Occupy for a Tea Party

The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement both feel it was wrong to bail out the banks and not Main Street, but that’s where the similarity ends. The Tea Party is against the TARP bailout and mistakenly insists it was passed during the Obama administration. Never mind that it was passed during the last administration while former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson was the Treasury Secretary, and that’s a large part of the problem, Goldman Sachs is in control of the Treasury, hence the bail for banks only and not the citizens.

The Tea Party complains about the bail out as too much government interference while the Occupy movement complains about the banksters the bail out helped the most.

The current financial banking disaster goes all the way back to the seventies when the rules for commercial banks were deregulated. Commercial banks could only invest in mortgages but were deregulated by pressure from the banks, so that they could invest in anything. The numerous board members were replaced by one bank president. This led to thousands of small bank failures, which then allowed bigger banks to buy up these failed savings and loans banks. This is what led to “banks too big to fail“.

After they created this housing bubble, and when it became clear to these robber barons that it was only a matter of time before this housing bubble burst, the banks bet against the hand they were holding, knowing in advance it was a losing hand. That’s a set up, pure and simple.

The original Tea Party wasn’t only against taxation without representation, they were rebelling against corporate control as well. During colonial times, the British East India Trading company had warehouses full of tea they couldn’t sell back in England. They convinced the British government to force all American colonists to buy only East India Tea. This tyrannical act stood to put many Tea Houses and Tea merchants out of business, part of the reason the tea was thrown overboard.

So both sides can find common ground in the original Tea Party except the people just don’t know it. In reality the Tarp bail out is only a drop in a big scary bucket, the tax payer is on the hook for trillions in sub prime debt. We all should be throwing this debt and the banksters who brought it to us overboard instead of taxpayer dollars funding 400 million dollar retirements for the very people who caused the financial failure.

Shake, Rattle and Raise Fees say the Banks

The president of the Consumers Banking Association, Richard Hunt said “Again, we do not want to charge our customers. We were forced to by Congress interjecting themselves into the marketplace.”

David Lazarus with The Los Angeles Times stated: The Federal Reserve says that it pretty much costs about 4 cents to process a debit card transaction, considering the huge economies of scale, 4 cents. So that means the current average of 44 cents represents a 1,000 percent profit. So now that we know that, as of tomorrow, that's going to be cut in roughly half to 21 cents, well, that's still a 500 percent profit.”

Bank of America isn’t going to lose money, their profits will be lowered. Yet Bank of America has the unmitigated gall to justify these profits by saying they provide fraud and overdraft protection, manufacture the card (is it made overseas?) and maintaining call centers. These plastic cards and all the other “services” they offer herd people into spending their money faster and with fees attached!

Using the excuse of maintaining “call centers” to justify mega profits would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad; the call centers are outsourced and they pay wages too low for Americans to compete with.

Now, their lust for money and power is transparent. No amount of profits will satisfy these gargantuan banks who are “too big to fail”. Not only that, the bankers threaten us. Richard Hunt said “This is a credit union and small bank issue. You are going to see thousands of small community banks go under because of regulation by Congress.”

On the contrary since the Savings and Loan bailout of the eighties, thousands of banks across the country have gone under due to lack of regulation including century old investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. The truth is the opposite of what Richard Hunt said, bigger banks have swallowed up the smaller banks and that’s how we ended up with banks too big to fail.

Today, the banks are coming right out and saying they will retaliate and make us pay for government doing what it’s supposed to do, protect the powerless from the powerful… except for when it comes to bailing them out of course, then they want Congress and all of the American people to interject billions to bail them out from their own lawless risk taking, so they can come back stronger than ever to charge us more fees. The deadly spiral is absolutely outrageous.