News from the United States, reveals how the corporate sector exploited the financial crisis, by tapping into cheap money, designed to help the most vulnerable.Would it surprise you to know that several Canadian lending institutes were also there with their hands out?
Obvious beneficiaries such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are on the list released Wednesday, but so are a surprising number of international banks, including all of Canada’s biggest lenders, which borrowed $111-billion (U.S.) through their U.S. divisions.A list of companies released yesterday, gives face to the culprits.
Instead of creating jobs and helping citizens cope with the devastating losses of their incomes and homes, these fat cats bellied up to the bar and bought their house a round.McDonald’s, General Electric and Harley-Davidson also turned to the Fed when no one else would buy their commercial paper. Hedge fund managers John Paulson and Julian Robertson put up toxic assets as collateral for Fed loans that they and similar investors used to buy sounder asset-backed securities.
The data released Wednesday details loans the U.S. central bank gave through 11 separate programs created to stave off an economic depression. The transactions date from December 2007 through July 2010. The Fed’s disclosure of 21,000 different transactions will change the way the financial crisis is interpreted, providing layers of context that will help economists and academics better understand the crisis.
...the reminder that big corporations, international banks, billionaire investors and foreign central banks were among the recipients of the Fed’s lending will stir up political animosity that already is running high because of the policy maker’s recent decision to create $600-billion to buy financial assets in a bid to stimulate the flagging economy. “This will not be good for the Fed politically,” said Douglas Elliot, a finance expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former investment banker. “Everybody hates bankers right now and this shows the Fed helping bankers.”Public funds were used to stick it to the public.
And Stephen Harper plans to go ahead with further tax cuts for the wealthy, while promising the rest of us an austerity budget. This is criminal.
We need to tell the corporate welfare bums to leave our money alone. If they can't run their businesses better than that, they need to find a real job. I hear McDonald's might be hiring.
"America is now a land of socialism for the rich -- and brutal capitalism for the poor."
ReplyDelete~ Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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.In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out. Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich. The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%. The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/14-1
In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves. It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.
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The game CEO’s can’t believe they get away with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfosSjWLMEE
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Bill Maher - New Rules - Greed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-oPdoT0H1A
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When your salary is determined by people who are beholden to you, as is the case of CEO's, then there's no...there are no brakes. The sky is the limit.
Laissez-faire-- let the market be free, and those who deserve to, will get their just rewards. That's become the standard explanation for why CEO pay has shot up in their lifetimes, from 40 times the average worker's pay in 1970 to more than 100 times in 1990 to some 500 times today.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec02/ceo2_12-03.html
Laissez-faire is even used to justify lavish retirement packages, like Jack Welch's from GE. Lifetime tickets to New York's Yankee stadium and Boston's Fenway Park, a Manhattan penthouse, and numerous other perks that came to light in his divorce case, and that critics like Graef Crystal now mock.
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THE TROUBLE WITH BILLIONAIRES: Why too much money at the top is bad for everyone
The glittering lives of billionaires may seem like a harmless source of entertainment. But such concentrated economic power reverberates throughout society, threatening the quality of life and the very functioning of democracy.
http://www.lindamcquaig.com/TheTroubleWithBillionaires/index.cfm
It's no accident that the United States claims the most billionaires – but suffers among the highest rates of infant mortality and crime, the shortest life expectancy, as well as the lowest rates of social mobility and electoral political participation in the developed world.
Our society tends to regard large fortunes as evidence of great talent or accomplishment. Yet the vast new wealth isn't due to an increase in talent or effort at the top, but rather to changing social attitudes legitimizing greed and government policy changes that favour the new elite. Authoritative and eye-opening, The Trouble with Billionaires will spark debate about the kind of society we want.
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/859721--excerpt-the-trouble-with-billionaires-by-linda-mcquaig-and-neil-brooks
This is just disgusting, Emily. McDonalds? General Electric?
ReplyDeleteThat they could think of it is astounding, that they could succeed in getting the money is unconscionable... were there no strings attached to the federal money? Like "why do you need this money?" and if the answer wasn't "to feed my five kids and keep them off the street" ...then what the hell? This goes beyond anything I can even imagine. Canadian banks getting US funds meant to help... no, my mind can't handle this one.
Apparently they were asked very little, especially in the beginning.
ReplyDeleteI find it absolutely disgusting.