Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 06, 2010

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! And we have a winner!

Remember what?

Uhm, Mr President, Carl Rove is on the line, and he sounds a little upset!!

Excellent call, and completely accurate.

The average American (idiot) voter has completely forgotten it was you that bailed out the bankers.

And the automakers.

Trudeau must have missed all the news stories about the bailed out companies repaying the TARP funds. As of last month, the net cost of the program is estimated to be $30 billion. The original cost estimate was estimated at $356 billion.

There was certainly fraud, mis-management, and outright thievery associated with the program, but on the whole it seems to achieved its purpose.

I seem to remember from high school social studies that the legislative branch, not the executive, passes laws. If it was Bush’s idea, then a majority of a Democratic Congress seems to have felt that it was a good one.

…and I thought the W. guys would take what the legislative branch made and say..well that’s your interpretation of the law you just passed…this is how we see it…or as I call it..wiping your..er…nose..on the Constitution…

You’re right, Sandfan, it WAS a good idea. Or at least, a good half-idea. Saving the financial system from collapse was a bargain at the final cost.

The only problem with it was the lack of prosecution against those responsible, those who recklessly gambled with and lost hundreds of billions that were not their own.

Gamble with your own money, fine. Gamble with my money after telling me with great authority that I was making a good investment with little or no risk, and then walking away considerably richer yourself … and that is fraud.

Well, as usual, Ambrose Bierce said it best:

Amnesty, n. The magnanimity of the state toward those offenders it would be too expensive to punish.

The problem Sandfan is not that Mr. Trudeau missed the news. I am very sure he knows money is being repaid. Instead, he is speaking of the masses of voters who saw billions of dollars being used to save “crooks.” Unfortunately, most of them do not have the smarts to put the payback in with the payout to see it has the potential to be a good deal. They only see the outgo and blamed the Democrats. That is part of the anger that fueled this last election. Sadly, most American voters just cannot connect the dots as you have done.

yes, that would be an example of self-serving bias as explained here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2009/10/20/self-serving-bias/

I am, of course, one of very few people who do not suffer from this phenomenon (<joke)

Let’s see. Jimmy Carter started Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (mistake). Bill Clinton vastly expanded both (bigger mistake). Barney Frank and Chris Dodd urged them to make loans to people who were less likely to repay (biggest mistake).

TARP was a mistake. The stimulus was a bigger mistake. QE2 is now the biggest mistake.

There’s enough blame to go around.

The real lesson to be learned here is that if you really want to screw up the economy, get government involved.

The posting by fbjsr captures in a nutshell the neolibs’ arrogance. The only trait to add (see my profile) is their childish habit—encouraged by Trudeau—-of blaming our unhappy state on Bush. As Sandfan notes, Bush and Paulson merely dreamed up TARP. It was Obama (for whom many of us voted) who implemented TARP.

When TARP initially fell flat as Bush was leaving the office, Obama and his lieutenants (Summers, Geithner, Bernanke) came to the rescue and bought the bad MBS’s from the banksters AT FACE VALUE. As a result, the banks were made whole again by money that the Fed created out of thin air.

That worked so well that Bernanke has announced another round of wealth creation twice the size of TARP ($1.4 trillion over the next year). Obama’s budget gives political cover to this shell game by projecting a recovery that will increase revenues and reduce the deficit—-the same kind of projections that Clinton and G.W. Bush made to justify spending.

You can see why many of us were not eager to shield Obama and the Pelosi gang from the wrath of the Tea Partiers. I called them politically incoherent, but I can’t see anybody else who’s ready to take on Bernanke and his banksters, who are no less dear to Republicans than they are to the president (“some of the smartest guys I know,” Obama called them while defending TARP).

person918: Thanks for the link – that’s one of the most stimulating, valuable web sites I’ve ever seen. Of course, like you, I already knew all that stuff…. :)

Seriously, the great misfortune is that those who most need to get the message are the least likely to bother, and the most likely to reject it angrily if they do.

Ah, loving this…once again: “It’s ALL BUSH’S FAULT!”

Orion

No, not all Bush’s fault. He had help in his first six years from the Radical Right. They collectively managed to dismantle the very regulatory agencies that were tasked with preventing financial disaster.

If you shoot your guard dog because he barks too much, you shouldn’t be surprised when your house gets burglarized.

Nice irony, SCAATY. As for your “seriously” observation, I’m not sure those who think they know what’s going on always see things more clearly. When it comes time to vote, those who don’t “get the message” (or who even mistake it) are the protesters who actually force political change. (This seems to be Neocon’s argument re the vox populi.)

In today’s Doonesbury, GT himself unwittingly provides an example of liberal self-contradiction or intellectual dishonesty. Up till now, he’s stuck to the line that Obama is an improvement upon Bush II. Most Doonesbury readers will agree; and yet today’s strip is shoddily equivocal.

GT is either a fool or a hypocrite to suggest that W had the smarts to trick his successor into carrying out this heist on our bank accounts. And Obama is either naive or cynical to have signed on to the heist.

Since Obama has delivered in spades on the fiscal policies set up by his scorned predecessor, I think the angry voters can be forgiven for not getting the message.

well after all he did accomplish looting the treasury..and that is no small feat. greedy bastards. j

Why do you even read cartoons if you have no sense of humor?

On money policy, Obama is indistinguishable from W who was indistinguishable from Clinton. Clinton introduced the first budget surplus in very long time by unleashing the Cerberus of investment “banking.” W (and the rest of us dupes) acted like we had entered Capitalist Utopia. It was only a matter of time.

@Ouirsophuct

Right to the point as always, Ouirsophuct.

If GT sees your name, that might reawaken his sense of political humor, which must have been asleep when he drew this strip—evidently sometime after reading Bush’s memoir but before realizing that the voters were about to “shellack” Obama for carrying out the Clinton/Bush fiscal policies.

As you say, the real humor lies in the cartoon, only this time the cartoonist is the butt of his own political joke.

question: and just why did we need bailouts in the first place?

@markpirkl

We “needed” the bailouts to save the big banks and their even bigger insurers like AIG. Had the Fed let the big money institutions go bankrupt (as they did Lehman), every pension fund or university endowment would have suffered, cities and States invested in MBS’s (mortgage-backed securities) would have gone bankrupt, and your own life insurance policy or money market savings (they’re not insured as bank deposits are) would have lost half their value.

You may ask, “Who gave the Fed so much power?” You can find a clear account in Thirteen Bankers (Pantheon, 2010). Our Fed was created a century ago so that the govt. could “rescue” the nation from a recession. With the public coffers empty, Teddy Roosevelt and his Treasury sought help from private wealth. J.P. Morgan, with four or five other millionaires (in today’s $$, billionaires), took over the govt’s fiscal responsibility (i.e. control of money).

It was a sweet deal for both parties but it screwed the taxpayers, who weren’t paying attention because their income tax on a dollar earned at the time was only five cents. The bankers were now THE FED with a monopoly over the creating of money (i.e. printing and selling those govt. IOUs that we call bonds and notes and dollars). In return for granting the Fed their monopoly, the govt. was assured of an inexhaustible fund of credit.

I’ll let you guess how the govt. used this credit. And it’s easy to know whether the experiment has been a success. A 1910 (paper, not gold) dollar a century later is worth just five cents. Give Bernanke another year and he’ll get it down to two cents.

Presidents have been helpless to stop the Fed because the Fed makes it possible for them to project a budget; all Congress has to do is vote to raise the debt ceiling (their next vote will hike it to $14 trillion—more than our entire GNP for the year). The Republicans, who will easily coopt their clueless Tea Party allies like Rand Paul, are just as helpless, and they’re blind to the damage they do by using the counterfeit dollars and borrowed renminbi (Chinese for “the people’s currency”!) to reduce taxes on the wealthy.

(Republicans pretend the “wealthy” category includes small businesses, but in fact only 3% of those making over $250K are actual businesses. The other 97% are individuals who file as corporations in order to get a tax break. See yesterday’s discussion of this topic.)

@RSR

Not only Bush ignored the danger signals, Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank (heads of the Finance Committees in either house), after having spent ten years pushing the banks to stretch the lending rules, when the crash came were anxious to protect the biggest banks by writing the new regulations (Obama’s “Financial Reform”) whose real effect will be to wipe out smaller banks that don’t have the capital of the “[STILL-] too-big-to-fail” banks.

Unlikely as it seems given the electorate’s hatred of Wall St. banks (35% of the exit polls blamed Wall St. for our mess; only 29% blamed Congress), when the next crash comes, the administration in charge will again bail out the banks.

The bailout should teach us that while we may still be formally a democracy, our basic political structure is oligarchical. We’re a bunch of “peasant slaves” (or wage-earners if we’re employed) governed by an aristocracy of plutocrats whom our elected king (president) is impotent to control (because they pay his bills).

The Democrat Congress voted for TARP with Senator Obama’s full support. Senator McCain at first denounced TARP, then endorsed it. Everybody loved Paulson’s idea of private investors buying up the bad loans (MBS’s) at a discount. But when Geithner became Treasurer and found that private investors declined to snap up these “Troubled Assets” even at a steep discount, he and the Fed decided to buy the loans themselves—at face value because banks like Goldman Sachs refused to take a haircut on them.

And that’s how the banks have been able to “pay back” the bailouts. By dumping onto the Fed these sleazy mortgage-backed obligations whose actual, market value was only thirty cents on the dollar, the banks made fat profits. So we taxpayers are left holding a bag of junk debts that our Fed paid way too much for and on which we’ll never collect (unless the Fed can force BankAmerica, Wells Fargo, Citicorp, and the rest to buy them back). That’s why “our” Fed’s credit is shot, and why the dollar is sinking around the world.

Having spent 3 hours in and out of this forum, I’ll excuse myself for today, no doubt to the relief of casual readers who are looking for laughs; as W predicts in the strip, they’d much rather forget about the T[roubled]A[asset]R[elief]P[rogram]. I trust my lectures on fiscal policy (and nothing in them is original) will not be mistaken for Marxist rantings or—worse yet—the condescension of a “neolib.” I am indeed discouraged by last week’s verdict from the vox populi but I can sympathize with their anger at Obama’s failure to stop or reverse (as he promised to do) the fiscal locomotive. I’m afraid our president didn’t know what he was up against. I’m glad Summers is gone, and I hope now the president will fire Geithner and start whupping the banksters. Too bad he can’t send Prof. Bernanke back to Princeton, but Bernanke’s appointment outlasts the president’s.

And the Fed will outlast us all.

Don’t forget the credit rating companies, Moody’s, and Standard and Poor. They spent years rubber-stamping mortgage-backed security junk as AAA. Their only ‘product’ is their integrity, and they had none. Why none of the clowns are in jail is a mystery to me.

And as to the ‘Democratic Congress eagerly embracing TARP’ … I watched with my own eyes as Paulson ‘testified’ (threatened) them with a global financial collapse if they didn’t go along immediately, no questions asked.

@Radfish, Dead On!

I agree pouncingtiger & radfish – too little, too late.

The truth is a jagged little pill, huh righties?