The flag at the U.S. Treasury should remain at half mast permanently in respect for U.S. taxpayers who funded the bailout of fat-cat Wall Street thieves.
In the latest affirmation of why U.S. taxpayers hate the government, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew released a statement today on the sixth anniversary of the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers, the largest in U.S. history that Treasury gleefully allowed to happen. The result was Titanic job losses, innumerable business failures, millions upon millions of home foreclosures, wiped out retirement accounts, the bankruptcies and subsequent bailouts of GM and Chrysler, the even more absurd bailouts of financial firms and an economy approaching that of the Great Depression that is still hobbled.
Even though the disaster occurred under the George Bush Administration’s non-watch, this ineffective Obama appointee claims – with a nose that should be longer than Pinocchio’s – that “because of the immediate crisis response, the effective policies put in place by the Federal Reserve … our economy is stronger today than it was when the crisis erupted.” Pure poppycock.
AutoInformed is disgusted by this blatant election year claim. The lack of government regulation and effective oversight by government agencies caused the ongoing Great Recession. No one – repeat no one – at the bailed out Wall Street firms has been prosecuted for blatantly fraudulent activities. Moreover, at the current rate of job creation in the weak U.S. economy it will be another four years before we return to the employment levels of early 2007 when the whole disaster of failed free-market ideological nonsense started to unfold in a global crisis.
All that is missing here is the security tape of the Ray Rice knockout punch of his woman, and that is why such folderol as this exists. There have been no Wall Street reforms. The craven Congress remains bought and paid for by big money interests, which makes the corrupt tax-exempt (by act of Congress) NFL look good in comparison, and that is a stomach-turning statement.
At least the Detroit Three auto companies, which create wealth by actually making things besides press releases as absurd as Treasury’s, still exist. Two of them – Chrysler and GM – should have perished in 2009 but they were bailed out. Whether they can survive is still and open question. (See Pulitzer Prize winning Paul Ingrassia’s formidable accounting of what went on Ping-Pong style at the end of the hapless Bush and beginning of the Obama Administration’s reign titled Crash Course, the American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster for a tough, fact-based discussion of what went on. )
AutoInformed says a pox on both corrupt parties – the party of “No” Republicans, and the party of “Show but no growth” Democrats.
