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Wall Street’s Economic Rampageby Zach Carter
Published on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 by The Media Consortium
Over the past year, Wall Street’s excess has helped push the unemployment rate to epic levels and created millions of foreclosures. Yet the rules of the financial road remain unchanged. As 2009 draws to a close, it’s astonishing that so little progress towards financial reform has been made.
President Obama, Congress and federal regulators have not been tough enough on the nation’s financial elite. As Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery emphasize for Mother Jones, the government has committed about $14 trillion in bailout funds to save the banking system without demanding much of anything in return. Goldman Sachs and other big banks are now planning to pay giant bonuses that come straight from taxpayer giveaways rather than invest that money in socially constructive banking.
“Bankers aren’t being rewarded for pulling the economy out of the doldrums,” Bauerlein and Jeffery write. “Nope, they’re simply skimming from the trillions we’ve shoveled at them.”
The major banks are even spending our bailout money to lobby against reform. When President Obama called a meeting for leaders of the nation’s largest banks to scold them for their lobbying, the heads of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup didn’t even bother to show up, as Matthew Rothschild describes in a podcast for The Progressive.
It’s easy to see why the bank execs are so indifferent, Rothschild argues, even to the president. Now that almost all of these banks have repaid the loans they received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Obama has no negotiating leverage and the bankers know it. Even though it represents just a tiny fraction of the $14 trillion bailout, TARP was the only program that attached any strings to that money. Prior to those TARP repayments, Obama could have demanded that banks do more lending to help the economy, work harder to keep troubled borrowers in their homes—or face executive compensation restrictions or other penalties.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/22-2 Are you feeling unseasonably angry, too?