Are you as sick as I am of the political fabricators falsely claiming and the political illiterates actually believing the financial reform bill is a bailout? 41 Senators are willing not only to filibuster, but also to lie, by signing a “letter” (more like fiction) saying as much. Their letter demanding “no more bailouts,” as if there is one in the bill. Welcome to the continuation of the GOP Disinformation Tour. The GOP Rushes to the rescue from nothing, again. And they think they can get away with it.
WAPO’s Ezra Klein has a message for the misinformed: There is no bank bailout in Financial Reform Bill.
As Klein shows with the above video from YouTube, even Republican US Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) says there is no bailout in the bill. But the lies go on. How many Americans will actually read the bill and show the liars for what they are? Apparently not even a fellow reporter at WAPO, is blame-free. He said the following:
” President Obama urged congressional leaders Wednesday to work together over the next several weeks on a financial regulation package, expressing confidence that a bipartisan bill remained possible even as Republicans said the Democrats’ proposal would make government bailouts more likely. ”
This article is a masterpiece of he said/he said. No real reporting, only a gathering of quotes laced together with apparently no reading of the bill from that reporter, no-sir-ee. Real fact-checking would take more time. But reporters are supposed to deliver the facts, not GOP partisan spin.
What is in the bill is an assessment on too-big-to-fail banks totaling $50 billion to be kept in a fund to pay for the resolution of failed banks. It’s not a bad idea, since the banks’ malfeasance cost us taxpayers real money when they crash. But the fat-from-bonuses bank execs don’t want that. So their lackeys in Congress (I’m talking to you, Mitch) lie to the American people, try to get them angry over nothing, and turn them against those who would try to do something to strengthen the very reform which will improve health of the financial sector. BTW, growing a conscience is something that sector has proven itself incapable of. We can argue that it’s not enough. We can argue about which approach is best. But the ongoing falsehoods come with no end in sight.
But you see, there could be a “future bailout,” the GOP ditto-heads claim, forgetting that their own former fearless leader brought our nation to near financial collapse and then patched it with a –bailout.
The Obama administration has gotten financial payback for much of the bailout under Bush. Indeed the American people are making a profit from it. But you’d be hard pressed to know that either. One wonders whether W. Bush would ever have collected from the banks. The Obama administration is also doing something the Bushies would never have done. The new administration is going after those financial pirates who wrongly stashed their money in off-shored bank accounts, including Swiss ones, and skipped out on their taxes.
Over at Think Progress, DJ Carella points to the appalling willingness of McConnell and Boehner to lie with impunity about this. But it’s “OK” (sarcasm), Frank Luntz told them to here.
The language originates from the advice of pollster Frank Luntz, who has urged Republicans to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts. Republicans have thus asserted that the proposed resolution fund, negotiated by Sens. Bob Corker (R-TN) and Mark Warner (D-VA), amounts to a “50 billion dollar bailout fund.” The resolution authority, of course, has the opposite purpose: It is designed to eliminate too-big-to-fail institutions, not prop them up. It would raise $50 billion “from the largest financial firms” to provide for the orderly unraveling of big, systemically important institutions in the event it is needed – without forcing taxpayers to cover the losses.
The GOP spin to the contrary is the kind of through-the-looking-glass fantasy that the GOP has been BS-ing for more than a year. As the GOP “Word Doctors” say on the front page of their “The Language of Financial Reform”: “It’s not what you say. It’s what people hear.” What a beautiful whitewash of the word “lie”! And we have to call them out on it, every time, over and over, until the so-called MSM points this out. WAPOs Klein has already done so. Where are the rest?
Why grown men would follow the walk-off-the-cliff instructions of this Pied Piper is anyone’s guess. Message to the GOP “leadership”: The end does not justify the means, guys. One more thing, your Luntz vocabulary includes “accountability,” which you are incapable of, and government failures, which your party’s most recent administration was so “good” at. Your Luntz vocabulary also includes “hard working taxpayers.” Why don’t you go work for a living, as we taxpayers are paying you to do? As it is now, Luntz writes the spin and they deliver the lines–hardly a day’s work.
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