LUIS GUTIERREZ SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT…. As part of regulatory reform for the financial industry, Republicans believe Democrats have created a “bailout fund.” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) yesterday decided this is a lie worth debunking in detail.
Gutierrez, who is bilingual, told his colleagues, “I’ve had the bill thoroughly examined by those who do speak the English language and have only spoken the English language all their life, and they cannot find the ‘bailout fund’ in the bill.”
Ryan Grim added, “What the bill does do, [Gutierrez] explained, is create a fund that major firms must pay into. If banks get into trouble, the fund is used to take them over, break them up and sell off the parts. If such a fund was socialist, Gutierrez said, then so is Geico. But unlike Geico, he said, drivers who crash the economy don’t get their bank repaired and returned to them under the Democratic plan.”
In the hopes of making this easy enough for his GOP colleagues to understand, Gutierrez explained, “What they won’t tell you is unlike everybody in this room who has to go and take out an insurance policy to drive a car, they want Wall Street and Goldman Sachs to be able to drive our economy into the ground without paying a cent of insurance in case they act recklessly. And all we’re saying as Democrats is: ‘It’s simple. If you want to do business in America and you threaten the economic stability of our country, then you’ve got to pay into an insurance fund.’
“But let me tell you: it’s not the kind of insurance fund where you get into an accident and they take your car and they fix it and they kind of give it back to you new. No no. In our insurance fund, you know what happens? We chop up your car into pieces and sell it and then we pay back the fund with the pieces. That’s our fund. Read the bill. It’s a funeral fund. You guys love to talk about the death and death and death when it came to health care. Why don’t you talk about our death panels now?”
Now that Gutierrez has explained reality, I’m sure House Republican will stop telling people there’s a “bailout fund” in the bill, right?
