Thanks to reader Mark, I came across this report by US Senator Bernie Sanders about a GAO audit of the Federal Reserve that reveals that it secretly loaned out over $16 trillion dollars to American banks and businesses all over the world. The audit also revealed that there were people on the board of the Fed who seemed to be benefiting from the Fed’s actions.

Such audits of the Fed are a new thing this year, thanks to legislation sponsored by Sanders. It is ridiculous that such secrecy has been allowed for so long to institutions that are publicly funded and use public money.

Herman Cain took a beating for the fact that his 9-9-9 tax plan would raise taxes on low and middle income people while giving rich people a huge tax break.

So he has tweaked it and now says that for the poor it will be a 9-0-9 plan. You can be sure that such ad-hoc lurches due to pressure has produced another half-baked plan that will also be roundly attacked. So what’s next?

This gives me an excuse to cue up the Beatles.

Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland list them (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs) and explain why they are so bad and how they get their way.

Currently, Bank of America is engaged in yet another effort to swindle the taxpayers. When it took over Merrill Lynch it also acquired all the toxic derivatives the latter owned. Bank of America is an FDIC-insured institution, which means that its deposits are taxpayer-insured, while Merrill Lynch is not. Now Bank of America is apparently trying to quietly shift the Merrill Lynch liabilities over to Bank of America so that the taxpayers will bear whatever loss occurs,

Of course the Federal Reserve, which has already used enormous amounts of taxpayer funds to bail out the banks, supports the move but the FDIC is balking, fearing getting stuck with a huge bill.

Jon Stewart interviews Ellen Schultz, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of Retirement Heist, who explains how corporations, with the connivance of the government that was willing to provide them with the necessary loopholes, looted the pension funds of 44 million of its workers to enrich their top executives, thus transforming pension fund surpluses of $250 billion into deficits.

The behavior of the oligarchy and their total lack of scruples in destroying the lives of ordinary hard-working people go well beyond greed. They are sociopaths.

The Wall Street Journal has a handy calculator that lets you know.

The median household income is $43,000 while the top 1% consists of those earning over $506,600.

Herman Cain has been getting a lot of mileage about his ‘simple’ 9-9-9 tax plan. Jared Bernstein says that it will result in a big tax increase on the middle class and a huge tax cut for the very wealthy. I have seen similar conclusions reached by other analysts.

While this is a goal of the oligarchy, they would like to achieve their goal in more subtle ways. The very transparency of Cain’s scheme is likely to be the thing that pricks his bubble and sends him back into the ranks of the stragglers for the Republican nomination.

If you were paying close attention, you may have noticed that yesterday Congress, which is supposed to be locked in partisan gridlock that has paralyzed it, managed in a bipartisan manner to pass quite easily and with little fanfare major free-trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. The House passed the South Korea agreement by a vote of 278 to 151, Panama by 300 to 129 and Colombia by 262-167. In the Senate, the South Korean plan passed by a vote of 83 to 15, Panama by 77 to 22 and Colombia by 66 to 33.

Whether one thinks such agreements are good for everyone or not, the oligarchy definitely favors them because anything that enables them to move goods, money, and manufacturing capacity more easily and cheaply across borders enables them to make more money.

These agreements had been negotiated by George W. Bush but had stalled in Congress because of opposition from the labor movement that they would cost jobs here. This time they passed easily, thanks to the support of president Obama, which illustrates once again that the oligarchy can sometimes get more of what it wants under a Democratic administration than under a Republican one. It also illustrates once again how noisy partisan gridlock only comes into play when it comes to doing things that benefit ordinary people, and miraculously melts away when the oligarchy’s interests are involved.

This timeline shows how we arrived at the situation where we now have just a few big banks controlling almost the entire financial sector.

(Via Balloon Juice.)

From political cartoonist Ted Rall, I learn that 15% of Americans are on food stamps and of those, 40% are employed.

It is interesting how people react to such statistics. My reaction was that it showed that there are a large number of poor people in the US (about 45 million) and that employers are paying a lot of workers (about 18 million) far too little.

But I am well aware that there will be others for whom this same statistics will send the message that the government is far too generous with food stamps and should cut back.

Matt Taibbi describes how the Obama administration and the Fed are part of the group trying to put the screws on New York’s attorney general Eric Schneiderman to get him to agree to a sweetheart deal that will let the banksters escape with a slap on the wrist for all their mortgage-backed fraud.

David Atkins explains how the Obama administration and others had Schneiderman removed from a group of state attorneys general that were investigating mortgage abuses because he was not satisfied with the deal being offered. (Thanks to Peter G.)

I wrote about this before here.