So here's what he had to say about TARP today:
As we look back, all TARP was... There was certainly nothing capitalistic about it, and there was nothing capitalistic about the failure of the US economy. Capitalism was not in play. The subprime mortgage crisis had no relationship to capitalism. Capitalism would not permit the subprime mortgage crisis.
Capitalism does not permit the bailout of failed institution after failed institution, which is what TARP was. It was the biggest bailout of failed businesses in the history of this country, and it ended up being nothing more than a massive slush -- and all of these people that are ripping into Romney or whoever now for being anti-capitalist and so forth, they didn't care that TARP was anti-capitalist then. You know, all these people standing up and defending capitalism today didn't care a whit about it when it was under siege with the subprime mortgage crisis and didn't care a whit about it when TARP was proposed. TARP... What is a bailout?
A bailout is nothing more than wealth redistribution, and this was with taxpayer dollars. This is before Obama's Porkulus! Total here, we're looking at $1.8 trillion of slush funds, redistribution, that took place inside of six months, all set up by a phony economic crisis. Well, not phony but what was phony was the severity of it in terms of if we didn't do this the world economy collapses in 72 hours. That was bogus. So we bailed out big banks (in some cases banks that did not want to be bailed out) and sovereign wealth funds of foreign countries all on the backs of American taxpayers. They said it simply had to be done.
There was no time to stand up for things like principle. There was no time to worry about the moral hazards here. There was no time to even really dig deep and get the details and have us be told exactly why this needed to be done. No, no. There wasn't time! It was a "crisis," like every damn thing that has happened in this country the last four years! It has been a crisis that we cannot afford to wait on. TARP was the first one. The stimulus was the next one. Now, it goes without saying that in all the great investigations and fixes that followed, there has been no accountability of anybody who supported TARP. Not a single bit of it. Even after everything we said about TARP proved to be true. Even after it was used by Paulson and Geithner and Obama as a piggy bank to reward their friends.
Don't for a minute think that Solyndra didn't get some money from the TARP slush fund. Even after it ended up being used as a slush fund, even after it was used as a bailout so Paulson's buddies could hold onto their houses in the Hamptons and so forth, we heard the argument, "It's too big to fail, Mr. Limbaugh! We can't let these things fail," and that argument "Too big to fail" is still with us. "Too big to fail" is still something that we are hit with. So if disaster strikes again (and there's Greece lurking out there and all of Europe); and if TARP was to fix this and prevent it, it hasn't worked, has it? Because we're being told the same thing now.
"Another crisis! The world economy is nearing collapse. Look what's happening in Europe. The Germans are gonna have to bail out the Greeks -- and if they don't all hell is gonna break loose. The European Union, the euro? Too big to fail! We can't allow this to happen." So if Greece goes belly up and starts taking Europe down with it, guess what we're gonna be told? "It's too big to fail. We can't let this happen." So would Romney give us TARP 2? If Romney's elected and the powers is that be in the financial community walk into his office and tell him what they told Bush, "Mr. President, we've got 72 hours on here, and it's really bad," do you think we'd get TARP 2? I bet we would and all the same geniuses would be saying once again that this is something we just have to do.
"We don't have time to think about it! We don't have time to explain it. This is a crisis, it is an emergency. The world economy hangs in the balance!" It's the same technique they use every time we need to extend the debt limit. Every time Obama wants to spend another trillion dollars, what are we told? "It's crisis. It's an emergency. We don't have time for debate. We don't have time for the usual congressional hearings. We don't have time for the usual congressional testimonies. We don't have time." That's why I said yesterday: "There are ideas, and there are people that are governed by them and people they're inspired by them and people that get into politics because they want to advance ideas. But I'm telling you: At the same time, there are people who get into this strictly, solely to have access to all this money."
It's much easier than having to work for it, and the amounts that you can take and have allocated to you are far greater than what you can convince somebody to pay you. September 25th, 2008, Gingrich appeared on Fox News and said that the TARP legislation was socialism. He said that it should be defeated. That's September 25th. On September 28th, Gingrich was on This Week on ABC. He said the question was not whether something needed to be done but whether needed to be TARP, whether needed to be done the next 48 hours. He then stated that he probably would reluctantly vote for it but... So everybody got captured by it. Then on October 1st of 2008 Gingrich wrote in Human Events that his solution would be to get rid of Secretary Paulson and to suspend the market to market rule, which would give Congress the breathing room to develop a plan to replace TARP and to reestablish trust with the American people.
So Gingrich was opposed to TARP. Romney -- everybody -- was for it. TARP is not capitalism! Romney, we're being told, is the big capitalist. He supported the biggest bailout of banks and sovereign wealth funds. So my point is all of these allegations going back and forth about who's a capitalist and who isn't and who's willing to defend it, the way it's manifested itself now, is the establishment's candidate is under assault for being a capitalist. His opponents are running around using the language of the left to attack him as a capitalist, and what are they gonna do? Are they gonna defend capitalism? Somebody better. Because whatever's happening to Romney now, whoever our nominee is, you can quadruple this in terms of the allegations, what a Republican is: A conservative is, mean-spirited, loves big profits, love big business, take money from the poor and give it to the bankers! All of that crap, it's gonna be magnified twice what it is in the Republican primary right now. Meanwhile, in the Oval Office, we have a genuine redistributionist Marxist -- and our establishment will not get anywhere near properly characterizing him that way.
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