What's wrong with this picture?

[OffWithTheirHeads]

Front page, San Jose Mercury News. Saturday, July 18.

Valley's jobless rate hits 11.8%. Unemployment at nearly 60 year high.

Front page, San Jose Mercury News business section. Saturday, July 18.

Billions of dollars in profits for banks.

This isn't class warfare folks. It's a fucking massacre!

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. Have the banks paid us back what we lent them?

[Hydra]

2. Someone rightly pointed out that it's not that simple

Even if they pay the Tarp money back, they're getting HUGE support by the Federal Reserve that we don't know about, because The Fed won't tell us.

They can borrow money at almost zero interest(or perhaps even at zero) and loan it to us at any rate they'd like...if they were actually bothered to loan to us. Also, the way they've gobbled up and consolidated by controlling who got bailed and who didn't, they have a much larger slice of the pie.

Capitalism at it's best- subsidized by taxpayers.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

3. Is anyone keeping an eye on them?

[Hydra]

5. That's a murky question

We're certainly watching, but we can't do anything about it. The Federal Reserve is a private entity, so at the end of the day, they can do anything they want. Add to that the fact that Goldman and JP Morgan seem to own the Gov't on some level, and while there are lots of people watching the looting, not much is being done about it other than a few comments.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

6. More people need to highlight this fact

[DefenseLawyer]

4. Banks never stopped making money

It was their balance sheets that were destroyed because through greed and hubris they owned a lot of paper that went from being valued in the billions to essentially zero. What the government has done was let them take all that "bad debt" off the books. And then Bobby Ewing shows up in the shower and the banks' bad dream is over. Now it's back to business as usual.