THE BATTLE WITH THE BANKS IS ON: PROTESTS AND PITCHFORKS

By Danny Schecter
April 10, 2009

Founder of MediaChannel.org, filmmaker "In Debt We Trust" and author of Plunder
Posted to Creative i

Schecter: "For the most cogent explanation of what’s going on, visit the Baseline Scenario website run by former IMF exec and MIT Professor Simon Jenkins." [sic Johnson] "The Quiet Coup" The Atlantic, May 2009 issue.

Also see:
The Radicalization of Ben Bernanke
He is throwing trillions of dollars at the financial crisis. What happens if his gambles don't pay off? By Simon Johnson and James Kwak Sunday, April 5, 2009; Page B01

As New Bank Bailouts Seem Likely, There Is More to Speak Out Against

There’s phrase that’s worked its way into the Japanese language: “Lehman Shokku”—translated as Lehman Shock. It refers to what happened to 460,000 people after Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner let the global Lehman Investment Bank collapse. A former Lehman executive told me over Matzoh at a Passover seder that she believes the decision reflected a competitive conflict and ego battle between the former Goldman Sachs chief turned Treasury Secretary and the bullheaded CEO of Lehman.

The clash of two power-crats in New York triggered a hard rain across the world.
Bloomberg reports on a forty year old former bank employee, Miki, who “now sleeps in cardboard boxes under the elevated Hanshin expressway in Umeda, Osaka’s central business district…as the global recession triggered by the implosion of Wall Street banks batters Japan. … Miki’s loss of housing shows how Japan’s 2.95 million unemployed people threaten to fuel a rise in homelessness.”

Bloomberg is doing more than reporting bad news; it is also suing the Federal Reserve Bank for information that the privately run “public institution” wants to hide. Bloomberg wants the FED to disclose securities the central bank is accepting on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks. Click here for more.