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Not only has the Wall Street bailout restored the banksters who wrecked our economy to full prosperity, it’s also paying off very handsomely for the bank overseers who orchestrated the bailout.
For example, as chairman of the Federal Reserve for six years, Ben Bernanke led the bucket brigade that poured trillions of public dollars into Wall Street’s vaults. So, he’s now on a global “Show Me Some Love” tour, pocketing up to $400,000 for each speech he delivers to the financial giants he rescued with our money.
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Then there’s Timmy Geithner, whose chief responsibility as head of the New York Fed had been to regulate Wall Street’s reckless banks so their greed wouldn’t cause a nationwide financial crisis. But – oops! – they did exactly that on Timmy’s see-no-evil watch. Still, having proven himself a banker’s man, Geithner was promoted to be President Obama’s Treasury Secretary. There, he insisted that the government’s priority must be rescuing greedy bankers with taxpayer dollars, rather than saving the millions of American homeowners stuck with bloated mortgages, facing wage cuts and joblessness, and who were sinking into deep debt and poverty.
But, being a banker’s man, Geithner was not punished for his inept and morally-deplorable policies. Rather, he was richly rewarded with a top executive position as – what else? – a Wall Street banker. Now, he has published a book about his years of public screw-ups. Oh… sorry, I meant “public service.” Concluding that he was correct and courageous, Geithner’s book should’ve been titled: Heckuva Job, Timmy!
This is Jim Hightower saying… So Wall Street prospers, Ben and Tim wallow in wealth – and the real economy remains mired in the ditch of joblessness, low wages, household debt… and rising anger at the Wall Street/Washington cabal of self-serving elites who shoved them into that ditch.
“Springtime for Bankers,” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/opinion/krugman-springtime-for-bankers.html, May 19, 2014.
“Crisis Management, Rethought,” The New York Times, May 18, 2014.