What's That Ticking?

Madame:

Citizen ride-alongs do need far better publicized.  One wonders if the police really want the program all that much, given the poor promotion.

An important side-note to all of this discussion is that effectively no police officers are killed by actually unarmed assailants.  In all 57 cases since 2000, all of the officers were shot with their own weapon that the assailant or assailants had wrestled away from the officer (more argument-strength for those who point out that the UK and other countries whose regular police are unarmed do not have the same problem). It is not even possible to get accurate data of the number of unarmed African-Americans killed by police in the same time period, for that isn’t even reported or tracked for statistical gathering.  The best estimates are that it is many factors greater than 57.

“There are bigger issues than sports,” one person, a sports fan, remarked to a newspaper reporter who was asking why he was protesting the killing of an unarmed person from a race not his.  When enough people feel that way, things will have a great chance to start changing.

On to some of the other issues:

In the budget just passed by Congress and signed by Obama, there were many reprehensible things, from letting wealthy individuals inject even more money into politics, to overriding a citizens’ referendum in DC, to fomenting coal power plants abroad, to allowing companies to push already tired truckers to even more dangerous working hours, to making pre-school and school meals even less nutritious, to cutting funds for students’ Pell grants, to cutting IRS’s ability to audit returns, to undermining pension plans and future retirees.  But the biggest one was the ticking nuclear financial bomb inserted into the US and world economy. 

If one wants to see how the wealthy and big corporations have effectively taken over in the absence of our attention and concern, and in particular, how the finance industry has taken over, there was plenty of evidence before this budget.  From rock solid insider trading convictions being overturned, to Disney and the Koch brothers dodging US taxes via foreign countries, to colossal corporate and wealthy individual loopholes, tax breaks, and subsidies, to Citizens United and McCutcheon  vs. Federal Election Commission. 

But the Wall Street rider that was added to the budget, a rider that had nothing to do with the budget, was egregious in multiple ways.

Starting with the way it was inserted.  In secret, after most everyone thought all the work was done. Caught only by a sharp-eyed staffer.  No way to trace who did it, but obviously it had to have had the approval of key portions of at least House and probably Senate leadership.

And who was it written by?  A Citigroup lobbyist (Citigroup is one of the largest financial corporations), representing Wall Street money organizations.  And guess who called many congressmen to strongly urge (demand) its passage?  The most powerful CEO on Wall Street, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan (and formerly of Citigroup).

What does the provision do?  It removes one of the key protections enacted in response to the financial crisis that brought on the Great Recession and nearly took down the entire world financial system.  A protection that required separation between federally insured deposits and financial institutions’ risky derivatives (financial hedges or “bets”). 

Derivatives are financial gambling.  “This was the epicenter of the crisis.  This is what brought AIG down, what brought Lehman Brothers down,” a former US Treasury official explained to the Washington Post.

Now, US taxpayers (that’s “us”) are on the hook if the derivatives lose money, even if the losses are catastrophic.  But guess who gets to to keep the profits if the

bets pay off?  The financial institutions.

For them, all smiles.  For us, tick, tick, tick…