I challenge you to read Matt Taibbi's excellent article, The Real Housewives of Wall Street, in the newest Rolling Stone magazine concerning how the Federal Reserve folks sloshed out the money in the follow-up to the bailouts. We have obviously been conned, and nobody knew until the U.S. Senate finally insisted on having the names of those who received the largess from the taxpayers.

It actually took an act of Congress to force the Fed to release the names to the public. Staffers from the House and the Senate are now examining over 21,000 transactions in the Fed's "shadow budget."

Incredible as it sounds, the Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in Mexico, Bahrain, and Bavaria. The Fed made massive purchases of securities in foreign automakers such as Honda, BMW, Volkswagen, Nissan, etc. One might assume that this was to help the US plants of those companies; except for the fact that we were bailing out Chrysler and GM in the US. Does it make sense to aid their competitors?

Also, Muammar Qaddafi received more than 70 loans from the Federal Reserve. The Bahrain bank we sent money to, is owned (59% of it) by the Central Bank of Libya. The US Treasury invoked economic sanctions against Libya, but granted a special exemption to the Central Bank of Libya to keep its assets from being frozen.

Are you outraged yet?

Well, here's another fact. Two women, without any known experience in financial business, became the chief investors in a company called Waterfall TALF Opportunity. They received low interest loans in the amount of 220 million dollars for the purpose of buying up student loans and commercial mortgages. These were supposedly "bad" loans that needed to be taken off the market. But they were the kind of loans, where the government assumes 90% of any loss and the company is liable for the remaining 10%. If there is any gain, the company gets 100%.

Interestingly enough, one of the women was the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. The other was her friend, the widow of Peter Karches, the previous president of Morgan Stanley's investment banking division.

As bad as those examples are, the following seem worse. When the "great recession" was happening, there were many people who had overdue mortgages, credit card bills, car loans, etc. Our government was cautioned by the R's not to help them out because that would be socialism. Heaven forbid!

So what did they do instead? They encouraged banks and investment companies to buy up the bad loans and the government would now help the bankers. Apparently that wasn't socialism. Then we developed non-recourse loans. This meant that the government would guarantee the repayment of the loans if the banks would loan to people who needed access to money.

Our government offered interest free loans to the banks and investment companies for that very purpose. Some of them used the money to purchase treasury notes from the government at higher rates of interest. Two senators (Bernie Sanders and Charles Grassley) have requested the names of, and amounts given out in this manner, but so far the Fed has manged to stonewall this information.

With all this, perhaps you'll understand why I think we need to be loud, adamant, and determined to insist that our government is not broke.

We CAN afford to fund Medicare, Social Security, Head Start, higher education, and all the other people programs we seem so hell-bent on destroying.

We can insist that we have a right, indeed a duty, to speak up and demand that we quit this endless welfare for the rich. Let's go back to the great nation we can be --- where our people are our most important product!