12-09-24 Bailout author/Trap Inspector General,Neil Barofsky on C-SPAN tonight

As soon as TARP was established, I called the office of Barofsky and provided them detailed information that Bank of America (and Countrywide, it subsidiary) is managed as a corrupt and racketeer influenced organization, pursuant to RICO.  Accordingly, I claimed that TARP should prevent Bank of America from getting any TARP money.  Needless to say, no action was taken on the evidence by TARP that I know of.  Now the Barofsky himself advertises the bailout system as corrupt.
JZ
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G wrote:

To All:

Washington D.C. is sick becaise both major political parties have made it a pig trough which they gorge themselves at.  There are over sixty-four (64) Inspectors General - that mostly do not rock the boat and largely provide cover for government fraud, waste and abuse.

Tonight on C-CPAN's Q & A host Brian Lamb interviewed the former Special Inspector General (SIG) of the Troubled Assest Relief Program (TARP) Neil Barofsky.  

It is a very candid and very informative interview, well worth your time to watch. 

Here is the link to that program.  http://www.c-span.org/Events/QampA-with-Neil-Barofsky/10737434196/ which you can go to and watch via the internet, and here is a summary of the program:

Washington, DC
Sunday, September 23, 2012
This week on Q&A, our guest is Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General in charge of oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP).  He discusses his new personal narrative titled “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.”
Barofsky shares his perspective from serving in his position for both the Bush and Obama administrations.  He describes his efforts to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of $700 billion allocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  He explains how he established the office of SIGTARP, and built it to 140 employees who had won criminal convictions of 18 people, and was continuing work on 153 pending civil and criminal investigations when he resigned in 2011.  He relates his constant struggle with officials at the Treasury Department, as his office made more than 68 recommendations to protect taxpayers from losses in the programs.  He offers accounts of his behind the scenes conflicts with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other representatives from the Treasury department.  Barofsky talks about his prior job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and comments on what it was like to work for the federal government in Washington, DC.
Neil Barofsky is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York University School of Law where he received his law degree in 1995.  He was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for eight years.  From December 2008 until March 2011, he was the Special Inspector General in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  This is his first book.  He is married, has two children and lives in New York.

Barofsky is aslo the author of the recent book BAILOUT:  An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (2012) Free Press.  From the reviews I read (and from watching the above interview) Mr. Barofsky appears candid, honest and names names.  GLZ.

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An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street 

Here is a link to the book  http://www.amazon.com/Bailout-Account-Washington-Abandoned-Rescuing/dp/1451684932 and here is a summary:

Book Description

Release Date: July 24, 2012

In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader public—and at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City, where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.
Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.
Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him.Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.
***
FROM BAILOUT
The further we dug into the way TARP was being administered, the more obvious it became that Treasury applied a consistent double standard. In the late fall of 2009, as I began receiving the results of two of our most important audits, the contradiction couldn’t have been more glaring. When providing the largest financial institutions with bailout money, Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt. For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of the “sanctity of contracts.” Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for home- owners and businesses that were most assuredly small enough to fail.
Nowhere was the favoritism toward Wall Street more evident than with the government’s approach to AIG, where inviolable contract terms were cited to justify the absurd executive bonus payments as well as far richer payouts provided to the megabank counterparties to AIG’s CDS deals, honoring even their most reckless bets. For homeowners and small business owners, though, contracts went from being sacrosanct to inconvenient irrelevancies. So when mortgage servicers blatantly disregarded HAMP contracts by trampling over homeowners’ rights, Treasury turned to an endless series of excuses to justify its refusal to hold them accountable. Similarly, for more than two thousand auto dealerships, Treasury’s auto bailout team sought to void the contractual rights granted them under state franchise laws to shut them down.

administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay. 

Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis. 

*** 

FROM BAILOUT 

The further we dug into the way TARP was being administered, the more obvious it became that Treasury applied a consistent double standard. In the late fall of 2009, as I began receiving the results of two of our most important audits, the contradiction couldn’t have been more glaring. When providing the largest financial institutions with bailout money, Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt. For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of the “sanctity of contracts.” Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for home- owners and businesses that were most assuredly small enough to fail. 

Nowhere was the favoritism toward Wall Street more evident than with the government’s approach to AIG, where inviolable contract terms were cited to justify the absurd executive bonus payments as well as far richer payouts provided to the megabank counterparties to AIG’s CDS deals, honoring even their most reckless bets. For homeowners and small business owners, though, contracts went from being sacrosanct to inconvenient irrelevancies. So when mortgage servicers blatantly disregarded HAMP contracts by trampling over homeowners’ rights, Treasury turned to an endless series of excuses to justify its refusal to hold them accountable. Similarly, for more than two thousand auto dealerships, Treasury’s auto bailout team sought to void the contractual rights granted them under state franchise laws to shut them down.