Lloyd Lofthouse

Forbes reported that the U.S. Treasury sold all of the remaining shares of General Motors common stock ending four-and-a-half years of government ownership. Taxpayers loaned GM $50.1 billion but only got $39 billion back.

It didn’t take long before tea party people and other Obama critics started shouting from the rooftops what a horrible president Obama is because of the $11 billion dollar loss. No mention is made of the 2.6 million jobs that were saved and the $105 billion in potential lost taxes. You have to visit Washington Examiner.com for that news.

Forbes does mention that the Treasury Department has recovered a total of $432.7 billion on all investments under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) compared to the $421.8 billion it paid out to banks resulting in an $11 billion profit—erasing the loss from the GM loan.

In fact, tea party conservatives and the GOP will never tell you about April 19, 2009, when the Obama administration came up with an outlined plan to convert the TARP bank bailouts into an equity share to protect the taxpayers’ money. And there will be no mention that the American Bankers Association (ABA) lobbied Congress to cancel the warrants owned by taxpayers, calling them an “onerous exit fee”.

In addition, under President G. W. Bush management of TARP, a December 22, 2008 Associated Press article stated, “The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government TARP money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers… Some banks said they simply didn’t know where the money was going.

But—this is what’s interesting—according to the Pew Research Center, “Almost half of Americans—47%—incorrectly think President Obama is responsible for the bank bailout known as TARP.

Who is responsible for the incorrect opinions of half of America? The answer is simple: the conservative media machine that works 24-7 reporting cherry-picked facts to manipulate public opinion. Both sides do it but the evidence suggests that the GOP does it better. A defense against this would be to look for facts and avoid opinions—if you know the difference.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine, Vietnam Veteran and English-journalism teacher.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy that started life as a memoir and then became a fictional suspense thriller. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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