Why are recipients of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) – better known as the Banking Bailout – allowed to continue to lobby?  Taxpayer dollars should not be used to influence our government.  We, the People should be telling them what to do, not the other way around.

TARP recipients spent $114 million on lobbying last year as the financial crisis emerged.  In just the last quarter of the year eighteen bailout recipients spent $14.8 million to influence the government, as the TARP funds were distributed.

The lobbying has paid off.  According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “The companies' political activities have, in part, yielded them $295.2 billion from TARP, an extraordinary return of 258,449 percent.” 

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Commonweal Institute Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan interviews Alan Jenkins, Director of the Opportunity Agenda, and Nancy Cleeland, Director of External Affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, about the relationship between expanding opportunity for all Americans and achieving an economic goal of broadly shared prosperity. From the new book from the Progressive Ideas Network, Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era.

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Commonweal Institute Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan interviews Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Director of the Drum Major Institute, about the current economic crisis and the pressure it is placing on America's middle class. From the new book from the Progressive Ideas Network, Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era.

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