Sixteen Trillion Dollars; Sixteen Tons

Sixteen is a number that rings a bell for me, because when I was a boy I used to listen to a song called "Sixteen Tons." It was a coal miner song expressing the pain and futility of endless work without the possibility of getting out of debt. The song was made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford: Now I see that the number sixteen has come back into the news in the context of banks. This time, sixteen refers to a secret deal arranged by our government to prop up huge corrupt banks to the tune of $16 trillion dollars. We, the taxpayers would never have approved this deal if it had been made out in the open.  Nonetheless, we are now subsidizing these too-big-to-fail institutions for as long as any of us will live, and further, we've piled huge amounts of this debt onto the backs of our children. It's all part of a new spin on "family values": dumping unimaginable amounts of debt on our children, "justifying" this by the fact that the people who run corrupt banks bought Congress and asked for for this money.   Now our children will have to try to work off endless corporate debt.  My image is that we've just signed them up to work an old-fashioned coal-miner's job of the type described by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Alan Grayson recently included me in a mass emailing, where he puts the number sixteen into context:

Dear Erich: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks. Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS. That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show. How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries. A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice. That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years. All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster. I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib. Whatever a jib may be. In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing more about this. But right now, I wanted to keep this really simple. Just give folks something to talk about when they’re standing next to the coffee maker. The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it. Think about it. Think about what that means. Courage, Alan Grayson

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Senator Bernie Sanders proposes changes to America’s corrupt banking system

At Huffpo, Senator Bernie Sanders, who remains one of my heroes, points out that the secret bailout by the Federal Reserve makes the better-known bailout look tiny:

More than three years ago, Congress rewarded Wall Street with the biggest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. Simultaneously but unknown to the American people at the time, the Federal Reserve provided an even larger bailout. The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis. As a result of this audit, the American people have learned that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in low-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, huge foreign banks, multi-national corporations, and some of the wealthiest people in the world. In other words, when Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the federal government acted boldly, aggressively, and with a fierce sense of urgency to save our financial system from collapse with no strings attached.
The huge backdoor bailout is a slap in the face to American taxpayers, especially since the big Wall Street banks are bigger than ever and because they are taking more risks than ever, presumably emboldened by the fact that they are "too big to fail," and that the federal government will come bail them out yet again. Here's what Bernie Sanders proposes to clean up this despicable situation: 1) Break up the big banks. 2) Cap credit card interest rates ("Today, more than a quarter of all credit card holders in this country are paying interest rates above 20 percent and as high as 59 percent.") 3) Force the Federal Reserve to make low interest loans directly to small businesses. 4) Put an end to speculation that jacks up the price of petroleum products. 5) Demand that Wall Street invest in real businesses instead of "gambling on derivatives." 6) "Establish a Wall Street speculation fee on credit default swaps, derivatives, stock options and futures. Both the economic crisis and the deficit crisis are a direct result of the greed and recklessness on Wall Street." Sanders points out that there was such a fee (.2% tax on all sales and transfers of stock) from 1914 - 1966. Sanders points out that getting these measures passed will be enormously difficult, given that these Wall Street banks spent $5 billion on lobbying over the past decade.  Which leads to another enormous need: to get money out of politics.

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Rolling Stone examines the Catholic Church’s secret sex crime files

The September 15, 2011 edition of Rolling Stone shines a light on the inner-workings of the leadership of the Catholic Church, centering on an ongoing criminal case in Philadelphia involving five allegedly sexual predators (for priests and a Catholic school teacher). This is a well researched and well-written article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The article is filled with disturbing anecdotes and statistics. For instance,

  • The US conference of Catholic Bishops funded a study that lowered the number of clergy classified as pedophiles by redefining puberty as beginning at age 10
  • "Seminary is a form of military-style indoctrination, molding meant his think institutionally, not individually it's like a brainwashing, almost [states a former seminarian]"
  • According to a 1990 psychological study, "only half of all priests adhere to their vows of celibacy."
  • Another study ("The Catholic Priest in the United States: Psychological Investigations") found "that three fourths of all American priests were psychologically and emotionally underdeveloped, or even mal-developed." The attitudes of these grown men toward sex, the study concluded "were on par with those of teenagers or even preteens."
Why has the cover-up of sexual predators continued on to the present? "The answer, in large part, lies in the mindset of the church is rigid hierarchy, which promotes officials who are willing to do virtually anything they're told, so long as it's in God's name." The focus of the article is the conduct of high-ranking Catholic clergy who engaged in the now-well-known conduct of denying the criminal conduct of pedophile priests, and moving them from parish to parish, or school to school, rather than calling in the police, or at least defrocking the miscreant priests. Stir in additional misconduct such as hiding incriminating records and you understand the criminal minds of much of the leadership of the modern Catholic Church, an organization that claims moral authority while exhibiting none when it comes to the horrific conduct of many of its high-ranking leaders.

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Trillions in secret loans by the Fed reveal massive welfare for too-big-to-fail banks

Thanks to incorruptible Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, the Federal Reserve has been forced to reveal information regarding loans that it tried hard to keep secret.   Here's what we are finding, according to IPS:

The Fed provided loans to JP Morgan Chase bank to acquire Bear Stears, a failed investment firm; provided loans to keep American International Group (AIG), a multinational insurance corporation, afloat; extended lending commitments to Bank of America and Citigroup; and purchased risky mortgage-backed securities to get them off private banks’ books. Overall, the greatest borrowing was done by a small number of institutions. Over the three years, Citigroup borrowed a total of 2.5 trillion dollars, Morgan Stanley borrowed two trillion; Merryll Lynch, which was acquired by Bank of America, borrowed 1.9 trillion; and Bank of America borrowed 1.3 trillion.
I'd call it welfare for the too-big-to-fail. Phase One of the bailout was to address a legitimate liquidity crisis. Phase Two went far beyond this, and was kept secret because the public would never have consented to the above actions Here's how Economist Randall Wray sums up Phase Two:
"But then it turned to phase two, which was to try to resolve problems of insolvency by increasing Uncle Sam’s stake in the banksters’ fiasco. That never should have been done. You close down fraudsters, period. The Fed and FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Commission) should have gone into the biggest banks immediately, replaced all top management, and should have started to resolve them," Wray said.

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License to commit contempt granted to the CIA

The CIA destroyed 92 videotapes depicting torture of two prisoners, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri during the course of litigation brought by the ACLU. Here's how the ACLU reports the CIA conduct:

We argued that the CIA showed complete disdain for the court and the rule of law itself when it flouted several court orders to produce the videotapes and instead destroyed them. To provide some background, in September 2004, the court first ordered the CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment of detainees in its custody, which would have included at least 92 videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of the two prisoners. Despite the orders, the CIA never produced the tapes or even acknowledged their existence. Unbeknownst to the public, the tapes were destroyed in November 2005, a year after the court’s first order, although the destruction was not publicly revealed until 2007.
Are you ready to hear about the severe ruling by the judge. There was no contempt of court. The ruling was an invitation for the CIA to do whatever the hell it wants next time. Inconvenient evidence? No problem! Check out this part of the ruling: "The bottom line is we are in a dangerous world. We need our spies, we need surveillance, but we also need accountability."

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