Money, Power, Good and Evil
I think it may be necessary to yet explain a bit about the Occupy Movement. I support the Occupy Movement. I am not a lazy hippie, drug addict or dropout. I am a Liberal, maybe a Progressive that used to be a Conservative Republican. I like money. I have some. I worked very hard and long to have some. I use my money for the good. I sometimes use it for fun. I enjoy some of the perks of having some money. I sometimes don’t have to wait in line. If I wanted more money, I could figure out how to get it. For the past several years I have worked on keeping my money. I am one of the most fortunate of the 99%. I was blessed with the tools and in some instances the foresight to work around the system that is no longer conducive to innovation for the average American. I was afforded an excellent education that stressed problem solving, independent thought and personal gratification in personal achievement. In my opinion, the education system as it stands no longer fosters these qualities. I won’t start again on all that’s broken, you know. We are not living in the America that we dreamed of and were promised. I love when passerby’s yell at the Occupiers, “Get a Job”. OK, where? For the most part, do you not think they’d rather be inside and warm as opposed to outside, cold and wet? And guess what, many have jobs, minimum wage jobs in spite of college degrees. Most people who find themselves without a job or home did not get there on purpose. Stuff happens, sometimes in spite of prudent planning and doing all the right things. So, unless you have walked in their shoes, please don’t judge.
I get all kinds of push back saying the Occupiers just want everything handed to them, they expect it, feel they deserve it. Maybe a small percentage does, not the majority. I expect no one to help me but know and live, “Sometimes a hand out is a hand up.” I know and live “There but for the Grace of God go I.” Think about that. Aren’t most of us just one move away from being financially OK or not? That’s all it takes, one thing, and we’re done. How is it that we are in this position? What changed over the past 15-20 years that makes it nearly impossible for a dual income household with two children to substantially save? Some of it is on us. Bigger house, newer cars, it is probably simply conspicuous consumption with an endless supply of extended credit offered us. Did we choose to use it? Yes, we did. We assumed as generations before us that things would just get better and better, it’s the way it worked here in the US until it didn’t. Adjusted for inflation our dollars have less buying power. There is really no job security. The corporations gave away jobs to third world countries. We stopped producing manufactured goods. The banks just kept getting richer. They then offered even more money to those they knew wouldn’t be able to pay it back. Those people bought durable goods. Our “numbers” looked great until, as many predicted; the unsustainable “growth” fell apart. Then we had to bail the banks out for their greed. We lost, they did not. We paid, they did not. To quote an Occupy chant, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Greed wins, we lose.
Below is an excerpt of an article written on Nov. 28th, 2011, Bloomberg News:
<strong>Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress
Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. 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. Betty Liu reports on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop." (Source: Bloomberg)
On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
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.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
This is what we are up against, Evil Power. What we do with our money defines us as humans. How we treat others who are less fortunate defines us as humans. Is it as simple as Good vs. Evil? I think maybe so.
LJ Lassiter
2/6/2011