Brown: Federal Reserve loans to large banks unfair, unjust
Wall Street
August 25, 2011
I suspect you have not heard, but last month the Government Accountability Office finished a year-long audit of the Federal Reserve. Two separate bills in the House and Senate (HR 1207 and S 604), sponsored by two of the most honest legislators in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), initiated this audit.
It found that since 2007 the Federal Reserve has loaned large American and foreign banks — such as Citi Group, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch — $16 trillion at 0 percent interest.
Yes, you read correctly — $16 trillion! So, in effect, the Federal Reserve gambled with the value of the dollar just to help the banks that made poor bets on derivatives and doled out senseless bonuses. This is clearly favoritism of the most deplorable kind.
These loans are so self-evidently unfair and unjust that any more discussion would be futile; instead, I would like to discuss why you probably have not heard about this, and why the mainstream corporate media has completely neglected this unprecedented story.
As you may have gleaned, the American media is one of the most corrupt institutions in the world; nearly every major outlet is owned by some ginormous for-profit corporate conglomeration. For example, the number of outlets that Rupert Murdoch owns is astounding (for a list of the few corporations that own almost every cable channel and newspaper in the country, visit www.cjr.org).
The underlying problem here is that the content and information each corporate media outlet provides is determined by its parent companies’ business ventures or investments, and/or good ratings (which includes the fear of being attacked by other outlets). Consequently, if it is bad for business, truth and fact are often ignored; another scary consequence is that large corporations literally control public opinion — a terrific recipe for a few people to control the masses.
I have found, for the record, only two mainstream outlets — The Washington Post and CNBC — to have acknowledged that this audit actually occurred. Oddly enough, neither title of the two articles mentioned the $16 trillion loan, or the 0 percent interest rate; neither article mentioned the 0 percent interest rate either. Only The Washington Post mentioned “$16 trillion” in a quote from Sen. Sanders (if you can find another outlet — and I do not mean relatively unknown independent websites — that has addressed this issue, please email me or write in to the Daily).
This kind of written coverage is very similar to the kind of television coverage where truth speakers rarely and quickly slip through the cracks, invariably to be clamped down, with no chance of their words spreading throughout the other outlets.
As long as the Daily will have me, I will aim to discuss these kinds of things that are generally omitted by the corporate media. Steroids in baseball, Lindsay Lohan’s court cases, the trial of Casey Lee Anthony, or anything like this the corporate media has deemed all-important, will not be given much attention.