April 21, 2009

TARP Overseer Initiates 20 Criminal Probes

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The bad news: 20 criminal investigations into people who have tried to rip off the TARP program have been initiated by federal prosecutors, with more investigations likely. The good news: at least we’re going after these people in a timely fashion.

If you agree the bailout is necessary, you have to accept some amount of this — any pile of money that big is going attract people seeking to filch some of it, and the best we can do is try to stop them before they are successful and catch them afterward if they are, which appears to be what the Obama administration is doing. I am officially not outraged.

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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