Enriching the Rich. The Federal Reserve has once again lowered interest rates, without requiring banks to pass along the benefit to consumers. So, what have the banks done with this governmental benefit? Lent out new money? No. Lowered interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, etc.? No. "Banks are hoarding their money" reported Trish Regan on ABC World News today. No, they are hoarding OUR money.
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In short, the only people who have benefited in any way from the Fed's lowering of interest rates are the rich who own and control the banks.
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Now the Fed intends to buy up toxic assets, as the Department of the Treasury was supposed to do but didn't. What conditions will the Fed impose on the banks and credit-card companies it aids this way? Any? Will the Fed even demand that companies so aided must lend an equivalent amount to consumers in the form of new loans at reasonable interest rates? If not, then tell the banks and credit-card companies to go f(asteris)k themselves, because this will turn out to be just another transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class taxpayers to the rich.
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Neither Congress nor the Fed has to date put any strings on the money they have doled out to the rich. Yesterday we learned that altho Congress intended to put severe restrictions on bonuses paid by corporate recipients of taxpayer money, it turns out that the bill that the Bush Administration tricked Congress into passing tied that limitation to money lent as the result of the purchase of "toxic assets" at auction — only. And then the scumbag Henry Paulson instantly changed the way money was distributed, as not to purchase anything at auction, so the rule did not literally apply.
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We are not without recourse. Courts do have the right to punish misuse of the wording of a law to sidestep the intent of the law, and the intent, if clear, can be enforced. So Congress should immediately demand that the corporations that have paid bonuses after receiving taxpayer moneys pay back every cent, either of bonuses from executives to the corporation or of taxpayer money from the corporations to the Government, and if they don't, Congress should seize the corporations, and fire and jail the executives, or force the corporations into bankruptcy, and jail the executives for fraud.
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Congress, or the new Attorney-General at the behest of Congress and President Obama, should also prosecute Henry Paulson immediately after his successor takes office, for official misconduct; send him to PRISON; and make him pay for his own imprisonment; then ban him from any position of public trust, at any level of government or in any quasi-governmental agency or authority, for the rest of his life. Any corporate executive sent to prison should as well be fined enough to pay for all costs of his or her trial and imprisonment. We have already spent far too much taxpayer money on those con artists. Every further expense of punishing corporate scumbags should be paid by those bastards themselves.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,209 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:47 PM