Starbucks Launches ‘Jobs For USA’ PR Stunt With Wall Street Front Group

Opportunity Finance Network is backed by very banks who screwed struggling Americans by refusing to loan bailout funds

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Starbucks has gone on a charm offensive with the launch of its ‘Let’s Create Jobs For USA’ initiative, which will encourage people to donate $5 dollars every time they buy a coffee towards a fund aimed at helping poor people get loans.

However, the group running the scheme is funded by the very same big banks who received trillions in bailout funds that are still deliberately withholding loans from struggling Americans in order to make money off the interest on deposits held with the Federal Reserve.

“Starting Nov. 1, Starbucks will begin collecting donations of $5 or more from customers to stimulate U.S. job growth through its “Jobs for USA” program,” reports the Associated Press.

Customers who make the donation will receive a wristband with the word “Indivisible” printed on it.

As expected, the establishment media has spun the move as a rare example of a transnational corporation giving something back to the people, when in reality the move will largely benefit the Wall Street institutions and giant banks who fund the Opportunity Finance Network.

What the corporate press is loathe to report is the fact that the OFN, while posing as a philanthropic financial refuge for poor Americans, is little more than a Wall Street front organization. It is bankrolled by the likes of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley.

“The ‘Create Jobs for USA’ fund has been made in partnership with Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), a group of private financial institutions that provide affordable loans to low-income people and communities,” reports the Daily Mail.

However, the OFN’s financial backers include the very banks and financial institutions, JP Morgan prime amongst them, who deliberately withheld loans paid for with bailout money that were supposed to kick start the US economy.

After former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson sold Congress on the initial $700 billion dollar bailout by promising it would be used to buy up banks’ toxic assets and unfreeze credit markets, as soon as the legislation was passed the money was used instead to prop up failing banks as part of a re-capitalization process, and millions of Americans were denied desperately needed loans. Most of the bailout money, which went on to total trillions, went to foreign banks.

The Federal Reserve made at least $16 trillion in secret loans to big banks including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, the very groups behind the Opportunity Finance Network, and not a penny of that money went to ordinary Americans.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“The dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans,” the New York Times acknowledged back in 2008.

Indeed, banks that received bailout money did not increase their lending to struggling Americans, and refused to lend to smaller local banks, causing the banks to collapse and allowing the likes of Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup to pick off their competition.

The Federal Reserve is still paying big banks not to lend the bailout money, including those behind the OFN group, by giving them interest on “excess reserves” held with the Fed.

For Starbucks to claim that it is collecting donation money from the American people to help fund affordable loans for poor people and then handing that money to a group completely bankrolled by the very entities who refused to provide affordable loans at the height of the financial crisis, and took trillions of dollars in secret from the Fed, is the height of hypocrisy.

Starbucks and Wall Street have often found themselves on the same page before, particularly when it comes to supporting the Obama administration.

Back in 2008, the Wall Street-owned Obama administration attempted to hand Starbucks a piece of the bailout pie when Nancy Pelosi introduced a bill that would have halted the closure of 600 Starbucks coffee shops by using millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for ‘Venti Vouchers’ that would have been usable by Starbucks customers in hard hit areas.

Starbucks also scratched Obama’s back by offering a free cup of coffee for anyone who voted on the day of the last Presidential election , knowing of course that the vast majority of Starbucks customers who live in major metropolitan areas are Democrats and would vote for Obama.

The company also offered free coffee to those who offered to pledge their allegiance to Obama’s creepy ‘national civilian security force’ proposal back in January 2009.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

This article was posted: Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 1:02 pm

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