Stop! Watch this. Elevated visceral outrage from Pitchfork including transcribed quotes, plus a clip of the entire House floor debate on TARP.

Video - Dean Baker speaking at the Institute for Policy Studies, just one day after the first TARP bill was voted down - September 30, 2008

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By Dr. Pitchfork

It's common these days to hear people trying to explain their support for TARP by saying that we had to do something and that everyone else was just as panicked and scared as they were. But the bailout was never a fait accompli. It didn't have to happen -- certainly not the way it did. And not everyone was fooled by Bernanke and Paulson's fear-mongering. In fact, during the debate leading up to the passage of TARP, people like Bill Isaac and Dean Baker were there in Washington, in the halls of Congress, working their asses off behind the scenes to try to stop the bailout of Wall St. If you cheered the day that TARP was voted down, much of the thanks for that little glimmer of hope goes to Dean Baker.

Baker throws cold water on the notion that TARP is necessary to save the world from financial armageddon. This clip, by the way, is from September 30, 2008. In other words, this is NOT Monday-morning quarterbacking (listen up, Gresham Barrett). This is real-time opposition to the bailout, and it nearly worked. Obviously, Baker called this one correctly. It's too bad more people didn't listen.

Highlights (don't miss the last one):

"Is the bailout necessary? I would say to all the people who say it's necessary, I'd say, For what? And that usually shuts them up"

"Running around talking about the Great Depression is not serious. This is just silly scare tactics. And it reflects the contempt that these people have for the public."

"The public overwhelmingly is opposed to this bailout. The elite is almost unanimously in favor of it. The elite has absolute contempt for the public, [saying] their emotions got carried away with them, they thought this was a handout to Wall St. Well guess what, the public is exactly right. The elites don't know what they're talking about. They've let their emotions get carried away with them."

"They don't know what bad thing will happen if we don't do the bailout tomorrow or Thursday... What will happen? None of them can tell you. They all know it's supposed to be really, really bad. But none of them can tell you."

"The people who are selling us this, the people who are talking to us like we're little kids -- President Bush, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke -- they missed it. We're in this crisis because they missed it. It really takes some nerve for people who totally messed up their job to come out and talk to us like we're idiots."

"You could have taken this [bailout] and fixed it, so that it wasn't enriching the executives on Wall St., so that it wasn't enriching the shareholders. They didn't do that. It was a joke. The provisions put in there are the sorts of things you give to children. These were not serious provisions. The executive compensation caps, what I said about those is, any executive who couldn't get around those caps, should be fired."

"It's just an insult to the American people. Everything about this was an insult to the American people. There might be nothing bad that happens. We're in a recession. We're in a recession because we lost 4 to 5 trillion dollars in housing bubble wealth."

"From the standpoint of the public, and from that vantage point, the standpoint of the economy, we don't need the big banks. That's not our problem. We can keep the financial system operating -- that's what we care about. The fact that banks go under, that's bad news for the bank executives. Who get paid tens of millions of dollars, by the way."

"What's going on here is [the Wall St. banks] have a gun pointed at their head and they're trying to tell us that if we don't give them $700B, they're going to pull the trigger. And I'm willing to live with that."

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To contrast with Dean Baker's three minutes of common sense, below is the full TARP debate. (Those with heart conditions should watch at their own risk.)