In his weekly address President Obama presented a speech worthy of this year’s Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role. How else could he get on his bully-pulpit and make stone-faced attacks against those Wall Street scoundrels who repaid their loans from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) with interest? Especially the banks forced to accept the loans in an attempt to hide the identity of the banking and mortgage companies whose balance sheets triggered the crisis.
Under the disguise of “populism” the President announced plans to tax big banks up to $117 billion over the next ten years as punishment for their role in the financial crisis. With the exception of Citigroup, the banks identified have repaid their TARP money with interest. The President stated,
“Those who oppose this fee have also had the audacity to suggest that it is somehow unfair, that because these firms have already returned what they borrowed directly, their obligation is fulfilled.
But this willfully ignores the fact that the entire industry benefited not only from the bailout, but from the assistance extended to AIG and homeowners, and from the many unprecedented emergency actions taken by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and others to prevent a financial collapse. And it ignores a far greater unfairness: sticking the American taxpayer with the bill.”
Read more at David Horowitz’s NewsReal