Bailout Progressive Plans

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.

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 Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

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:

By David Swanson

If you're like me you find it at least a bit disturbing that we're giving trillions of dollars to save the economy to the very people who wrecked it, and more disturbing that we're doing so without any solid basis for expecting to get much of it back and without making fundamental changes to prevent a repetition. But if you're like me, you also aren't 100 percent certain how a credit default swap works with a cubed collateralized debt obligation, much less whether such a monstrosity needs to be eliminated or reformed. What to do?

Simon Johnson believes the best way to break up the banks is through anti-trust enforcement:

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division should be called in to investigate the increasing market share of major banks (remember that Bear Stearns and Lehman are gone), the anti-competitive practices of some market leaders (there’s more than one predatory way to force your rivals into bankruptcy and to move closer to monopoly power), and the broader increase in economic and political power of the biggest financial services players over the past 20 years and the last 6 months - this is potentially damaging to all consumers and, obviously, to all taxpayers.

By Dave Lindorff

Six months after the failed Bush administration effort to "rescue"
the US financial system, and after two months of failed efforts by his
own new administration, at an expense to the American public of several
trillion dollars and counting, the Obama administration is announcing
plans to blow another $1 trillion in a massive taxpayer giveaway to
investors who will be subsidized in an effort to get them to buy the
so-called toxic assets on the books of the nation's biggest banks.

The problem with this plan is that its goal--getting these zombie banks to start lending again--is not going to work.

This weekend we finally pried loose some secrets from AIG, the insurance giant that has cost U.S. taxpayers more in bailouts than any other financial institution.

First we learned 2/3 of our $160 billion went to foreign banks. Then we learned the  criminals in AIG's Financial Products Division - who did more to create the meltdown than anyone else in the world - are extorting enormous bonuses from the Treasury Secretary, under threat of blowing up the world financial system.

For the next few days, Washington and Wall Street will debate AIG bonuses. It's a powerful issue, but it really is a distraction because the total cost of the bailout is not $1 billion, it's in the trillions. And the key question is: who is going to pay these trillions - America's struggling middle class or the rich?

Obviously the rich should pay. First, they are the only Americans who can afford it. Second, they are the ones who are benefiting most from the trillions in bailouts, whether they are investment bankers guzzling $750 champagne or their investor clients.

So we need to tax the rich. But how? I propose a temporary surtax for millionaires. It would start immediately and end when all of the trillions in bailout funds are repaid in full.

Sacramento's homeless shelters are full, so people who lost their homes and jobs are pitching tents and living like hobos: 

Yet 15% of all homes are vacant. Can't America find a way to put homeless people into those vacant homes???