In the last few weeks, a new player entered the financial reform fray with a $1.6 million ad buy, a respected economist on board, a blitz of opinion columns on left-leaning websites, and a message, cooked right into the group’s name — Stop Too Big To Fail — that liberals could love.
But as TPMmuckraker has looked into the group, every indication is that Stop Too Big To Fail is an astroturf operation funded by corporate interests to give the appearance of grassroots opposition to reform.
Not too surprising, actually. “Too big to fail” has been adopted wholesale by opponents of financial reform; rather than admitting that they’re trying to head off serious regulation, they claim that anything you do is actually institutionalizing TBTF — that what we need to do is swear that we’ll never do another bailout, and never mind the rest. Listen to any speech by Mitch McConnell.
And may I say, that’s one of the dangers of a too-simple, not-quite-on-point slogan. It’s easily hijacked.
Anyway, let’s see if this particular fraud can be shut down.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/stop-stop-too-big-to-fail/