As we watched the dangerous scenes of protesters interacting with riot police and the ransacking of banks and businesses in cities across the United States this past weekend, a warning from the 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, came to mind:
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
Two of those systems of oppression are the Wall Street mega banks and the Federal Reserve, which have institutionalized enforced inequality in the United States, particularly in minority communities. Let’s start with Citigroup....
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Having a black man in the Oval Office and a black man in the U.S. Attorney General’s office (Eric Holder) when Obama was President helped to mollify the outrage and anger as black communities across America saw their wealth evaporate in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010 – an era of corruption on Wall Street that has had no precedent since the late 1920s.
Proving that the Trump administration is not an aberration in Swamp Building, the Obama administration allowed a Citigroup executive to hand pick key staff and cabinet positions, according to leaked emails. Citigroup was receiving the largest bank bailout in U.S. history at the time. No one involved in those emails has denied their veracity. See here and here.
...In addition to the $2.5 trillion in revolving loans that Citigroup received secretly from the Fed (the loans were revealed in 2011 by a government audit), Citigroup also received $45 billion directly from the taxpayer ...when Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered an analysis of how Wall Street banks had conspired against wealth building by blacks, she was censored by major business media, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, Reuters, the Financial Times and CNBC. ...She said this was preceded by a U.S. government conspiracy against them from 1934 to 1968.
Warren also cited a study in the Boston Globe which found that “the median net worth of white families in Boston is $247,000” while the median net worth for a black family “is $8.00.” That’s not a typo. Warren said “That’s something that all Americans, regardless of race, should be ashamed of.”
What is the Fed doing today to level the playing field? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it’s doubling down on its 2008 bailout policies to broaden the wealth disparities in America.