Rick Raw: Bailout My Ass–Where’s Our Money–TARP Infested with Fraud

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

After the unprecedented $700 billion bailout of the big banks, there was never an accurate accounting of exactly where the money went or how it was spent. The banks took the money and did what they wanted with it. CEOs took big bonuses, and shared the booty with their top executives. Hot damn, it’s party time.

AIG threw a big bacchanal in Vegas with strippers and wild sex parties. Their mantra was, "let the good times roll," as the middle class disappeared under the fallout of the economic apocalypse.

Now, bailout Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky says that the public wasn’t told about the lack of financial responsibility of nine of the bailed-out banks. He said that the Treasury Department officials painted an overly rosy picture, creating unrealistic expectations. Yeah, there was gold in them there hills and the greedy CEOs rushed to get their hands on it. The government opened the doors to the Treasury, and let these thieves inside.

More seriously, the FBI and Treasury agents have opened 35 ongoing criminal investigations of blatant fraud committed by bank executives that received the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. And still, no one can say for sure how the money was spent. The investigation could uncover massive fraud among the bailed out banks if the forensic accountants can trace the money trail to complex shell corporations in the islands.

TARP turned out to be a fiasco–a rush to save the banking system and Wall Street by throwing money at it. During the last weeks of the Bush administration, Congress voted no to the TARP bailout. Then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and other former bank CEOs made a secret backroom deal and the TARP bailout passed.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this secret deal lined many pockets and setup many CEOs to gain windfall bonuses. Yes, the money train was arriving in board rooms across the land.
There is also a separate criminal investigation into the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger led by the New York Attorney General’s Office. While the masses suffer unemployment and foreclosures of their homes, the bailout crooks are raking in the avelanche of TARP funds faster than Obama can say the bailout will save the ecomony.

The TARP bailout now has a derogatory connotation. We, the screwed over taxpayers, have lost faith in the bailout’s ability to save our economy. Funny, enter Allan Greenspan, whose doctrine of laissez faire got us into this mess to begin with. He said that unemployment would rise above 10% before things got better. Shut up, you old sod. No one’s listening to you anymore. But I think he’s right.

This substantiates my fear that a cabal of wealthy crooks brokered the TARP deal for personal gain and to enrich their cronies. Hank Paulson is one of these alleged masterminds who met behind closed doors. He was CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was appointed Treasury Secretary. He, like the other cabal members, conspired to force the TARP on the American public under the pretense that if we didn’t release the $700 billion to the big banks, the entire economy would collapse. Well the economy did collapse despite the bailout.

The bottom line to this outrage is the bailout did nothing to help our economy but it did make some big time players filthy rich. Now the banks are raising interest rates on credit card holders, slapping large overdraft penalties on customers, and denying loans to eligible appliers. The banks are no better than Mafia loan sharks. We the people must rise up in anger and stop these injustices before the wealthy few take over the country. In most ways, they are already in charge.