In addition to portraying the Occupy Movement as aimless and confused, another meme in the corporate media has been to claim that since the banks paid back the TARP funds, they’re off the hook to the taxpayers:
After that discussion, Burnett attempted to set the protesters straight on the facts. As she put it: “What are they protesting? Nobody seems to know. So, this afternoon, we went to Wall Street to find out.”
Burnett quizzed one protester: “So do you know that taxpayers actually made money on the Wall Street bailout?” When he says that he was unaware of this, Burnett insists it is true — and goes on to argue that it basically negates the whole point of the protest:
That’s all it would take to put an end to the unrest? Well, as promised, we did go double-check the numbers on the bank bailout, and this is what we found. Yes, the bank bailouts made money for American taxpayers, right now to the tune of $10 billion, anticipated that it will be $20 billion. Those are seriously the numbers. This was the big issue, so we solved it.
No TARP isn’t the issue, and TARP is just the tip of the iceberg. TARP originally allocated $700 billion dollars to bail out the 1%. A recent audit of the Federal Reserve showed that the Fed gave the top 1% another 16 trillion dollars in cash. That’s a whole new ball game of theft.
Yves Smith is reporting another way banks suck off the public teat. The banks get near zero interest rate loans and the equivalent of $300 billion a year of systematic risk insurance. Read more at Naked Capitalism.
People aren’t out in the streets because of TARP or the Fed money or any one particular injustice. People are out in the streets because the entire system is rigged to benefit the 1%.
