Stop Me if This Sounds Familiar

Imagine a financial giant with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Their job is to extend loans to those in need during the most trying of times. Yet they choose to hoard almost twice as much as they loan out, deying loans even to those who kick in toward their bottom line.

Sounds like a bailed out bank, doesn't it?

Now imagine this same entity leaning on the poorer economic strata, basically browbeating them for what amounts to protection money, using enforcers to essentially extort this money and giving out petty privileges in return and sending out other enforcers to chase down those who don't repay their loans?

Sounds like Tony Soprano's mafia, don't it?

You'd be wrong on both counts. In both cases it's the Army Emergency Relief.

Then they have the fucking nerve to defend hoarding $117 million by saying, "Look at the stock market. (Without the large reserve) we'd be in very serious trouble."

Yeah, thank God we're not quite there, yet, asswipe.