Corporate Bailouts

I just read Danny Schechter's latest, "The Crime of Our Time," which ads to his latest film, "Plunder," and a series of related books.

It's useful to remember that Congress and the presidents bailed out with our money people who appear guilty of serious crimes, and is now debating whether to slightly regulate their ongoing crimes, but criminal prosecutions are still not flowing down like waters into Wall Street.

Schechter's book reads like a long blog entry blockquoting numerous other blogs.  It's not an indictment, but a wakeup call to prosecutors and to the rest of us.

Wall Street's gone wild and Congress seems disinclined to rein it in. The Justice Department may stray slightly from the president's goal of "looking forward, not backward." But there's a weakness in the master plan for Goldman Sachs' domination of the world: Wall Street is in New York State, and the leading candidate for New York State Attorney General is Elizabeth Holtzman.

If Liz runs on a campaign to clean up Wall Street, regulate it, and deter crimes by enforcing laws, she will likely gain the backing of many national organizations, including the labor movement, which share this agenda. And a campaign that garners support, and funding, nationally would add significantly to her advantage, and to our chances of combatting the kleptocracy in courts of law.

This from the Senate:

SENS. BROWN, KAUFMAN TO HOLD NEWS CONFERENCE CALL ON WALL STREET REFORM Senators to Announce Introduction of Bill Ensuring Banks Don’t Become ‘Too Big to Fail;” Have Resources to Cover their Losses Main Street Alliance to Release Letter Signed by 100+ Small Businesses on Need for Wall Street Reform WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE) will hold a news conference call tomorrow [WEDNESDAY] to discuss Wall Street reform. They will be joined by the Main Street Alliance, which will be releasing a letter signed by more than 100 small businesses urging tough Wall Street reform. The senators will explain why reform is need to hold Wall Street accountable, prevent future bailouts, and protect American homes, jobs, pensions, and businesses. Brown and Kaufmann will announce the introduction of new legislation that would place reasonable caps on the size of our nation’s behemoth financial institutions. Their bill, The SAFE Banking Act of 2010, would also ensure that banks have the resources to cover their losses.

This from A New Way Forward:

Tomorrow, Senators Kaufman and Brown will be introducing a Break Up The Banks bill. No one can beat our excitement over this -- we stood up for structural reform for over a year and we've been heard! This bill can mean the largest reform to the power of large corporations in 80 years.

We have maybe a month to two months on financial reform in Congress. This is an important moment for slaying a huge part of political corruption.

Please stay tuned and share your ideas for reform.

By David Swanson

Michael Moore's movie motivated me to bring this out. Here's a theme song for Capitalism that I wrote at the time of Paulson's Plunder. Here it is sung by Timbrewolf:

From Michael Moore:

For two months, we've sat and watched the rabid right achieve the
unimaginable: Derail universal health care and send the Democrats in
Congress running for cover. Many have asked, "How did this happen? How
could a small minority of angry people control the public agenda? Where
is the majority's response? Why the silence?"

I don't have the answers to all these questions. But I do know
this: I've had enough. As far as I'm concerned, Tea Bag Nation ends
today -- at noon to be precise. For that's when I set loose, on a
thousand screens across this great land, a movie I've made that's so
relentless, so dangerous, so damning in its humor, that it will -- I
can only hope -- do what no movie has done before: Take them down, take
them all down, once and for all.

By Dave Lindorff

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program
(TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets
had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he
extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new
President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of
the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

http://www.livestream.com/anewwayforward

The webcasting events are:
New York City, 6/8 at 7PM with Leo Hindery, Les Leopold, Alice Kessler-Harris at the Tank, (webcasted)

San Francisco, 6/10 at 6:30PM with Ernesto Dal Bo, Doug Rucskoff, Donald Goldmacher at Mechanic Library, (webcasted)

New York City, 6/10 at 7PM video screening with Danny Shechter, New Roosevelt Institute, Working Families at Le Poisson Rouge (webcasted)

Washington DC, 6/11 at 9:00AM with Simon Johnson, John Taylor, Nancy Cleeland, Mike Lux at the Capitol Hill, (one hour broadcast delay)

By David Swanson

I've just interviewed Les Leopold, who blames the recent financial disasters on trends that began over 30 years ago, explains how a great deal of Wall Street's "investing" has had as much connection to the real economy as fantasy baseball has to baseball, diagnoses the failures of labor and the left to resist the financialization of the economy, views the current situation with genuine optimism as a rare moment in which we might be able to make necessary changes to regulate finance and to shift money from a tiny group of billionaires to the rest of society, and explains why that latter step is needed to stabilize any economy.

With teach-ins planned everywhere on June 10th and people trying to educate each other on exactly what just happened to trillions of our children's dollars, you could do a lot worse than to gather some friends together, read or listen to, and discuss, this interview, and then take appropriate actions.

Here's the audio in an mp3. It's a little under an hour.

David Swanson interviewing Les Leopold: