"Slush fund" ... "Banana Republic" ... "Keystone Kops." → Washingtons Blog
"Slush fund" ... "Banana Republic" ... "Keystone Kops." - Washingtons Blog

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

"Slush fund" ... "Banana Republic" ... "Keystone Kops."

Senator Inhofe, the Former Vice President of the Dallas Fed, and Congressmen Kucinich, Issa and Cummings aren't the only mainstream people slamming the bailout.

The first line of an article about the bailout by CNBC today is "Slush fund" ... "Banana Republic" ... "Keystone Kops.", and the article includes the following quotes:

"It's hard to escape the feeling that the majority in the Congress are paying off a strong constituency that helped them enormously in the last election," says former ten-term Republican congressman Bill Frenzel, now with the Brookings Institution. "You are seeing the Congress in a role people hate to see it in—responding to powerful constituencies rather than going after solving the problem."

***

"This is just the beginning of corporate welfare in a big, big way," Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, told NBC's "Meet The Press" Sunday.

***

" The key issue there will be whether his overwhelming sense of generosity to Wall Street will force him to inject capital on terms that are much worse for the tax payer than the terms private investor insist upon," says Rep. Brad Sherman (D. Calif.), who voted against the TARP legislation. "And by having those two groups come in at the same time, the differential in how those two groups of investors are treated will be all too apparent. "

***

Dan Mitchell, a scholar at the Cato Institute, says the US is acting like a "banana republic."

The only thing that's missing is someone using the words "looting the treasury", but I guess that's so obvious that it doesn't have to be said.

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