And Yet Martha Stewart Went to Jail

Three years ago, the politicians were fighting over bailing out the banks to the tune of $700 billion. It was sort of a fight between "you want to have all the banks fail and throw us into another depression" and "our ideology must be pure-- no bailouts", with Mr. Conservative himself, Richard (the Torturer) Cheney going personally to Republicans to plead with them not to saddle their party with causing a second depression in eighty years.

But while that was going on, the Federal Reserve was quietly loaning the banks eleven times that much money in interest-free loans. Nobody outside the Fed knew that it was going on, other than the banks, and they kept their mouths shut.

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It was a hell of a scam. Some banks borrowed a hundred billion dollars in virtually interest-free money. What they did was then to buy Treasury bills at 3% interest. Think about that for a minutes. What if someone came up to you and said: "Here's a hundred million bucks. Do whatever you want with it, but you have to give back to me in a year, plus fifty grand in interest." You would take that money, buy a hundred million in T-bills at three percent interest. At the end of the year, you'd cash in the T-bills, pay back the hundred million, toss in the fifty grand and you'd go home with two million, nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars, all at zero risk.

Now here is the best part: You and your benefactor tell nobody about this. So you can pretend to the world that you're a real smart businessman who managed to make nearly three million clams in tough times. When what you did was something that was readily apparent to your average fifth-grader.

All of the big banksters did this. And because they were playing on a huge scale, they individually were making billions of dollars. So their banks seemed profitable and they then badly sprained their arms by patting themselves ont he backs and handing out huge bonuses.

Talk about a rigged game.

We, the American people, bailed those greedy fucksticks out, not with $700 billion, but $8.4 trillion. Yet when it came to trying to do something for the tens of millions of Americans whose home values are underwater, the banks screamed: "No way, no bailouts!!"

So now here we are, today. The Party of Hoover is trying to do whatever it can to strip away the modest banking regulations enacted by the Dodd-Frank bill. They are going to the mat to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Board. Because the Republicans are, when you get right down to it, in favor of Half-Socialism for the Rich, where the rich get to keep their profits and everyone else gets stuck with their losses.

Jon Stewart had the right question: How the fuck is it that Martha Stewart went to jail?