At my union meeting last night we had a big discussion about how the Local (of the Carpenters Union) spends our money, and in particular how we need to release more funds for the Out-of-Work carpenters. I am out of work, after 10-years with one company. The general mood was the union collectively in not sufficiently addressing the issue of the needs of the unemployed. But we were talking about pennies, compared to the biblical-sized-flood of cash to the banks.
The Financial Times estimates the banks will make $37.5 billion on fees from people who go overdrawn on their accounts, overwhelmingly the poor. (That figure is $37.5 billion NOT S37.5 million!)
Then today “we” (I say we, because “we” are paying for it) suffered the biggest bank collapse of the year. Colonial BancGroup, a property lender based in Montgomery, Alabama, had about $25bn of assets according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC). The collapse is expected to cost the FDIC about $2.8bn. The FDIC also entered into a loss-sharing agreement on about $15bn of Colonial's assets with BB&T, a North Carolina-based bank.
Firstly, who knows about this? Who will hear about it? It’ll be buried in the newspapers. Why? It's like the overdrawn fees, they're hidden because your gonna pay for it against your will.
But let’s look at what you could do with $2.8billion. For one year we could hire 60,000 teachers that could teach (at 15 students per class) almost a million children. While the FDIC and the Feds write these checks, how difficult is it for us to even get one music teacher in our local elementary school or one more teacher.
Banks. Big business. Corrupt Politics. These are a few of my favorite things (to despise).
1 comment:
There is a real crisis in commercial real estate also. A huge developer has walked away from three buidings it owned owing about $1.5 billion. We areeintereng the same situation in commerical real estate that existed in the sub prime.
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