The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Most people, when they hear the term “bailouts,” think of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, called TARP. And when people think of TARP, they reflexively remember hearing that the banks that borrowed billions from that program have all paid their money back. So—no harm, no foul. It’s not like we gave them the money. Thus while it is true, for instance, that Linda Almonte’s employer, JPMorgan Chase, accepted $25 billion through the TARP program and used that money to buy not only Washington Mutual (for a state-struck pennies-on-the-dollar price) but a pair of $60 million Gulfstream jets and an $18 million hangar facility in Westchester County, that’s all okay because, well, Chase paid the money back a year later. So it’s not like it came out of our pockets. Less well known is that Chase was extended billions more in guarantees to help buy the corpse of Bear Stearns. It was allowed to borrow $33 billion more against the state’s credit card—if it defaulted on those loans, we’d have picked up the bill—through an even more obscure Federal Reserve program called the Temporary…