Those anti-colonial Kenyans -- Wall St.'s worst nightmare.
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By Dr. Pitchfork
Dinesh D'Souza's recent Forbes piece, "How Obama Thinks," has been getting a lot of attention for, among other things, inspiring Newt Gingrich's reference to Obama's "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." Apparently there's something wrong with referring to Obama's Kenyan heritage. (Michelle calls it Barack's "home country.") But doing so is hardly the worst sin committed by serial adulterer Newt Gingrich (who for now is a fervent Catholic).
But here's what inspires this installment of Dinesh D'Souza is Clueless. Writing in the Forbes piece, D'Souza describes as an "oddity" the fact that,
Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
It's been nearly two years since TARP was passed and well over a year since the kabuki (non-)stress tests were performed. And yet, D'Souza writes as if Geithner and Obama were a couple of Marxist-Leninists running roughshod over the paragons of free-market capitalism at the TBTF banks; as if the bankers were just innocent victims of heavy-handed government regulation. The only "oddity" I see here is that D'Souza writes as if Geithner and Obama had been anything OTHER THAN Wall St.'s shameless errand boys.
Now, maybe D'Souza thinks capital requirements are just a nutty, left-wing sort of thing, or maybe he actually believes the stress tests were something other than theater. It's possible that he's never heard of FAS 157, and it's all too likely that the primary driver behind the banks' impatience to repay the TARP (restrictions on executive pay) has completely escaped him. But there is NO EXCUSE, especially for a so-called conservative, to be this clueless about Team Obama's cozy relationship with Wall St. and the nation's largest banks.
Jamie Dimon doesn't need your help, Dinesh. Timmy and Barack are already doing a heck of a job.
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BONUS CLIP:
Scott Brown says it just ain't fair to put a special new tax on those honest banks who paid back all that money we gave them (while simultaneously relying on a whole range of other taxpayer-funded subsidies that Brown probably neither knows about nor understands). Still, I'm really glad we voted for this guy so we could stop that whole Obamacare thing.
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BONUS DYLAN RATIGAN QUOTE:
"Now the only way those banksters can survive is to pretend that their corporate communism is working even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Most recently, they decided that instead of taxing complicit financial institutions the cost of their "Financial Reform-In-Name-Only," they will instead use what I call the Big Tarp Lie to pander for the vote of Senator Scott Brown and others."