How many times have I said, "It's hard not to feel bilked?" Just a few months ago, the Treasury Department stress tested the banks. The result was a call for massive new capital infusion -- for them, from us. Even then, academic studies were clear that the very same banks were making more than a buck. TARP recipients JP Morgan and Wells Fargo cut dividends to investors only once, and, well we all know what was happening at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- they were actually on track -- boy, were they on track -- to super-profits. $3.44 billion in the second quarter for Goldman. Hank Paulson, a former Goldman CEO, who once owned $700 million worth of STOCK told us last fall that if we gave to the banks, they'd give back to us --in jobs, and loans, and new businesses on Main Street. So the public paid out. And we waited, and waited, while unemployment rose and wages sank. Come summer, bankrupt states across the country were shutting summer schools and parks. And still the public waited and wondered. What happened to those hundreds of billions we gave to the banks? Now there's news -- from special inspector general Neil Barofsky, the overseer of the TARP Bailouts. Where did our money go? Of 360 banks that got money through the end of January -- Barofsky reports that 110 invested at least some of it in the stock market, 52 repaid bad debts they'd taken out, and 15 used our funds to buy up other banks. And that's not even counting the millions they spent lobbying against bankruptcy reform or credit card regulation. Now Barofsky's calling on the Treasury Department to require regular, detailed reporting from TARP recipients. Just in case you forgot, so far, the Treasury has refused to collect such information. In a written response, Geithner et al are still against it. "Officials have taken the view that the exact use of the federal aid cannot be tracked because money given to a bank is like water poured into an ocean. " Oh, really? Well, that's a little different from how TARP was sold to us. Opponents of healthcare are all hot and bothered about $1 trillion -- that's $1 trillion over ten years for healthcare for everybody. Most estimates put the final cost of the TARP fiasco at twice that. Would we have gone for that -- any of us -- if we'd been told it was to "pour money like water into an ocean?" A very profitable, private ocean, at that. What do you think? Less