Wall Street

By Dave Lindorff

If you are sitting in class taking a test, and you’ve chosen to sit amongst your bone-headed, slacker friends, don’t turn to them for help when you can’t figure out of any of the answers. They may all tell you the same thing, but they’ll all be wrong.

That’s the situation President Obama finds himself in today in the White House. Having surrounded himself with the very Wall Street con men who set up the crooked game that led to the current financial crisis and economic collapse, and finding that the lousy advice they have been giving him since last January has left the country still mired in deepening economic decline, with the banks still not lending and unemployment still mounting, and with growing signs that instead of bottoming out and starting to recover, the economy is threatening to fall a second time, to new lows and higher unemployment, Obama has turned to the same rotten advisors for answers.

The 15 Biggest Congressional Recipients Of Wall Street Campaign Cash | Huffington Post

Reforming Wall Street is a hot topic on Capitol Hill these days. Congress is currently weighing two financial reform bills that would, to varying degrees, reshape the way the financial system is regulated.

Still, Wall Street's influence in Washington appears to be as strong as ever. After all, it was just last spring that Senator Dick Durbin, frustrated by pushback on bankruptcy reform, denounced the financial sector's influence on the Senate: the banks, he said, "they frankly own the place." The Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks money in politics, reports that financial industries -- the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, specifically -- have been one of the biggest benefactors to Congress over the past two decades,,,

We [Huffington Post] took a look at the Center for Responsive Politics's database, OpenSecrets.org, to see which members of Congress have so far received Wall Street money for the 2010 election cycle. The answers may surprise you. Check out our slideshow of the top 15 recipients and choose which politician may be taking too much money from Wall Street. Read more, view the slideshow.

What: End the Fed Rally

When: Sunday, November 22, 2009, 1-4 PM

Where: Charlotte Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, 530 E Trade St Charlotte, NC 28202

How to Raise $140 Billion a Year From Wall Street Banks
By Dean Baker | Counter Punch

The deficit hawk crew, famous for missing the $8 trillion housing bubble that wrecked the economy, is now on the warpath pressing the case for a big new national sales tax. They claim that the country badly needs additional revenue to address projected budget shortfalls.

While we may need additional revenue at some point, it makes far more sense to impose a financial transactions tax (FTT), which would primarily hit the Wall Street banks that gave us this disaster, than to tax the consumption of ordinary working families. We can raise large amounts of money by taxing the speculation of the Wall Street high-flyers while barely affecting the sort of financial dealings that most of us do in our daily lives.

The logic of an FTT is simple. It would impose a modest fee on trades of stocks, futures, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments. The United Kingdom currently puts a 0.25 percent tax on the sale or purchase of shares of stock. This has very little impact on people who buy stock with the intent of holding it for a long period of time.

For example, if someone buys $10,000 of stock, they will pay $25 in tax at the time of purchase. If they sell the stock ten years later for $20,000 then they will have to pay $50 in tax. The total tax would be equivalent to an increase of 0.8 percentage points in the capital gains tax. Read more.

Call It Socialism
By Antony Currie and Rob Cox | NY Times

Here’s a shocker: Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only self-described socialist in the Senate, has put forth the most capitalistic proposal yet for banking reform. The senator’s Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act proposes that if a firm is so big that its failure would threaten the economy or financial system, it should be broken up, not protected by the promise of a bailout.

That sounds simple and logical, yet none of the competing proposals floating around Capitol Hill — those from the White House or the House Financial Services Committee, or others expected this week from Christopher Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman — have been so explicit in calling for an end to government rescues for private companies.

Of course, Senator Sanders’s bill is intended to be provocative. In two pages it outlines sweeping powers for the Treasury secretary to identify banks, hedge funds and insurers that are too big to fail. Read more.

Take Sen. Sanders poll on Wall Street. What do you think?

Sign the Petition to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Here's part of the text:

Too Big to Fail is Too Big to Exist

Financial institutions that are “too big to fail” played a major role in undermining the American economy and driving our country into a severe recession.

Financial institutions that are “too big to fail” put taxpayers on the hook for a $700 billion bailout and more than $2 trillion from the Federal Reserve in virtually zero interest loans.

Huge financial institutions have become so big that the four largest banks in America (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup) now issue one out of every two mortgages; two out of three credit cards; and hold $4 out of every $10 in bank deposits in the country.

Just five banks in America (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) own a staggering 95% of the $290 trillion in derivatives held at commercial banks. Derivatives are risky side bets made by Wall Street gamblers that led to the $182 billion bailout of AIG, the $29 billion bailout that allowed JP Morgan Chase to acquire Bear Stearns, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The concentration of ownership in the financial services industry has resulted in higher bank fees and interest rates that consumers are forced to pay for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. Read more, sign the petition.

Read both pages of Sen. Sanders' proposed legislation.

By Dave Lindorff

With word being leaked out over the weekend that our Nobel Peace Prize President is close to announcing plans to escalate the US troop level in the Afghanistan War by 50%, we are about to have perhaps the ultimate of ironies—a president announcing a big step-up in American war-making on November 11, the day known around much of the Western world as Armistice Day.

While modern Americans might not know it, with all the boom and bombast and mindless flag-waving featured in the military parades popular in today’s warrior culture, November 11 was originally established by Congress back in 1919, a year after the day the guns of World War I finally went silent over the blood-drenched fields of Europe in what was once, in a naïve spasm of optimism, referred to as the War to End All Wars. In declaring the national holiday Armistice Day, Congress said it was to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world peace.”

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.

British break up several bailed-out banks
Some want U.S. to follow suit to increase financial competition | Washington Post

The British government announced Tuesday that it will break up parts of major financial institutions bailed out by taxpayers, highlighting a growing divide across the Atlantic over how to deal with the massive banks that were partially nationalized during the height of the financial crisis.

The British government -- spurred on by European regulators -- is forcing the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock to sell off parts of their operations. The Europeans are calling for more and smaller banks to increase competition and eliminate the threat posed by banks so large that they must be rescued by taxpayers, no matter how they conducted their business, in order to avoid damaging the global financial system.

The move to downsize some of Britain's largest banks comes as U.S. politicians are debating whether American banks should also be required to shrink. Read more.

America the Betrayed
By Richard Cook

...Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

By Dave Lindorff

If you listen to the happy-talk folks at Treasury and the Fed, and on the tube, you’d think things had finally turned a corner. The economy grew at a 3.5% annualized rate in the third quarter ended September 30. “The Economy is Back in Gear” shouted the headline on an article by CNN senior writer Chris Isadore. “The recession ended unofficially in September,” said a reporter on NPR.

Watch the entire PBS Frontline report online.

Not Too Big to Jail - Protest in Chicago

Last week, we got a slew of submissions to our "Foundation for Reform" paper! Consensus starts to crack. We just need to keep building the momentum.

So, have you heard about what promises to be the largest protests against the banks yet - Showdown in Chicago on October 25th? All ANWF members who want to go and need more details should contact us. As much as we can, we need to show up! We expect thousands of people to show, we hope you will too. The protest is being organized by dozens of organizations, including ANWF, and will take place outside of the American Bankers Association's annual meeting. You can help at this critical moment, find rides, organize a contingent and go. We'll help you meet up with other ANWF members. We'll have even more info for you next week, but the time to make a decision about going is now.

Our friends at the Center for Media and Democracy recently started working on bank reform too with a new go-to site for updates on the fight: www.BanksterUSA.org. Their "Action Center" is a hotbed of popular campaigning on the crisis, helping us to ramp up the campaign to demand the Federal Reserve fix what's broken (see the ANWF petition):

Fight the Big Boys on Wall Street at www.BanksterUSA.org.

"Fight the Big Boys on Wall Street at www.BanksterUSA.org

The Banksters have pulled off the biggest heist of all time. They have crashed the global economy, throwing 7.5 million Americans out of work, emptying retirement and college funds and forcing many into hardship and homelessness. Yet they continue to be rewarded with trillions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their Bankster bonuses, they prey upon the vulnerable with ballooning bank fees and macabre investment schemes such as "death bonds" and their taxpayer-subsidized lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill to prevent the passage of any meaningful reform of the financial system.

The Smackdown Starts Now

This fall is a critical time. Congress is now taking up a series of bills to restore confidence in the financial sector. If you want to rein in the Banksters and if you think America deserves better than a "boom and bail" economy, you need to muscle up and weigh in. Only you can tell Congress to prioritize the interests of Main Street over the interests of Wall Street.

Bust the Banksters at BanksterUSA

www.BanksterUSA.org is the go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fights in Congress and for progressive netroots campaigning against the big boys on Wall Street.

Our "Action Center" is a hotbed of popular campaigning on the crisis.

We know that it is wrong that a full year since the Wall Street meltdown no employee of any major American bank or blue chip financial institution is behind bars. Compare this to the Savings and Loan crisis 20 years ago. No less than 1,852 S&L officials were prosecuted and 1,072 were jailed.

Our motto? Too big to fail, but not too big for jail! Click here to email the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI and tell them to get cracking!

Administration Refutes Geithner and Summers' Approval of BofA-Merrill Merger
Internal Bank Documents Show Obama Aides Were 'On Board'
By Matthew Jaffe | ABC News

"The Bank of America-Merrill Lynch merger was the outcome of a collaborative effort orchestrated by Ken Lewis, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Larry Summers," Bardella said in a statement. "As a result of this collaboration, the taxpayers ended up footing the bill so Bank of America didn't have to absorb Merrill's losses." ...

In January, when the Obama administration took over, Summers became National Economic Council director and Geithner replaced Henry Paulson as Treasury secretary.

During last year's transition period between presidential regimes, Obama economic aides Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers signed off on the Bush administration's deal to bail out Bank of America if it finalized its merger with ailing investment bank Merrill Lynch, according to bank documents obtained Tuesday by ABC News.

However, both the White House and Treasury today disputed that Summers and Geithner ever agreed to any financial decisions made during this time period.

"Mr. Summers received occasional briefings by Federal Reserve officials during the transition, but he did not make, review, or approve decisions regarding financial institutions during that time," White House spokesman Matthew Vogel said in a statement. Read more.

$140 billion! Record Payday for Wall Street
Goldman Sachs 2009 Bonuses Could Buy Insurance for 1.7 Million Families
50 Million Americans Live in Poverty
By David DeGraw | Amped Status

The facts are that $30,000 per person is unaccounted for - that’s $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the US - which means if you have a family of five, your family has lost $150,000 to Goldman Sachs.

Paraphrasing a very insightful quote: ‘The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Goldman Sachs, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such a magnitude entails is left out of the mainstream media, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.’

The American middle class, once the only effective counter weight to Wall Street greed, has been decimated. Over 25 million people, in what was the US middle class, are now in full-blown crisis mode and urgently need to increase their income. Read more.

On October 17, 2009 on the 8th anniversary of the attack on Afghanistan Bay area trade unionists spoke out against the continuing US war in Afghanistan and wars in Iraq and around the world. Trade unionists included Betty Olson-Jones, president of Oakland Education Association and Jack Heyman, Executive Board ILWU Local 10.
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