Help me find hard-hitting facts on the recent financial collapse please

April 1, 2009 1:47 PM

Please help me find facts about the banking/economic crisis and the impact of the financial meltdown for a demonstration against the no-strings-attached billions for banks while Americans suffer. Your help will be rewarded with a just and fair financial system that works for all Americans and not just Wall Street. Thanks so much!

I'm helping organize one of the April 11th rallies for A New Way Forward, previously discussed on Metafilter here. These rallies are being staged across the country by grassroots activists and concerned citizens to demand a restructuring of the failed financial institutions and an end to the no-strings-attached bailout billions that have failed to help anyone but the insolvent banks and financial institutions that put us in this economic crisis in the first place.

Part of our demonstration in Raleigh, NC will potentially involve a "nest-egg" hunt to play off the Easter holiday weekend where participants will search for their now-emaciated financial nest eggs. We're trying to fill these eggs with hard-hitting facts about the impact of America's oligarchical financial system that has amassed unprecedented wealth at the top and left the rest of America on the brink of financial ruin. We're hoping to find 25 - 40 hard-hitting facts along the lines of:

Bank of America has collected $45 billion in federal bailout funds - your taxpayer money - yet they plan to lay off over 30,000 workers while handing out $5.2 million in corporate bonuses.

I'm really hoping for more personal facts about foreclosure & bankruptcy rates to contrast with the lavish spending and counter-productive investments these groups are using our bailout funds for. I'm sure there's a list of these somewhere and I hate to ask others do my work for me, but this demonstration is truly a grassroots movement and, as such, we're all doing four people's jobs at once. Your help with this will be so appreciated. Thanks!

--- Willie

posted by willie11 to work & money (2 comments total)

[removed multiple links to the event - please put it in your profile if you want people to look at it]
posted by jessamyn at 2:17 PM on April 1

You might want to investigate your entire paradigm. This money is not "no-strings-attached", the money is not "ours". And perhaps give an example of what your new framework might look like.

The bailout money was either a loan, a purchase of equity in the company, or a purchase of assets in the company, depending on the situation. Hardly no strings attached.

And make sure you use honest numbers in your factoids- assuming your example is true, it should read $45,000 million in bailout funds, and $5.2 million in bonuses. And really, BofA is one of the good guys here- they took over a number of failing banks. They didn't need to do that, they did it because they were asked to and because they thought they could profit from it. I do not believe that has happened (yet).
posted by gjc at 4:29 PM on April 1 [3 favorites]