Our budget-busting bailouts and recent Federal budgets were supposedly put in place to (1) stabilize the economy so it wouldn’t collapse and (2) create new jobs. One reason the bailout hasn’t done much to get the economy moving, so far, is that key insiders seem to have been pocketing some of the "extra money" instead of putting it back to work.
Smile. You've been fleeced.
Not much, though. A few billion here, a few there.
Can we reason together, employer to employer? As a taxpayer, you and I employ the fools who allowed this to happen or helped it happen. We haven’t been holding them accountable.
Here a few starting points of how to impose basic accountability on those responsible.
First, we need to find out the truth of how we got where we are, so we can "help" our employees in Congress and the White House set aside partisan politics and cease the destructive "games" they’ve been playing, so they can clean up the mess.
To start with, we need to get our facts straight, so that any leader - Republican or Democrat - who allowed this mess to happen will be held accountable. His or her party does not matter. What matters is whether he or she exercised the oversight we paid them handsomely to exercise.
To get the facts straight, we need a series of top-to-bottom audits of the entire subprime mess, and the bailout, and the job-creation program, by the highly-respected and often-ignored Government Accounting Office. The G.A.O. is a non-partisan watchdog of all Federal spending. These audits will happen if enough taxpayers get upset, call Congress, and DEMAND it.
It won’t serve us if the current paradigm continues, where our politicians continue to point fingers at and thus remain in "I did nothing wrong" full denial mode. Someone did a lot wrong. If this culture of pointing fingers at everyone else is allowed to continue as business as usual, with no objective measuring of actual results and actual votes cast, nothing will be fixed.
We’ve seen enough of our leading Republicans and Democrats in power. They have zero credibility. As their employers, it’s time for us to impose true accountability upon them before they drive our economy off a cliff.
Bush and Obama were obviously both out of their depth with the subprime mortgage crisis, as were every one of their Cabinet leaders. The financial system has become too complex and our leaders haven’t done their job, so the Average Joe was set up to be fleeced by the first unethical, technically-savvy insiders on Wall Street with access to power.
Every major crisis brings out rip-off artists, whether it’s Hurricane Katrina or military contractors defrauding the government.
The early candidate for "Fleecer in Chief" seems to be my former employer, Goldman Sachs. The crème de la crème of Wall Street seems to have "creamed" us.
CHOOSING THE LOSERS … AND WINNERS
If you’re a Fat Cat on Wall Street who can get the taxpayers to repay 100% of the loss on certain large investments, life is good. It means you snookered the President, the Congress and the public. Personally, I doubt that Bush, Obama or Congress fully understood the clever scam they were sucked into.
Only a series of independent G.A.O. audits can tell us, because G.A.O. either has the expertise to do such audits or would obtain such expertise, and if forced to do so, Congress can grant the G.A.O. wide subpoena power.
QUESTION: Which Republic or Democrat would dare oppose a thorough audit by the G.A.O.?
ANSWER: Those with something to hide.
The G.A.O. has an outstanding track record. The problem is that Congress frequently doesn’t listen to them, because they think that taxpayers don’t care if our taxes are wasted.
Do you care?
The White House website explains the important role of the G.A.O.:
"Today, the GAO audits and generates reports on every aspect of the government, ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent with the effectiveness and efficiency that the American people deserve."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/our_government/legislative_branch/
Since Bush and Obama didn’t understand what went wrong or how to fix it, former CEO's at Goldman Sachs "helped" them along the way to design the bailout packages.
Result? BILLIONS of taxpayer bailout monies quietly flowed through the A.I.G. conduit, to Goldman Sachs and other favored banks.
Can you say "conflict of interest?"
The G.A.O. understands "conflict of interest,", even if Congress does not. If our mass media is unable to calculate the illegal benefit received by Senator Chris Dodd for getting a jumbo mortgage from Countrywide at well below market rates, the G.A.O. knows how to do the math and report it with no political ax to grind.
A.I.G. was a "work of art." It racked up the largest quarterly loss in history (about $62 billion) for the last 3 months of 2008. Do the math - they lost $27 million every hour for those last 3 months.
QUESTION: With such a track record, why was A.I.G. singled out to be saved - but not others?
ANSWER: A.I.G. was needed to funnel billions to Goldman Sachs without the public finding out, to eliminate 100% of the loss on sizeable parts of Goldman Sach’s investment portfolio.
Under Bush, the decision to bail out A.I.G. was put together last Fall by a "brain trust" of insiders that included then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) and Lloyd Blankenfein (current CEO of Goldman Sachs) and Tim Geithner (then head of the New York Federal Reserve). The "brain trust" made sure A.I.G. would not fail, so that A.I.G.'s trading counterparties would be paid 100 cents on the dollar.
For its fully guaranteed A.I.G. transactions, Goldman Sachs was shielded from the pain and sacrifice required of others.
In addition, much of the rest of A.I.G.'s $170 billion bailout was also quietly funneled to Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Barclays. These are the current winners in the "A.I.G. bailout sweepstakes" as put together by the "brain trust."
All this took place largely outside of public view, until former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York explained the general flow of A.I.G. bailout funds, then asked key questions in two posts to