For the past few years Matt Taibbi has researched and written piece after piece exploring and exposing the triumph of the oligarchic corporate plutocracy in this nation. Over the past couple of decades, our elected representatives have progressively turned control of this nation over to the mega-corporations and the super rich. Most laws are now written by these interests and lobbies, not by members of Congress or their staff.
This has resulted in what is nothing more and nothing less than corporate welfare run totally amok, bleeding billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the top 1 – 5% of this nation, while the richest corporations, such as G.E., effectively pay no taxes at all.
Tax payer money has been doled out in the billions to the Wall Street moguls, the hedge fund managers, the mega-bankers, and the corrupt mortgage industry, to save them from the failure and collapse that would have resulted from their having to take the consequences of their own corrupt and in fact criminal activities that have plunged this nation’s economy into chaos.
As if that were not enough, as Taibbi now reveals, to add insult to injury we learn that we have been lavishing even more tax payer money on them for the most absurd reasons, pouring millions and millions into the pockets of those who need it least for the most unbelievably specious reasons.
Meanwhile, Congress is piously telling the rest of us that we have to give up Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. Of these three programs, two are programs that we, working Americans, have been paying for through payroll taxes.
But now it has become the mission of these greedy criminals to relabel as welfare entitlement programs two of the most stable, secure, and self-funded programs in the history of our government, Medicare and Social Security. And it has become increasingly clear, as in the case of the attacks on Medicaid, that the super rich running this nation simply do not care about the poor and needy, and those who simply do not have enough resources to meet basic needs. For them, apparently charity begins at home: their home.
As if the blind greed of the past two years of bailouts has not been enough to accelerate the transfer of the majority of all the nation’s wealth to the top 1 – 5% percent, now we are expected to give up our own savings, even more of our tax dollars, in order to bleed the average American as dry as possible, in order to insure the final stage of this billionaires’ coup of the United States of America. Their goal appears to be to reduce the majority of Americans to wage slaves without benefits, while insuring that that top 5% live in wealth almost unimaginable to the average citizen.
Here is the money quote from Tabbi’s latest expose of this madness, which will appear in the April 28, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The text is already available online: The Real Housewives of Wall Street. Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?
The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called “giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all.” If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.
This article appears in the April 28, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive April 15.
Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the “other” budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. “Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”
But if you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called “giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all.” If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like.
This post has been faxed to Representative Todd Young, IN-09; Indiana Senators Dick Lugar and Daniel Coats; The White House; House Speaker John Boehner; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid; and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; and posted on this web site, http://keepamericafree.com. The web site provides links to documents on the web supporting the statements in this letter.
