Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi has a thorough write up on AIG, Paulson and the systematic transfer of wealth from America’s tax payers to the financial sector. It’s rather lengthy and worth at least a quick skim.  It names a lot of the people who are responsible for the current mess and exposes the disgusting ways these people and institutions are still destroying the financial wealth of the government.

The Big Takeover: Rolling Stone

Most people haven’t heard of Maiden Lane, which is an organization created to hand out the TARP funds to the various recieving firms. What I had not known was that there were a number of other firms created that are handing out even more funds:

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn’t taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

These short-tern loans from the FED to the recipients are normally disclosed in a report known as the H4 report each week. As the financial crisis started we saw payments of around $33 billion being handed out; as things grew worse it reached $125. Then, at the start of the year, zero. Not because the funds weren’t being handed out, it was instead being handed out by:

“Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there’s also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG. “

And further in the article:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.