Oh So Clever

As bad as all the bailouts were, we have now received evidence that it was even more egregious than the government was leading us to believe. While the deficit hawks keep screaming about cutting spending and wrangling over the chump change needed to extend unemployment benefits, Team Bush-Obama literally has been giving away the store to those who already have more than they know what to do with!!

With the lifting of the "veil of secrecy at the Fed," in response to a legislative push led by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, reveals that the Federal Reserve gave banks, multinational corporations and foreign financial institutions - many of them with limited ties to the United States -- an estimated $3.3 trillion in emergency loans and other forms of assistance during the course of the current financial crisis.

"We now know that Fed loaned trillions of dollars at zero or near-zero interest rates not only to the largest financial institutions in this country, but also to many of our largest corporations - including GE, McDonalds and Verizon. Most surprising, the Fed also lent huge sums of money to foreign private banks and corporations" says Sanders, who since the 1990s has, with Texas Congressman Ron Paul, Florida Congressman Alan Grayson and a handful of others, been an ardent critic of the Fed's secrecy, unaccountable financial manipulations and coziness with Wall Street.

The document dump confirms that the $700 billion Treasury Department bank bailout out signed into law under President George W. Bush in 2008 was a small down payment on an secretive "backdoor bailout" that saw the Fed provide roughly $3.3 trillion in liquidity and more than $9 trillion in short-term loans and other financial arrangements. With hundreds of billions in U.S. money going to foreign financial institutions, Sanders asks: "Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?"...

While reading this story, I thought of two lines from Verse 65 of the Tao Te Ching.

Rulers who try to use cleverness
Cheat the country.

The last two administrations have proven to be very clever. As WikiLeaks has exposed, they say one thing in private and quite another in public. In terms of the bailouts, we were told that it HAD to be done, but we would only give the behemoths just enough to get them back on their feet. Now we learn that this was yet another ruse to siphon off even more money than usual from the public coffers.

No wonder we're in such an economic hole!!!

Of course, the new ruse being peddled by the president is that EVERYONE must sacrifice now to fill the gaping chasm. What he really means is that you and I must suffer, not the wealthy elites.