Was the bailout a scam based on a lie?

[Photo of Henry Paulson from Yahoo]

Joshua Holland, writing at AlterNet, notes that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that Paulson's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) "was a boondoggle of an intervention that's flailed from one approach to the next, with little oversight and less effect on the financial meltdown."

There's more, however: Holland suggests that TARP (involving hundreds of billions of dollars) "was sold to Congress and the public based on a Big Lie."

In other words, the so-called "credit-crunch" may have been mythical. Holland quotes Columnist David Sirota who came to the conclusion that the American public had been scammed, that "'the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false,' and the threat of a systemic banking crash was used by the Bush administration to overcome popular resistance to the 'bailout.'"

There's much, much more, to the effect that as usual, the rich got richer and the rest of us got screwed. Royally.

Read Holland's entire article here.