TARP was meant as a diversion from the real action going on behind the scenes, and the diversion is still working on the dunderheads like Rush Limbaugh.
He continues to be fixated on TARP, but ignorantly so. TARP was at least 10 times smaller than the real bailout which put taxpayers at risk.
Just today we have learned that the biggest banks made $13 billion in profits from the Federal Reserve's emergency loans, profits which small, well-run banks all over America did not get to enjoy. In fact, contrary to Limbaugh, the well-run banks got the shaft, having to pay advance premiums for FDIC insurance to cover all the failures, which last time I checked have cost $80 billion, mostly on the backs of the customers of the banks, you and me, who will end up paying the bill as banks pass their cost of doing business on to us. Part of that cost of doing business has been subsidizing the bad behavior of the top five or six 800 lb. gorillas like Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
Our fascist government picked winners and losers both through TARP and the Fed's emergency lending programs. We do not have a free market in banking. And Rush Limbaugh aims to keep it that way.
What is more, TARP recipients continue to be delinquent in paying dividends under the TARP program, as reported here in The Chicago Tribune in October:
[M]ore than 170 U.S. banks ... have missed approximately $275 million in TARP dividend payments to the government through August.
It is a myth that TARP has been "successful" in the sense that everything has been "repaid". It has not. TARP funds alone still not repaid come to $93 billion as of right now. Add in $183 billion more for Fannie and Freddie.
I nominate these as Rush Limbaugh's most ignorant comments to date:
European banks are teetering on the edge. The Italians went out and they sold bonds and they can't pay them now as they're maturing. The euro might collapse. It is real trouble. And, meanwhile, US banks did not get bailed out. Not the big banks, not the Wall Street banks. They did not get bailed out.
We have so many lies and myths being told that people believe. Most of the big banks were forced to take TARP money so as to avoid there being a stigma. The banks that needed TARP money were the local mom and pop banks all over the country that were in trouble. The big banks, Wells Fargo, these guys were forced to sign a paper agreeing to take X numbers of millions of dollars, billions, maybe, I forget the number, but whatever it was, just to make it look like everybody was in the same boat. But the big banks paid it all back. These Occupy people are protesting something that never happened. The big banks did not get bailed out. Taxpayers made a profit on the money they were forced to borrow. Other banks did get bailed out, the little mom and pops, but the big ones did not.
Europe is teetering, Italy, Spain, you name it, and what do we get on the Sunday shows?
It is the ignorance of the Tea Party about state-sponsored banking and the bailouts which has allowed Occupy Wall Street to occupy the vacuum the Tea Party has left about this most important of unresolved attacks on American capitalism. Unfortunately the attack on American style capitalism is now a two-front attack. On the left are the socialists of the Democrat Party who want effectively to nationalize the banking system and outlaw risk. On the right we have the liberal consensus from the era of Franklin Roosevelt which is an ad hoc echo of European fascism which pretends that banking is free enterprise while making the taxpayer responsible for its many and frequent excesses.
Too bad for America that the demagogues of both the right and the left keep you from hearing the truth.
