While we argue Health 'Insurance' Reform, the Wall Street Banksters make their Big Getaway...

[Octafish]

HCR is sideshow. Here's where the real money went:

Wall Street’s Economic Rampage

by Zach Carter
Published on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 by The Media Consortium

Over the past year, Wall Street’s excess has helped push the unemployment rate to epic levels and created millions of foreclosures. Yet the rules of the financial road remain unchanged. As 2009 draws to a close, it’s astonishing that so little progress towards financial reform has been made.

President Obama, Congress and federal regulators have not been tough enough on the nation’s financial elite. As Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery emphasize for Mother Jones, the government has committed about $14 trillion in bailout funds to save the banking system without demanding much of anything in return. Goldman Sachs and other big banks are now planning to pay giant bonuses that come straight from taxpayer giveaways rather than invest that money in socially constructive banking.

“Bankers aren’t being rewarded for pulling the economy out of the doldrums,” Bauerlein and Jeffery write. “Nope, they’re simply skimming from the trillions we’ve shoveled at them.”

The major banks are even spending our bailout money to lobby against reform. When President Obama called a meeting for leaders of the nation’s largest banks to scold them for their lobbying, the heads of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup didn’t even bother to show up, as Matthew Rothschild describes in a podcast for The Progressive.

It’s easy to see why the bank execs are so indifferent, Rothschild argues, even to the president. Now that almost all of these banks have repaid the loans they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Obama has no negotiating leverage and the bankers know it. Even though it represents just a tiny fraction of the $14 trillion bailout, TARP was the only program that attached any strings to that money. Prior to those TARP repayments, Obama could have demanded that banks do more lending to help the economy, work harder to keep troubled borrowers in their homes—or face executive compensation restrictions or other penalties.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/22-2

Are you feeling unseasonably angry, too?

[inna]

1. I feel angry, but reasonably/justifiably so.

:mad:

KR.

[Octafish]

7. T'is the season to move it to Switzerland...

...I bet you know this, inna. Those new to the subject: Guess which vice chairman of UBS also helped deregulate the American tax code?

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

Of course, today, many would do things differently. Wink wink. Of course, of course.

[glitch]

2. Thanks for posting. And the war beast is feeling pretty fat and happy too.

Lots of machines getting a feast on us this season.

[Octafish]

8. T'is a very big stocking stuffed with war stocks for the few, the vain, the connected...

All the gold they can carry. Meanwhile, We the People get the shaft -- sort of a real holiday tradition from a certain quarter:

Know your BFEE: War and Oil are just two longtime Main Lines of Business

Old news to you, glitch. Thanks, my Friend, for giving a damn.

[glitch]

9. Capitalism is imploding Bush already had the fire sale, what's left is looting the fixtures.

Feed ME Seymour!

Old news indeed. I wonder where the metastizing cancer will settle next.

Thank YOU My Friend, and have a Merry Solstice Season and a Happy New Year!

[girl gone mad]

3. Obama scolded them so I'm sure it will turn out just fine.

[chill_wind]

10. And they didn'tt even have to show up for it in person. They phoned it in.

Meanwhile we have the sick and the jobless getting their furniture and their kids' stuffed toys tossed out in the snow by the foreclosure sheriffs. Merry Christmas, USA.

[blues90]

4. I agree for the most part .

I keep ALL of the numberous issues in my nind . If anything the health ins bill should prove just how openly corrupt both sides of our government really are. How hypocritical they are and what liars they are. Also just how the media plays along zooming in on just one of the many issues and problems we are faced with.

They make is so it is like being forced to watch a movie you hated over and over again until any movie would look good after that. Just like 8 years of GW and here come Obama. Hope and change and he can even speak in complete sentences.
two year long campaign and one year of health ins re-form debate , all else gets worse or remains the same and after all is said and done change the movie.

[Echo In Light]

5. "...they’re simply skimming from the trillions we’ve shoveled at them.”

ugh

K&R

[Greyhound]

6. Once again, Henry Ford said it,

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

The banks, and all the institutions and industries that surround them, have never been anything other than thieves with a license to steal from us issued by "our" government.

[chill_wind]

11. And the best damn part? " The major banks are even spending our bailout money to lobby

against reform." I was unseasonably angry a whole year ago. Wall Street Senate Dems co-signed the blank check and kept the getaway car warm and running for the escaping thieves.