Accountable America -- I wish - In a TV Ad

Have you seen this ad made by Accountable America -- it gets at how serious the financial crisis is as crimes against American families. They urge New Yorkers to call their rep, Doug Hoffman to pressure him on making the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission do their job of digging out the truth of events leading to the crisis.

We're with them on that.

If you like it, you can help air it by donating.

It's short and sweet.

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Too-Big-To-Fail Legislation Just Came Out

"Financial Services Committee and Treasury Department Release Draft Legislation to Address Systemic Risk, “Too Big to Fail” Institutions"

Read the summary, analysis coming soon.

Seems like Rep. Frank is a pressure point as this bill is way better than suspected (at first glance) and he has been getting a lot of criticism for his flip-floppy nature, especially on bank reform.

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"Break Up The Banks" Has Finally Become a Nationwide Rallying Cry

We have won the first round for reform. A New Way Forward was the first nationally-coordinated grassroots protests (see videos) and platform to demand breaking up the banks. We made the call to people all over the country to protest the way the government favored enlarging big banks instead of saving our jobs and 60 protests and 20 educational forums were organized, all in one-month's time. We started the call for fixing the banking system in a fundamentally structural way through blog posts and outreach - we're getting somewhere and might possibly even get what we want. Our call to break up the banks and our petition to reform the Fed before giving them new powers are both being introduced in different bills. But the real success is in our ability to help educate and inspire minds.

Just a few months ago, most people in DC were too afraid to talk about fixing the fundamental problem between the banks and DC. Today, we are seeing a concensus forming and new bills around the concensus as the first fruits of our group labor. Hundreds of thousands of emails have been sent around the subject, hundreds of thousands of conversations, hundreds of protests have happened almost spontaneously, many tens of educational town halls have educated our communities, hundreds of groups and public leaders have helped in one way or another, hundreds of blog posts and campaigns, and thousands of letters, petitions were sent to Congress because we as a group have made a call to each other to do something about the largest banks. Our original demand - failing banks need to be resolved, reorganized, decentralized is being echoed in many great halls, see what is happening now:

Change is expected to come - the cry "Break Up the Big Banks" is the new hit among Fed Chiefs, Michael Moore, head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair and many more; Obama plans to curb pay for the too-big-to-fail banks; A bill in Congress to let even the most powerful, large banks reap the failures they sowed (but until now are profiting off of) through a resolution authority given to the FDIC. See more in the New York Times..

BUT the big news: a late breaking news tip through Donny Shaw points to an amazing first point of success to our "No New Powers for the Fed" petition - it seems to have helped to change Obama's intentions to have the Fed have most of the regulatory powers over the banks, powers they have not earned, and instead to give the powers based on a sound new idea of a council of regulators -- grr, PERFECT. the main reform bill introduced by the House will give system-wide oversight authority to a council of regulators and some to the FDIC and not the Federal Reserve. This is a strong, strong position for us to act. In addition, a recently converted Republican Senator Shelby has suggested he will call for a reorganization of the Fed so as to root out conflicts of interest with the banks -- we put this kind of reorganization on the list of ways to reform the Fed.

Let's continue to hammer in this sad story of greed and bring it to an end. Please use our tell-a-friend link to tell your friends about how fundamental change is coming to those who have committed crimes against and taken opportunities away from American families.

But even more, what do we do to make the break up the banks message stick? WE have a few campaigns coming up. Let me be the first to tell you that we can transfer out of a big bank into a small bank (even better put it in a credit union), pay off all your credit card debt now, then when you are ready to, cut up your credit cards.

I am looking for the footage of Jimmy Carter asking Americans to do the same in 1980 -- is anyone a part of a library system and has some special privileges or know of where I can get it?

And today, activists are united with us on breaking up the banks -- thousands protest the banks in Chicago crying for breaking up the banks. The most important message we can convey is that the banks must be broken up and conflicts of interests reorganized, including at the Federal Reserve. This is ACTUALLY A SCARY MESSAGE TO THEM and see it as what it really is -- the American public fighting for their own interest. We expect ANWF members and our allies to be there with "Break up the banks!" on your sign. You can see the latest videos here.

And of course, we can protest at home too, print out "Break up the Banks" signs and flyers for friends here.

There's room for artists too -- this artist is encasing Detroit homes in ice as a way to bring attention to the issue.

For more information on breaking up the banks visit our policy page and this blog for easy to understand analysis and the much needed layout for reform.

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Wall Street Insiderism

Here is a guest post from Bill Neil based on a long essay posted on Campaign for America's Future:

"It seems like everyone spends a considerable amount of time on Wall Street “watching their backs,” because the place is ripe with job and bonus anxiety – and insecurity. That’s part of the fascinating story told by anthropologist Karen Ho in her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009). Don’t let the terminology in the title put you off: ethnography is just the term for the summary that comes out of “the fieldwork.” This is one I stumbled across, and I wasn’t sure how it would go after I finished the 38 page Introduction entitled, appropriately, “Anthropology Goes to Wall Street.” But Ms. Ho, a Stanford and Princeton grad who worked at Bankers Trust in 1996-1997 and did her field work from 1996-1999 after she got “liquidated” herself, really won me over; I couldn’t put the book down. At first it was a battle between her upfront stance – the first sentence of the Acknowledgment reads “An intellectual commitment to social and economic justice first galvanized this book’s journey”- and the awkward terminology (some borrowed from the English Department narrative wars of the 1990’s?). That’s where “privilege” becomes a verb and we learn about the Wall Street Habitus (“‘a system of dispositions’”) and she goes about “decentering privileged models” - but that was about it. I found the few really alien terms quickly explained themselves from the context. And what a context it is, the missing one from the “other side of the world” – that the angry anti-government protesters from this August never mentioned.

Ho first caught the Wall Street itch in September of 1995 when she read about the break-up of AT&T which led to “77,800 managers receiving ‘buy-out offers’” and the down-sizing of 48,500 workers – which coincided with its stock going up by 10.6% of its total value. She reminds us that those golden 1990’s from the Clinton years were full of employment churning and poor tradeoffs: lots of Starbucks and Wal-Mart’s and IPOs (Initial Public Stock Offerings) and dot.com profitless wonder jobs created, but also incredible corporate downsizings: according to one outplacement firm: 1994 - 516,000; 1995 - 440,000; 1996 - 447,000; 1997 - 434,000…another source says downsizing averaged 3 million people per year. Readers who lived through the era may recall, that quite often, the bigger the downsizings, the more Wall Street cheered, and the more the stock rose.

(And Floyd Norris of the New York Times tells us we haven’t shaken the bad habit: “For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period.” That’s from July 1999 to July, 2009. Now wasn’t one of the charges to the Federal Reserve, from the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation, to tend to the nation’s employment needs, as well as to control inflation? I don’t recall this article being waved around at those government-castigating hearings. )

I like the way Ho went about her work, a field study of the “new exotic,” the resurrection of Wall Street and its practices which would become the “epitome” and the guidance for “a sea change occurring in American business practices during the past three decades…” - a new type of capitalism. As I thought about her work, and that anthropological approach, and the fantastic universe of exotic derivatives which have led the US and indeed, most of the financial world, nearly over the cliff and into the sea, I couldn’t help but summoning up images of those mysterious moai, the giant stone heads of Easter Island, averaging 13 feet and 14 tons in size, most facing out to sea, forever haunting that desolate and isolated 63 square mile island in the Pacific Ocean. The collapse of the ecology of the island, and its civilization, and how its leaders persuaded its people to invest so much of their wealth and energy in sculpting and hauling 887 of these giant statues, has left archeologists, anthropologists and engineers scratching their heads. Those leaders must have had some mystique about them, and some persuasive powers. A mystique surely as powerful as that which has surrounded that abstraction called “The Market” over the past 30 years, and the high priests on Wall Street which interpreted it for us.

Now we don’t know whether the Easter Island leaders led their people, lemming like, over the cliff and into the sea after their exhausting labors, but for those readers who think I am being unfair with this analogy, I ask your forbearance for a moment while I recollect for you a barometer of Market fever I had almost entirely forgotten: retired Admiral John Poindexter’s proposal to blend the magic of the market to the contemporary (summer of 2003) worries about future 9/11’s, by creating a futures market in terrorism, which was institutionally sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I defer here to the description provided by Steve Fraser in his wonderful book, Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (2005), that the idea was a “coming together of free-market utopianism and imperial hubris.” Here is more from Fraser’s peerless rendering of our own little excursion to an Easter Island dreamscape:

People would be invited to speculate on the likelihood of death and destruction around the globe. In its original incarnation, it was to be open to the first thousand members of the public who applied to participate. This Populist version of el casino macabre was soon modified so that only insiders, recognized ‘experts’ from government, business, and academia, would be allowed to place their bets on what mayhem seemed most likely and where…Business Week found the notion… ‘intriguing.’ Almost no one else did…Congressmen were appalled, and the Pentagon did a quick about-face…Belief in the market as the supreme conveyer of the truth had gone so far that an idea like this one could wend its way through the bureaucracy of a central government institution without anyone bothering to challenge its moral insanity. Coming as it did on the heels of the most gargantuan financial frauds ever witnessed on the Street, it is an even more remarkable happening. No one worried about the possibility of ‘insider trading’ or, even more frightening, of schemes to foment terrorism where none had existed before precisely to reap a speculative windfall…(Pages 573-575.)

So that’s some terrain here - the power of The Market and the siren call of the Street - to sink one’s anthropologic teeth into. Karen Ho’s gift is to ground grand abstractions in the actual practices of Wall Street and to examine carefully its own representations about hiring the brightest from the best schools, working harder and more hours than anyone else, paying the royal bonuses, and justifying it all under the all-forgiving shareholder value halo, an idea which has driven out more balanced, long term – and, dare we say, more humane values – that corporate management formerly took into consideration back in the mid-1960’s: such as impacts on workers, communities, consumers, the long term good of the firm, even of the nation itself - perish the thought."

- Bill Neil

Rockville, MD 20851

PS Readers can get on my Email list for future postings, about one a month or so...shoot me an email at w.neil@att.net

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On banks and government

Yves Smith draws attention to some of the machinations in DC occurring under the rubric of bank reform. Specifically in this case, a congresswoman from IL is trying to further erode state power in regulating banks in the name of efficiency -- hey ho. On a personal note of interest from long ago Southside politics, IL AG Lisa Madigan is castigating the idea, which puts me on the side of the Madigans. It really is a shame politics suck so badly in the country, as it really can be a sublimely engaging activity of amusing twists and turns.

Anyway, this issue begs discussion on the much greater issue of the architecture of American government. Separation of powers is one of the fundamental tenets of the American system. In the American federal system, the states provide balance to federal power. With the industrialization of America, power became increasingly concentrated in DC and our mega-corporations, away from the state and local economies. Of course this was a dynamic of necessity, as economic power could only be concentrated with a corresponding concentration of political power. In the American system as constituted in 1787, this meant a loss of power for local and state institutions and a gain for DC. In one of history's great misfortunes, states' power in the US became associated first with slavery and then segregation. So, over time as the Commerce Clause of the constitution, amongst other things, was used to institute mega-corporate control, states rights increasingly became a bad word.

Today, we need to rethink the American system using the basic tenets and principles of self-government instituted two-centuries ago, with the goal of making them relevant in the 21st century. For example, instead of a traditional hierarchical system, how is self-government implemented in a distributed network architecture? In an era dominated by electronic technology can't we create distributed nodes of government connected together in a web framework? What would be the equivalent of states' rights and separation of powers in such a system?

For those still thinking DC is going to offer any answers. I only point to the personification of all that is wrong with American politics -- Barney Frank. Mr. Frank is so conflicted on the banking issue, he couldn't give a straight answer if his life depended on it. As his committee puts forth their dreck of a bill on financial reform, Mr. Frank states about derivative swindling, “There was concern that a broad grant to ban abusive swaps would be unsettling.”(tx george washington) Isn't that the idea Barney?

If you have the stomach, politics does remain high comedy.

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Money creation, debt, deficit, and some solutions

Here is a guest post from an ANWF thinker and writer, Lisa. Thanks, Lisa.

I just read something about Russ Feingold's Control Spending Now Act k – a measure made up of over 40 different proposals that would cut the deficit by a half trillion dollars and wondered how many people confuse the term "deficit" for federal debt.
Something that Web Of Debt has clarified for me is that what "deficit" refers to is the shortfall on paying the yearly INTEREST on the federal debt. So if a president (like Clinton) says we have a budget surplus now, it does not mean that the federal debt is getting smaller, it just means that we're keeping up with the interest. the principal on the debt never gets paid back. (The banking system is unsustainable and is at the breaking point now.)

Whenever I read online articles that skip the part about how the banking system contributes to our woes, I try to comment and include that info.
One idea from Ellen Brown for what to do about fraudulent banking is to create state-owned banks. What this does is provide a source of credit which is an alternative to the "too big to fail banks" who don't feel like lending right now
and so create ">Here's more on community banking.

Benjamin Franklin explains how money was created.

One thing we can all do now is to pull what money we have out of the big banks and
do our monetary business with a local (preferably non-profit) community bank instead.
If no one wanted to save at or borrow from the big ones, i think it would help cripple their power.

Thanks, Lisa!

Here is what Michael Moore says we should do now:

"Michael Moore's Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now"

You've Seen the Movie -- Now It's Time to ACT!

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Friends,

It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"

You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It's time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party -- and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama's agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action -- and he won't feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it's to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I'll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year -- or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don't have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don't believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on -- and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there's more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place "Capitalism Did This" signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth -- so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here's an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don't fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here's how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn't be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she's right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I've turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny -- she's fit, she's rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don't put our own "oxygen mask" on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I'm sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video -- and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.

C'mon people -- we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!

Yours,
Michael Moore

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Best Argument for a Consumer FInancial Protection Agency

Donny Shaw points out that the Federal Reserve's mission as stated on their website and in their charter suggests that regulation is done in the context of a stable financial market, rather than in pursuit of the safety and soundness of the population of consumers.

To summarize, the Federal Reserve's duties involve the pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, etc. by maintaining stability for the markets -- their duty is to keep Wall St afloat for the good of the country, whereas the Consumer Financial Protection Agency would regulate the financial markets according to the safety and soundness of the products for the consumer. We need some regulatory body that thinks about pricing, etc. by directly fixing things for the consumer.

The Federal Reserve's duty, according to their site, is the following:

The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It was founded by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. Over the years, its role in banking and the economy has expanded.

Today, the Federal Reserve's duties fall into four general areas:

* conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates
* supervising and regulating banking institutions to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers
* maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets
* providing financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments system

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Anger Fuels Some Public Service to the People

There's always been public anger at the largest banks, the bonuses, the record profits, but now the media is reporting on it more. And thus, Congress and other public leaders are working on pushing back the banks. Just remember, that there is no reason to stop calling for reform when you know that things are wrong. Leaders should be working to reform what is broken, but are still unable to do the right thing unless you tell them to. Here is a roundup of pushbacks to Wall St that we can celebrate, but we should need to remember how important it is to keep being mad.

Obama Aides Go on TV to Criticize Wall Street: "Striking a populist tone, several of President Obama’s leading advisers on Sunday issued stern warnings to Wall Street. They said big banks must not resist greater government oversight now that they have regained their financial footing through taxpayer financed bailouts."

Downturn has hit banking lobbyists: "The 2008 collapse of the financial sector also spawned a contraction in the number of banking lobbyists on K Street, leaving the industry with a smaller bench as Congress begins rewriting the rules for Wall Street."

The Chamber of Commerce is a relentless lobbying group. "White House plan: Neuter the Chamber": "The Democrats’ assault on the Chamber is not without risk. While neutralizing the Chamber would amount to a major tactical victory for the administration, anything less could backfire — infuriating and energizing a well-funded foe with ties to business in virtually every community in the country.

The White House seems determined to put the boot in.

Last week, Obama slammed the Chamber for “spending millions” to make “completely false” attacks against his consumer financial protection agency proposal. His comments came on the same day as his energy secretary, Steven Chu, said it was “wonderful” that companies had left the Chamber over climate issues.""

Dodd, Shelby lead way on unified finance reform: "Although a Senate reform bill has yet to emerge, extensive interviews by POLITICO found that the marquee players who will emerge in both the Senate and the House during this fall’s debate on regulatory reform have been negotiating and hashing out ideas for months."

Summers Tells Finance Executives to Stop Fighting Tougher Rules: "White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers told leaders of top financial companies last month the Obama administration “will not be lectured” by opponents of a proposed consumer-protection agency."

Paul Krugman reminds of the past and our anger and the subsequent actions by leaders to bail out of the debate on reform:

You may recall that earlier this year there was a big debate about how to get the banks lending again. Some analysts, myself included, argued that at least some major banks needed a large injection of capital from taxpayers, and that the only way to do this was to temporarily nationalize the most troubled banks. The debate faded out, however, after Citigroup and Bank of America, the banking system’s weakest links, announced surprise profits. All was well, we were told, now that the banks were profitable again.

But a funny thing happened on the way back to a sound banking system: last week both Citi and BofA announced losses in the third quarter. What happened?

Part of the answer is that those earlier profits were in part a figment of the accountants’ imaginations. More broadly, however, we’re looking at payback from the real economy. In the first phase of the crisis, Main Street was punished for Wall Street’s misdeeds; now broad economic distress, especially persistent high unemployment, is leading to big losses on mortgage loans and credit cards.

And here’s the thing: The continuing weakness of many banks is helping to perpetuate that economic distress. Banks remain reluctant to lend, and tight credit, especially for small businesses, stands in the way of the strong recovery we need.

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Yes to break up the banks, signed Greenspan

Now two Federal Reserve Chairmen have come out to say we must "break up the banks" -- here's to Greenspan for standing up for the right thing at this moment in time.

If you want to learn why we need to break up the banks, read up on it here.

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Sick of faulty logic - Period

Cafe Hayek:

"Responding to one of the lamest arguments that I’ve yet encountered for why a free market in health care is impossible, I sent the following letter a few days ago to the Washington Post:

...

'Even granting Mr. Billings’ allegation that no consumer can refuse to have a broken bone fixed or to have medically necessary dialysis, it doesn’t at all follow that a free market in health care is impossible. After all, a thriving and competitive market in food exists even though no consumer can refuse to eat. Just as each consumer can easily refuse to purchase food from any particular grocer or restaurant, so too can each consumer refuse to purchase health care from any particular physician or clinic.'

..."

Why can't free market economists (Cafe Hayek usually has reasonable things to say) stop saying that consumers can choose to not purchase healthcare from the companies they don't like? Do they not understand anything about having no choices even when there are many plans out there? Choices are sometimes just limits. Being uninformed and essentially cornered is a mainstay in the US? A race to the top when bad plans are the standard? JFC! Choice only matters when there is real competition and the choices are what you actually want if you had to blind taste test and only were concerned with your actual needs.

This is no doubt what we're going to see from a super fake campaign coming our way, the US Chamber of Commerce. SQUASH IT. You may have missed the big flop that were Microsoft house parties -- same thing. Market efficiency thinking, consumers can choose mentality, and free enterprise rules without ANY regulation crashed the country about 5 times. If they feign grassroots, they are not mobilizing people with truth/education. Deem them fake and we win.

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