Shocking: Obama and Democrats Try To Sneak $100 Billion Stealth Bailout To European Banks (Update)
Cheeky bastards. Before the left attacks me, read what liberal blogger Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake thinks about the Democratic ploy to attach a $100 billion debate-free IMF credit line to a war supplemental funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Take a minute to check out the citizen whip count tool they constructed to help defeat the bill. Nice work.
Apparently the $35 billion in AIG payouts to over-leveraged Euro banks wasn’t enough for Obama who has championed borrowing the $100 billion from your kids and the Chinese in order to give it to the IMF, so that they will rescue European banks who invested unwisely in Eastern Europe. Even Iran and North Korea could potentially be eligible for IMF funds. Luckily, the Republicans are out in force against the amendment, and at least 35 Democrats have broken from leadership and now oppose the bill.
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Update
It looks tonight as though the Obama administration has succeeded in securing the votes to get the war funding supplemental legislation passed. From the Financial Times tonight:
Congress is this week expected to approve Barack Obama’s request for an extra $108bn for the International Monetary Fund, but it will come at a political price after weeks of grandstanding, messy compromise and horse-trading.
The request, tacked on to a $100bn (€71bn, £60bn) war funding bill, provoked a backlash in Congress as Republicans and some Democrats balked at what they called another bail-out, this time for foreign countries and banks. The administration had thought putting it in the war funding bill would speed its passage: which Republican would vote against money for US troops? But the move backfired and the administration spent last week scrambling for votes.
So why has the president spent so much political capital trying to protect the IMF amendment, when he needs all he can get to enact his ambitious domestic agenda? In part, it is about his international standing. Mr Obama has called for the IMF’s members to triple its firepower to help it combat the global downturn, and promised at April’s Group of 20 meeting the US would contribute an extra $108bn, $100bn in the form of a credit line. He would face humiliation if he did not deliver.
But from the start, it looked a tough sell at home. “The most plausible explanation for the request – and the lack of proper debate and Congressional process – is that the funding would be used to bail out private European banks with US taxpayer money,” wrote Dennis Kucinich and Bob Filner, two Democratic congressmen, in a letter to their colleagues.
The administration first tried to win the intellectual argument. The Treasury put out a “fact sheet” explaining why the IMF needed the money. It also released a letter in support from a bipartisan group of big guns including Hank Paulson, Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former secretaries of Treasury and state.
Read full story here
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No country will buy US products if these countries dont have money: that’s why IMF bail-out is usefull for US money. Some idiot countries will use IMF money to buy US planes, tanks, guns etc. Do you understand? US economy lack exports because China products are cheap than US. China is the leader right now. I was in Africa, I saw how China is all over place.