Tag: Financial reform

WALL STREET TURNS AGAINST THE PRESIDENT By John Humins for VT Former Wall Street supporters of Barack Obama have publicly voiced their alienation with President Obama’s...

"You can't live half-humanistic, half-fascist." Perhaps the most perceptive comment I have heard on world politics, in this case a disgusted commenter stating his feelings...

Dear Messrs, Tepper, Soros, Simons, Paulson, Cohen, Icahn, Lampert, Griffin, Arnold and Falcone, It's now estimated that about 150,000 teachers will lose their jobs next year because of the financial crisis touched off by your industry.

From the Baseline Scenario: By James Kwak Robert Reich discusses a theme that I think I’ve discussed before (and first heard expressed by Ezra Klein): “The most...

Popular opinion drives the elected representatives for a change. By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press WASHINGTON – Republicans set the stage Wednesday to lift their blockade against legislation...

By Robert L. Borosage at Huffington Post Senate Republicans have perfected the art of saying no. But in blocking a debate on financial reform, they...

Caught wind of this from the Huffington Post: As homeowners were falling behind on their subprime mortgages, wreaking havoc for investors that owned slices of...

Believe everyone is with Paul Krugman on this one, except for the GOP leadership. Don’t Cry for Wall Street By PAUL KRUGMAN On Thursday, President Obama went...

When Senator Mitch McConnell and the GOP oppose financial reform, make no mistake whose interests they are fighting for: The banking oligarchy. What McConnell is...

And why? Because our tax dollars bailed out their butts. The biggest banks would have gone under, and derservedly so, without our largess. Dow 11,000 is primarily a function of the trillions (not billions) of taxpayer dollars that poured into the biggest Wall Street firms in the form of loans, asset gurantees, liquidity programs and other subsidies. Wall Street then used our money to pay themselves lavish bonuses and to lobby against any and all meaningful financial reforms. (See Bob Kuttner's excellent new book, A Presidency in Peril, for the blow by blow of how crony capitalism really works.)

In 2009, the worst economic year for working people since the Great Depression, the top 25 hedge fund managers walked off with an average of $1 billion each. With the money those 25 people "earned," we could have hired 658,000 entry level teachers. (They make about $38,000 a year, including benefits.) Those educators could have brought along over 13 million young people, assuming a class size of 20. That's some value.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and influential New York Times columnist, says Wall Street institutions have become so big and powerful that they will never be allowed to fail. The only hope he sees is to regulate them thoroughly. He greatly prefers the stricter rules now being offered by Barney Frank in the House to the softer ones coming from Chris Dodd in the Senate. (Neither bill truly tackles the derivatives casino.)

Robert Reich points out that it's Congress that does the legislating around here not Wall Street. SC's Lt Guv finds lots of laughs in the unemployed using food stamps, Jim Hightower can't find the humor. At Tomgram we learn that as we suspected, "The Commercials Are the Super Bowl," and the GOP after preaching the horrors of public insurance wants to ration my Medicare and get its greedy fingers ion my Social Security. All that and more in today's picks