto industry?????

[Demsrule86]

53. If autos and banks went

I sincerely doubt you would have had a house.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

59. We definitely wouldn't have a domestic auto industry any more.

Ford might have made it but a lot of the suppliers would have disappeared.

[Vinca]

60. I've always banked at a small, local savings and loan.

The giant banks on Wall Street should have been broken into pieces and a few big shots should have gone to the big house. You might also consider, there was nothing that said the TARP money shouldn't be funneled to the banksters through all the mortgage holders being screwed over by them. If the debt of the sucker class had been reduced, everyone might have come out the other end in better shape.

[Hoyt]

66. Hey, as long as the banks go down, fine if construction workers, truckers, wait staff, and everyone

else feels a lot of pain too.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

67. I was trying to find an article about what would happen if TARP wasn't passed.

One of the first article was by Stephen Moore who opined everything would be fine, go figure.

[Hoyt]

68. I'm glad we are just debating what would/might have happened rather than experiencing it if

rabid folks like Sanders had been making the decisions. I think my early life experiences with cows and outhouses would serve me well if I had enough land.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

70. The credit markets were frozen./nt

[beedle]

81. And for once

Stephen Moore is right, since that is essentially what happened.

The banks didn't lend out the money anyway ... there are lots of articles between 2008 and 2011 complaining how the banks were just hoarding all the bailout and TARP money, and no one was getting loans.

So the economy basically got better on its own while the TARP money sat in bank vaults and if used at all it was used for hedge fund manger bonuses and other such non-economy fixing uses.

[Chan790]

69. I know this is going to come as a shock to you...

but some of us wanted TARP to fail and the resulting field-clearing downturn. It would have a good thing; short-term pain and a much healthier economy purged of companies and financial institutions still propped up on government money gambling with borrowed money. The bank speculators would have been wiped out along with those who gambled on risky derivatives. It needed to happen and because it did not happen...they're setting up to fall again...and it will happen again and again until we don't bail them out and they hemorrhage out as necessary.

It didn't save anything, it delayed what will be a much worse depression because we didn't let it happen and because the financial sectors now knows there are no consequences to doing it again. They'll always get gifted federal money to balance the books with no required concessions or regulatory changes to prevent it happening again as long as we keep electing politicians of the one-and-only oligarchy...whether those pols are Hillary, Obama, Trump, or Rubio. You want change. You want a healthy economy? You need to vote for politicians that will let the financial sector reap the fields they sowed.

TARP should have failed...our lawmakers failed us by passing it. Iceland had the right approach...they bailed out the public, threw the felon bankers in jail, let their financial sector meltdown and rebuilt a stronger economy from the ashes.

[madfloridian]

78. .....

[JohnnyRingo]

84. You shouldn't be in charge of a checking account

I was three months from losing my GM pension when Obama carved out the money to bail the company from certain bankruptcy. I was too young for Social Security and too old to begin a new career. I faced eviction and a grim future in a cold new America. Thanks to a government with more compassion than yourself, I've weathered eight good years since and thank the president every time I cash my retirement check.

I'm glad neither you nor Bernie are in a position to make decisions of such magnitude that would bring destitution to millions for the sake of scorning a few.

My family thanks you for nothing.

[kcr]

86. Iceland has a population of less than 500,000

and one of the smallest currencies in the world. They also have far more robust social safety nets. For a whole lot of reasons, you really cannot compare us to Iceland and say that it would be just as easy for us to do the same thing.

[JohnnyRingo]

89. Good use of a bucket of ice water.

I too tire of people comparing our country to Scandinavian Socialist Edens or Euro worker's paradises. Maybe we should model our govt on Lichtenstein where all 35,000 citizens are wealthy.

[kcr]

92. I know. Don't get me wrong, I think there's no reason we can't have nice things

But no frigging way we could pull that off like Iceland did. That's insanity.

[Chan790]

95. Hardly.

It's in-fact the only rational course of action. Without a collapse, regulatory change and prosecutions...we're going to repeat the process.

There is no fix to the financial sector except to let it burn.

[kcr]

96. How does regulatory change and prosecutions happen after a collapse?

If we had a governing body that actually wanted to prosecute anybody regulated anything, we wouldn't need to collapse everything in the first place! If Bernie had gotten his way and burned it all down, we'd all just be sitting around in the ashes still.

[Chan790]

99. If they don't, the process unfortunately still repeats.

The pain of the collapse isn't avoidable. The entire economy is still a illusion built on wet sand...we're going to have to have the collapse eventually to wind-down the damage. Repair doesn't prevent the damage, it just make it happen in an organized and manageable collapse as the defaults happen.

That's the part you're not getting. We cannot prevent the collapse, we can only delay the collapse over and over and every time it gets bigger until we either can't delay it anymore or let it happen. I'm sorry to say...we're all getting wiped-out eventually. I'd rather it happened 8 years ago when it would have been the smallest it's ever going to be.

TARP didn't achieve shit. We still have to eat the shit sandwich of a over-leveraged economy made up of imaginary money sooner or later.

[kcr]

100. I'm not getting it because it's loony toons

A collapse doesn't have to happen. We aren't living in a movie script. What's the point of even voting for anyone then? Might as well sit back, have a cold one and live out your part, then.

[Chan790]

103. We're going to try the simpler tack to explain this.

I assume you have a credit card. Have you ever used your credit card to pay your auto loan? No. Good. Don't. But, let's assume you're an idiot who did, okay? Now imagine that you then use your car as collateral to secure a loan that you used to pay the credit card. You also buy yourself a swimming pool with the proceeds of that loan. Then you take out a mortgage on the house with the pool that you don't actually own because it was paid for with loan proceeds of a promissory note secured by your car that you've already spent to pay your credit card payment that you can't afford so you have a down payment for a nicer house that you will also be mortgaging. (The bank won't let you do this because it's fucking insane...but it's perfectly legal for them to do it with your money that doesn't even belong to them and there is nobody to stop them from doing it. So...they did it...and they used your 401K and your home-equity to do it. You only think you own these things still because they told you, you do...but they lied.)

You realize that none of that money exists and eventually you're going to get wiped out when you can't afford the interest and you don't actually own anything other than debts 10x the actual assets used to secure the debt. You just get to live the good life until all this leveraged debt catches up with you. When your debt goes "splat!", that means your creditors don't have the assets to make good your neighbor's money on deposit so your neighbors suffers too. It's like that except it's all the money and everybody's in it together...except we didn't do it to ourselves, it was done to us by the financial sector. That's what our economy is right now. You're right, it's fucking looney tunes.

The shit hit the fan and the banks went running to the federal government to give them money so it wouldn't all implode...that's what TARP was...except the government didn't tell them they had to fix it...because fixing it means acknowledging that the profits are imaginary and the debts need to be defaulted, meaning everybody gets mostly wiped-out. No, they gave them money for a band-aid and told them they needed to find a solution...and instead the banks went right back to doing the same perfectly-legal but really stupid shit because they already know...there is no solution except default. That's why the collapse isn't avoidable...because they still already stole all the money and they still can't pay it back. They never can because the only way they have of creating money to pay their debts is through slight-of-hand, meaning their only choices are: default now or kicking the can down the road and defaulting later on even larger leveraged debts at which point everybody gets totally wiped-out.

That's why I prefer the solution where we default and stop digging the hole any deeper.

[JohnnyRingo]

104. "TARP didn't achieve shit"?

It saved my GM pension. That may not matter to you if you had a chance to spank a few fat cat bankers, but shit sandwiches would be a reality for me and thousands of others if not for the bail out. The Lordstown Ohio plant here wouldn't be cranking out Chevy Cruzes if not for the TARP.

Don't tell me the money would be passed separately either, we both know that wouldn't pass Republicans in Congress who ached to shred those union contracts. Sanders stand alone bill went nowhere. I don't know if you or Bernie are anti-union, but being singularly focused on Wall Street at the cost of sacrificing working families is sad.

[CajunBlazer]

110. Have you ever taken an Macro Economic Course?

If you have you might be able to understand why almost every prominent economist - from the most progressive to the most conservative - backed the bailout because if Bernie would have won the day with his vote, we would still be in a depression as deep or deeper than the one experienced in the 1930's. Sure, we have gotten even with the companies which caused the problem in the first place, but at what cost?

During the great depression unemployment in this country rose to 25% percent. Countless numbers of people lost their homes and everything they owned. My father's family was once such family. Formally middle class people waited in food lines to get enough to eat. It started in 1929 and it wasn't until the stimulus of World War II in the early 1940's that the country really recovered. It was twelve years of misery and many almost starved to death. But the rich got richer. Those with money bought land for pennies an acre, because poor people had only land and no money were forced to sell to feed their families.

People who talk like you do show no understanding of how close this country and the world came to duplicating that situation. Think about this George W. Bush, the big conservative who would never even consider having the government interfere with the "free market" started the bailout before he left office. Did you ever consider why the super conservative turned traitor on his conservative free market philosophy? I'll tell you why, because his economic advisers scared the hell out of him with their predictions of what would happen if he didn't do something quickly.

That's why I will always vote for a pragmatic candidate rather than one who make his decisions based on ideology. I don't trust a ideological President to make the proper decision when everything is on the line.

[Chan790]

90. Nothing worth doing is easy. Ever.

It however remains the right thing to have done and what we need to do when it inevitably happens again...because we've set the stage for it to happen again.

[kcr]

91. Oh, I think there are plenty of really hard things that are worth doing

Plunging our country into financial ruin, dooming millions to destitution? Not so much.

[Chan790]

94. But we didn't prevent it, we can only delay it.

We left the circumstances in place for them to do it again...and they will over and over until the day we let the shit hit the fan.

You're arguing for the impossible. It's all TARPs all the way down. At some point, we're going to have to eat it and I'd rather have done it the first time rather than waste money repeatedly before we get the picture and "Plunge our country into financial ruin, dooming millions to destitution" because...that...that we cannot avoid.

The meltdown is unavoidable. Inevitable. It's just a matter of how many times we throw money at the problem to forestall it before we let it happen.

[kcr]

98. That's simply not true

Simply blowing it all up is not the answer. Your argument to blow it all up because otherwise the enemy wins is nonsense. And the people who get blown up get a say, unfortunately for you.

[Chan790]

101. Who said anything about the enemy winning?

I said you can't fix an over-leveraged economy except by letting bad debt default... which is going to result in everybody getting wiped-out. That's not about winners or losers, it's about being a realist.

Your pension, your 401K...it doesn't exist. Financial sector bad-actors already stole it. They they used it for collateral to lend themselves money that they stole too...and then they used those load proceeds as collateral. It's a matter of how long we continue to prop up the lie so that the public can avoid that reality.

[Press Virginia]

88. Now voting to bail out Wall Street is a virtue?

[yourout]

102. What a load of crap. All that tarp did was set the table..

For the coming collapse.
Not one dime should have been handed out until Glass-Steagal was restored and the banks broken up.

[Marr]

105. Try to be a graceful loser. /nt

[Ken Burch]

106. Apparently, the voters of Michigan disagree with you. n/t.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

114. Do tell how the crow tastes.