I just listened to the Diane Rehm show. The subject was the financial reform bill. The AEI expert kept repeating the same talking point over and over — the bill is bad because the Democrats want to set up a $50 billion dollar fund paid for by the big financial institutions. This is bad because it will enshrine “Too Big to Fail” in the law and in the minds of those who deal with those banks.
Thus the Republicans are opposed to financial reform on principle alone: they want to prevent the evil Democrats from ever bailing out Big Banks again. It’s the GOP that stands on the side of the little guy, see? They don’t oppose reform because they are in the pocket of financial industry lobbyists! Heaven forbid! They are the principled ones here. It’s the Dems who want to screw the country and the little guy by helping the Big Bad Banks.
How soon these Republicans and their conservative disinformation machine want you to forget The Resolution Trust Company created up by Bush Sr. in 1989 to resolve the S & L crisis.
More recently, how quickly they want you to forget Hank Paulson and George Bush and the complete lack of oversight over TARP program that those GOP stalwarts created to bail out the banks that were “too big to fail.”
How quickly they want you to forget Paulson’s behind closed doors threats to Congress that if they didn’t pass the TARP legislation in precisely the manner the Bush administration demanded “that within 24 hours, the entire political structure of the United States would collapse.”
As readers know, several Congressional members have alluded to a private meeting with Paulson and Bernanke in which vague economic Armageddon was threatened if Congress did not immediately hand Hank $700 billion, with no oversight. As the political debate raged over the next 15 days, several members expressed a sense of shock over the severity of the secret warnings, while refusing to divulge the details to a concerned public. Representative Sherman of California later accidentally revealed that members were warned that Martial Law would follow if the $700 bailout plan were not approved quickly. Days later it was confirmed that the warning was delivered by Treasury Secretary Paulson.
Now these same Republican obstructionists of financial reform want to claim that the bailouts were all the fault of the Democrats, and that its the Democrats who want to bail out the big banks rather than help all the average Americans and small businesses. They want you to believe that their opposition to financial reform is to protect the public, rather than serve the needs of the financial industry who desperately wants to avoid a return to the laws and regulations governing the behavior of large financial institutions that resemble in any fashion the ones FDR and the New Deal put in place after the Great Depression.
Hypocrisy has a new acronym: G-O-P*
* That’s a lie. It’s an old acronym for hypocrisy, actually.
