Tag: Wall Street bailout

A video of Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is making the rounds this week. In the clearest language to come out of Washington on...

The grasping AIG Financial Division execs who brought the firm to its knees and helped send the global economy spiraling only to receive federal...

President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to overhaul financial regulation last week. While much of the Obama plan relies on the same regulators and structures that led to the current meltdown, there is one key exception. The establishment of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency would give ordinary citizens a seat at the financial policy table for the first time and prevent the abuses in credit card and mortgage lending that have wreaked havoc on households all over the country.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to unveil his agenda for revamping financial regulation later this week. As the economy struggles though a recession created by the banking industry, it's crucial that Obama and his advisers craft a set of rules ensuring that the financial sector strengthens our economy instead of destroying it.

With workers all over the globe trudging through a catastrophic recession, it's almost a given that governments will be battling the economic slide for a long time. Part of the effort to rebuild must involve new rules and regulations, but meaningful systems for economic accountability will be just as essential. If we do not hold the reckless executives who caused this crisis accountable for their actions, we risk regressing into similar turmoil in the near future.

Reading a recent New York Times article on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's relationship with the "finance club" he is charged with rescuing and regulating, Baseline Scenario blogger James Kwak makes a point many people have missed.

At the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) conference yesterday in Denver, the opening panel featured mainstream-media heavyweights admitting that journalists "blew" coverage of the financial crisis, that they missed the "big story" as it unfolded over the course of a decade. A root problem, as TV journalist Allan Dodds Frank put it, was the "posture of reverence" adopted by business reporters toward their subjects, a posture that sees CEOs as stars and "corporations as sexy."

Some of the largest U.S. banks may be on the ropes these days, but the disparity between the plight of financial executives and ordinary Americans has never been starker. Over the past two decades, the banking system has grown accustomed to scoring massive profits by preying on its own customers, making 2009's transition to pilfering taxpayer wallets an easy one. After burying the economy under a mountain of unaffordable debt, bank CEOs are now finding ways to subsidize their own paychecks with taxpayer bailout funds.

Talk of government pillaging and vague threats of a ballot box revolution at yesterday's nationwide "Tea Party" protests missed a prime opportunity to advance a cause we can all get behind — ending abusive bank overdraft charges by the very institutions taxpayers bailed-out courtesy of the Bush Administration's 2008 Troubled Assets Relief Program. Our Washington Independent colleague Mike Lillis has the skinny on just where the pitchforks and torches should be aimed.

The national "New Way Forward" protest against the Obama-Geithner bank bailout is gaining momentum in Colorado. On the Web site facilitating the action, people are signing up to rally Saturday at banks and public buildings around the country. Denver sign-ups to meet on the west steps of the Capitol have climbed to 145 people.