Why are Tim Geithner and the Media Playing Dumb About What Happened to Our Money?

[eridani]

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/130877/why_are_tim_geithner_and_the_media_playing_dumb_about_what_happened_to_our_money/

According to a Media Matters study of 59 network news broadcasts about the stimulus in the three weeks prior to the vote, only three mentioned concerns that the package was inadequate -- even though many economists believed it was not big enough to do the job. Another known known treated like an unknown when we most needed to know. And now, of course, we're already getting reports that the bill was, indeed, too small.

I'm not saying that everything about this crisis is knowable -- far from it. But there are a number of very simple truths that are being hidden behind a smokescreen of complexity and unknowability.

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can't have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses -- and you can't have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.

You can't have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.

And, ultimately, you can't allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn't get it then; they still don't get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).

That is something we all know that we know -- even Tim Geithner and the experts at CNBC.

[dkf]

1. I think the true realization that the stimulus package was too small

was when they saw the 8.1% unemployment rate which didn't come until after the bill was done.

That was the kicker.

[Double T]

2. Let's see if exposing wall street's 'filthy dirty little secret' rocks the GD stock market today.

Drastic reform is needed immediately. The dilemma is Tim Geither and cnbc are parts of the problem.

[TheWatcher]

3. They aren't playing dumb

They know EXACTLY what happened to your money.

And they are hoping you remain blind to that fact.