It may not be Occupy Wall Street that we need, but right now it's all we've got. A news report today shows that Henry Paulson, when he was Secretary of the Treasury, was giving inside information to hedge funds while telling the general public the opposite. It's just further proof that the system is rigged in favor of the banks and the bankers and the folks on Wall Street. Joe Citizen is left to scramble for crumbs.

How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word

Bloomberg Squeals on Paulson

Here's Another Shocker:

Banks made billions on secret Federal Reserve loans

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 emergency loans of 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 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 interest rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the 2007-2010 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.

While Fed officials say that almost all the loans were repaid without losses, details that emerge from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions 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.

Read more:

Bank Billions in Secret

It gets worse. It's not Billions, it is Trillions! Hard investigative work by the Bloomberg Financial News discovered that the Fed lent 7.7 trillion dollars to banks during the financial crisis. This money was lent at an interest rate of .5%. The banks then mostly turned around and bought treasury notes at 3% to them. Thus they made billions from the money the Fed lent them. Essentially, gave them.

Yet consumers find no bargains from the banks. Sure, the fee to use debit cards went down, but banks own Congress. The Frank-Dodd bill to reform banking rules is being drafted by the banks, or certainly their lobbyists are influencing it greatly. The average citizen is hard pressed to get a mortgage, but the banks get tons of money from the Fed. It's a disgrace, proving why we need protests, more and more of them. Occupy Wall Street until the whole damn city is taken by protests.

Shouldn't the protesters move from Wall Street, etc. to DC? Namely to confront the Congress?

Banks may own the MOC but they are gutless when "real" voters show up in large numbers (as well they should be).

Best regards,

RA1

Headline in today's nydailynews.com:

500,000 city kids in families that can’t afford food, up 37% from 2008

People are jobless for so long their savings and benefits have run out

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/500-000-city-kids-families-t-afford-food-37-2008-article-1.986622#ixzz1fbzpR3vs

As long as these movements can lead to something innovative that can make our society run more efficiently and productive, I don't mind what they are doing. I hope something productive can come out of this.