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Friday, October 21, 2011

The Bailout

           
                                                                              National Everything You Know is Wrong Day
                                                                 Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong
                                                                      (Or, why epistemology is everything.)



TARP - "Troubled Asset Relief Protection." This whipping boy of The Right was signed into law by George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. Under Obama's administration, TARP has been a resounding success. Who woulda thunk it? Not a single "conservative" in America. They've been lying so long they don't know what's real."  "The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government's measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.

Originally expected to cost the U.S. taxpayers as much as $300 billion,[1] by December 16, 2010, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the total cost would be $19 billion,[2] although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner argued that the final cost would be still lower.[3] This is significantly less than the taxpayers' cost of the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. The cost of that crisis amounted to 3.2 percent of GDP during the Reagan/Bush era, while the GDP percentage of the current crisis' cost is estimated at less than 1 percent.[4]While it was once feared the government would be holding companies like GM, AIG and Citigroup for several years, those companies are preparing to buy back the Treasury's stake and emerge from TARP within a year.[4] Of the $245 billion invested in U.S. banks, over $169 billion has been paid back, including $13.7 billion in dividends, interest and other income, along with $4 billion in warrant proceeds as of April 2010. AIG is considered "on track" to pay back $51 billion from divestitures of two units and another $32 billion in securities.[4] In March 2010, GM repaid more than $2 billion to the U.S. and Canadian governments and on April 21, GM announced the entire loan portion of the U.S. and Canadian governments' investments had been paid back in full, with interest, for a total of $8.1 billion.[5  ]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program



"People See Through You" - Bruce Cockburn song containing the lyric, "You've been lying so long you don't know what's real. You're a figment of your own imagination." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53JkTgdTKd0


"People See Through You" - Lyrics - http://cockburnproject.net/songs&music/psty.html



Elisabeth Warren video. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. 

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