por Charles Augustine
For the first time in history the Federal Reserve was audited. This unprecedented action occurred yesterday and comes as a result of Ron Paul’s “Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill” (GAO), which passed last year. And while it should be noted that the Fed’s chairman Ben Bernanke and previous chair Alan opposed it because they alleged an audit might serve to undermine the public’s trust in the 100 year-old institution, the audit was carried out Sept 20.
However, the audit conducted over the last two months was a “watered down” version of the original one, house bill HR1207, which called for a complete audit. And now the public can access the results at: sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3.
As might be expected the results were really shocking, with the amount doled out to banks, a whopping – $16,000,000,000,000.00 – that’s right $16 trillion of taxpayers money that has been doled out to humongous Wall Street financial institutions to bail them out of their own corporative mess. And citizens opposed to the bailouts point out that the money loaned out to these corps was at 0% interest. Proponents of the GAO believe that Fed has been hush-hush about this because of the public outrage that would have ensued had it been made known to the public.
It should be noted that the entire gross domestic product (gdp), or money that was made on U.S. investments for last year was only $14.12 trillion, compared to $16 trillion.
Corporations, most of them investments firms, which received the most money from the Federal Reserve’s bailout, spending spree, were:
Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000).
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000).
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000).
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000).
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion* ($868,000,000,000).
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000).
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000).
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000).
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000).
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000).
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000).
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000).
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000).
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000).
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000).
FAIR Action Alert alleges NYPD police brutality
FAIR Action Alert, a citizen watchdog group critical of the way Wall Street banking and investment/lending institutions do business, and who are in agreement with the current “Occupy Wall Street” protests, alleges New York City Police (NYPD) brutality of protesters and a “virtual media blackout,” on its Sept. 27 blogs.
It should be noted though that opinions in major news circles like CNN, NBC and NPR vary. For instance, while NBC and CNN aired stories that show “some” police abuse; NPR refused to cover the Occupy Wall Street protest, because as its Dick Meyer stated, in a response to Fair questioninghim about why NPR refused to run a story, “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”
Footage of alleged police misbehaving can be seen at: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4406.
Free Fast Passes for SF elementary, middle and high-school students
In April, May and June of this year, the City and County of San Francisco tried a temporary three-month program that allowed low-income high school students to ride MUNI for free. This action came as a response to SF Unified School District possibly cutting its “yellow bus” fleet by as much as 43 percent over the next two years.
This trial program was so much of a success that the Board of Supervisors has introduced a similar one that allows all SF students, regardless of financial status, to have free Fast Passes.
In addition the new pilot program introduced at the Board’s Sept. 20 meeting would be for three-years.
Funding for this project would come from private contributions and public funding, among them, MUNI and SF.
Supporters of the measure point out that it would have little impact upon burdening existing MUNI services, pointing out that MUNI ridership would only increase significantly during school commute hours and when schools are open.
If this pilot program is as successful as the three month one the Board and Unified would go back to the drawing board and has out a plan for long-term funding.
The previous program was such an achievement that there were not enough Fast Passes for those needing them.
At the forefront of advocates supporting the adoption of this resolution are: SF Unified Superintendent Carlos Garcia and MUNI Transportation Agency Board member Joel Ramos.
