Neil Barofsky, head of TARP, says the system is corrupt



The government tried to kill TARP and “justified rage” is needed to destroy the corruption endemic in the big banks and the government, says Neil Baroksky. He was Special Inspector General in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and author of the bombshell book, Bailout. An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

Writing for Bloomberg, Barofsky says:

Americans should lose faith in their government. They should deplore the captured politicians and regulators who distributed tax dollars to the banks without insisting that they be accountable. The American people should be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects those who drove it to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again. Only with this appropriate and justified rage can we hope for the type of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks.

The important thing to remember is that Washington is not somehow a hapless captive but a completely willing co-conspirator. At the top levels, the game is fixed. That’s where our justified rage comes in. Smash the banks. Jail the bankers. When a ruling class becomes grotesquely corrupt, history is filled with instances where it is brought down and broken. That’s what we need to do now. And I’ve no doubt that it will happen. People across the political spectrum are seriously pissed about the federal government sending trillions to Wall Street while ignoring Main Street.

Both parties are equally complicit. There is no difference between Obama and Romney when it comes to supporting corrupt big banks and not enforcing the law. This is not a presidential race between the lesser of two evils but, as Ralph Nader famously put it, the evils of two lessers.