Lunar Obverse
Brian Moon Portland, OR, generally An unpublished (yet) writer. Contact me.
Brian Moon Portland, OR, generally An unpublished (yet) writer. Contact me.
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
As Wil says (from whom I got this post), this is outrageous. It gives me context for all the folks who complain about cities that choose to spend money on cops policing peaceful protests, or the “damage” to city parks caused by those protests.
As we saw in Portland, the Occupiers can police themselves and there is no violence when the robotic stormtrooper riot cops don’t show up. But banks? Banks need policing, and our government is doing a piss-poor job of it.
I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.
This is obscene and shame on the police officer who did it, and the police department who allows it, and the leadership who does not immediately condemn and repudiate it, and the citizens who see it as the expected action by police in response to a peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights.
Today at Occupy Portland: Protester hit with pepper spray at point blank range.
How can anyone justify this? Or this?
