According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, however, the motivations go much deeper and may involve that Goldman Sachs is misusing TARP bailout funds as a “political weapon” to bully smaller banks.Back in 2008, Goldman Sachs received $10 billion from the US Treasury under the TARP program that had been established to bail out failing commercial banks. The firm was neither failing nor a commercial bank, but the Secretary of the Treasury at that time, Henry Paulson, was a former Goldman Sachs chairman, and that was sufficient.
There was one catch, however, which was that “Goldman would have to return a chunk of the public’s billions in the form of loans for low-income customers and members of its ‘community’, as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Problem: Goldman has, it seems, no low-income customers, nor a ‘community’. Goldman was directed to find poor people and a community and hand over some cash.”
Goldman complied in part by giving $5000 to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union for its 25th anniversary.
Wow! Big spender. Can that even be considered to fulfill the requirement? And better yet - then they took that piddling sum away when the credit union advertised that it would honor OWS at the party. (Emphasis mine.)
Video report seemingly showing a woman being arrested in front of CitiBank when she tried to go in and close out her account to move it to a small bank, and claiming that Goldman Sachs threatened legal action against the credit union for honoring OWS before pulling their $5,000....
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