Maine Owl

Marcy Kaptur, today from the House floor:


What have they spent the money on? "It's sure not shaking out to communities..."

Representative Marcy Kaptur was a leader in the "skeptics caucus" over the bank bailout last fall. She had reason to be skeptical, as it turns out. No surprise to me. HERE is a link-rich post with lots of very recent material about who's gotten money and what they've done with it--to the extent anyone knows. Representative Kaptur refers to an Inspector General's report, found HERE.

Below I have some more media, links, and some additional background material I've had in draft form while I've been too busy to finish and post. Well, here it is, although it reads more like notes:

State-subsidized hedge-fund profiteering


"The real takeover, Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone, has more to do with power than money."

The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money -- it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
Rolling Stone | MATT TAIBBI | Posted Mar 19, 2009

Taibbi: So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

On April 27, the New York Times published a fascinating piece on Timothy Geithner and the machinations to which he was privy: They were "stunned" [in a high-level meeting] when, "He proposed asking Congress to give the president broad power to guarantee all the debt in the banking system."

And this gem concerning who actually is writing the policy:

A bill sent recently by the Treasury to Capitol Hill would give the Obama administration extensive new powers to inject money into or seize systemically important firms in danger of failure. It was drafted in large measure by Davis Polk & Wardwell, a law firm that represents many banks and the financial industry's lobbying group. Mr. Geithner also hired Davis Polk to represent the New York Fed during the A.I.G. bailout.

Treasury officials say they inadvertently used a copy of Davis Polk's draft sent to them by the Federal Reserve as a template for their own bill, with the result that the proposed legislation Treasury sent to Capitol Hill bore the law firm’s computer footprints. And they point to several significant changes to that draft that "better protect the taxpayer," in the words of Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman.

But others say important provisions in the original industry bill remain. Most significant, the bill does not require that any government rescue of a troubled firm be done at the lowest possible cost, as is required by the F.D.I.C. when it takes over a failed bank. ...

A bad actor, is Geithner, along with Summers. They could bring down Obama.

Do you suppose Naomi Klein was right back in November:

Klein: What I argue in the piece is that we actually have it backwards. It's not the banks that have been partially nationalized; it's Treasury that has been partially privatized by the very banks that created the crisis in the first place."