Obama has used both the TARP bailout funds and the stimulus bill funds as any Chicago politician would — as slush funds from which money can be drawn as needed to reward pals and buy votes. Two stories illustrate this.
The first is Veronique de Rugy’s article on Breitbart (March 26). Ms. De Rugy, a fine economist of libertarian inclination, reports her analysis of the data posted on the federal government’s own website, Revovery.gov. She discovered something amazing: of the stimulus funds thus far spewed out, Democratic districts have received 1.8 times more money on average than Republican ones. To be exact, the Dems are lapping up $471.5 million per district, while the Repubs are getting only $260.6 million.
Oh, and there is no apparent allocation of these funds on the basis of unemployment (or even change in unemployment) — which was supposedly the whole point of the massive “stimulus” spending to begin with.
The second is an older piece of news, which has been making the rounds since last year, when the Washington Post reported that Obama’s Treasury Department shoveled $135 million in TARP money into a bank in Hawaii, Central Pacific Financial, in spite of the fact that the FDIC had indicated it was a poor candidate for support. The bailout happened after a call from the office of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), a liberal fossil who has been in the Senate for almost 50 years. Inouye helped to found the bank and, as of 2007, he and his wife owned hundreds of thousands in its stock.
No conflict of interest there!
