Wall Street Greed Continues, Jordan & Moyers List New Abuses of "Free Market" Socialism

Has Wall Street, banks and government overseers played us for suckers?

Of course they have. You want proof? Watch Georgetown Univ. Legal & Finance scholar Emma Coleman Jordan and Bill Moyers run through a list of new abuses and greed getting little or no press. A partial transcript is provided below. Keep in mind this detail from miccheckradio.org:

After taxpayer outrage, Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the compensation of Wall Street execs. They even wrote in a provision intended to stop golden bailouts. Well, that was all good and well—until the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision that has ended up leaving a giant loophole for corporate executives.

EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Well, I think these large institutions think they're beyond accountability. It appears there were no management structures in place in the Treasury Department to keep track of exactly what these banks were doing with the money. The money was given. The top banks were given $25 billion each, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, banks that protested they didn't need the money. They were asked to take this money anyway It was expected that they would convert these capital infusions into lending.

BILL MOYERS: But they didn't. They got-

EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: They didn't.

BILL MOYERS: -the money but they didn't lend it. Bank of America was not lending the money-
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: They weren't lending the money. They were busily making tactical acquisitions.

BILL MOYERS: The ideology is that trickle-down economics will work and that the market will eventually correct the excesses? Is that what you think that ideology is? That's the bubble they live in on Wall Street, right?

EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: It's that confluence of belief, the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the White House, all believing that the markets would correct. So that in the year between August of 2007 and September of 2008, we had a natural experiment. And the natural experiment was the markets did not correct. They crashed and burned. And as a result, the government had to come in to rescue with the taxpayers' dollars.