Every day, if you pay attention, we can get a teachable moment. Today’s teachable moment gives us this: if you are a CEO of a bank, a CEO who makes millions of dollars, and you are in financial trouble — trouble of your own making — you can ring up the White House and, presto, the coffers of the Federal Reserve open up to extend you loans in the billions of dollars. On the other hand, if you are a worker making a modest income, or you are now retired, and you live in a city ravaged by the so-called “free market”, a city that files for bankruptcy, and you ask the White House for help, you are told, “sorry, buddy, you are on your own.”

That’s the message from this:

Top leaders of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main federation of labor unions, on Thursday called on President Obama and the Congress to offer an immediate financial infusion to Detroit, which last week became the largest American city ever to file for bankruptcy.

…And White House officials have indicated that solutions to Detroit’s insolvency rest with local leaders and creditors. “While leaders on the ground in Michigan and the city’s creditors understand that they must find a solution to Detroit’s serious financial challenge, we remain committed to continuing our strong partnership with Detroit as it works to recover and revitalize and maintain its status as one of America’s great cities,” a White House spokeswoman said last week.

That comment from the White House is almost criminal. Let’s review.

When the financial crisis hit the country, banks lined up at the Federal Reserve window to get tens of billions of dollars a piece to stay afloat. I don’t want to re-argue here the question about whether money should have gone to banks facing collapse — some people argued that if you let the banks go down, it would carry the entire economy into a very deep depression; my issue, as I’ve written extensively before, is that everyone one of those CEOs, in return for getting TAXPAYER MONEY, should have been forced to resign, along with the boards of directors — and a number of them should have been indicted and gone to jail.

But, not every bank was hurting. A lot of banks, in the U.S. and around the world, lined up for money that was essentially free. As Bernie Sanders found:

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

Among the investigation’s key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. “No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president,” Sanders said.

Contrast that to the message from the White House: no money here.

Pathetic. We are talking about real lives of working people. And the lives of many people in the Detroit community who have been hurt because of one thing: an abusive “free market.”

So, essentially the White House, which made such a big deal about its commitment now to fix the economy and help people who are hurting is saying: bankers matter more, regular workers are on their own.

Disgraceful.

UPDATE: I changed the headline to reflect the real message, harkening back to Gerald Ford’s message to the people of New York back in the 1970s.