Category Archives: Banks
The Banksters vs. the Rest of Us
Tale of Two Cities: GOP Tries to Convert
America’s ‘Bedford Falls’ Into ‘Pottersville’
By Leo Gerard
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost
In the iconic Christmas film, It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel offers the beleaguered main character, George Bailey, the stark choice between a hometown named for a cruel banker or one created by and for the middle class.
The banker’s town, Pottersville, is filled with bars, gambling dens and despair. The people’s town of Bedford Falls is made of hope, hard working middle class families, and their homes financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.
The film’s happy ending is the people of Bedford Falls banding together to rescue George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan that had given so many of them a leg up over the years. Republicans seek a different conclusion. They find middle class cooperation and community intolerable. They want the banker, Henry Potter, with his "every man for himself" philosophy to triumph. In the spirit of their self-centered mentor Ayn Rand, Republicans are trying to disfigure America so she resembles Pottersville.
A building and loan association, like the Bailey Brothers’, uses the savings of its members to provide mortgages to the depositors. Members essentially pool their money to give each other the opportunity to buy cars and homes. At one point in the film, George Bailey explains this concept to frightened depositors who are trying to withdraw their savings during the panic that led to bank runs in 1929.
Banksters: You Made the Mess? Pay Up!
Crash Tax: Wall Street Reparations
By Leo W Gerard
International President, United Steel Workers
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost
Nov 14, 2011 – Wall Street waged war on the American economy and middle class with its reckless gambling.
It wasn’t Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that crashed the economy. It wasn’t the federal government. It wasn’t hapless homeowners who were sold mortgages they couldn’t afford. It was Wall Street financiers that aggressively sought and bought mortgages to package and sell as derivatives, which the banks could wager on.
Americans bailed out Wall Street, handing it a Marshall Plan for reconstruction after its bad bets blew up the world economy. Now, three years later, happy days are here again for the Wall Street banksters. They’re hauling in big profits and paying outrageous bonuses. But the American middle class continues to suffer high unemployment, record foreclosures and rising poverty.
So it’s time for Wall Street to pay reparations. It’s time for a crash tax, a tiny sales tax on Wall Street transactions, the revenues from which would pay for Main Street restoration. It’s time for the 1 percent to repay the 99 percent, for Wall Street to share in the sacrifices necessitated by its rogue behavior.
One, two, three, four … WE DECLARE A CLASS WAR!’
Occupy Pittsburgh Protesters
Assail All Manner of Enemies
By Sadie Gurman and Jonathan D. Silver
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct 16, 2011 – A disparate group of Occupy Pittsburgh protesters in tents and sleeping bags settled into Mellon Green on Saturday night after a day in which about 2,000 protesters peacefully crisscrossed Downtown and far fewer readied to stay put for as long as they could.
The events were one of several regional offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in New York City and has inspired protests in Philadelphia, Denver, Seattle and other cities. Those involved decry what they describe as a number of social, political and economic ills spawned by corporate greed and governmental corruption.
"When you spend four years in the military and you come back and you see the way things are being run, you get pretty angry about it," said Joshua Heidecker, 28, of Erie, a U.S. Marine who said the majority of veterans he knows are fed up with corporate influences in government. He was with several other young veterans in partial uniform.
In the afternoon, the demonstrators set up camp on Mellon Green, a stretch of grass at Grant Street and Sixth Avenue that’s owned by BNY Mellon. The Green turned to mud within a few minutes of their arrival just after 4 p.m. They gathered around a loudspeaker, where a man faced the towering BNY Mellon building and announced, "We are not below you, as we are today. We are above you. We are the 99 percent!"
He looked back at the cheering crowd.
"Thank you for occupying Pittsburgh! Do not give up the fight!"
Some of the protests in other cities have ended in mass arrests, but in Pittsburgh, police reported no major incidents, property damage or arrests by day’s end.
Continue reading One, two, three, four … WE DECLARE A CLASS WAR!’
Steelworkers in Solidarity with Wall Street Protests
USW Supports the
‘Occupy Wall Street‘
Protest Movement
PITTSBURGH, Sept. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW), North America’s largest industrial union with 1.2 million active and retired members, today issued the following statement in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement:
“The United Steelworkers (USW) union stands in solidarity with and strongly supports Occupy Wall Street. The brave men and women, many of them young people without jobs, who have been demonstrating around-the-clock for nearly two weeks in New York City are speaking out for the many in our world. We are fed up with the corporate greed, corruption and arrogance that have inflicted pain on far too many for far too long.
Our union has been standing up and fighting these captains of finance who promote Wall Street over Main Street. We know firsthand the devastation caused by a global economy where workers, their families, the environment and our futures are sacrificed so that a privileged few can make more money on everyone’s labor but their own.
Wall Street and its counterparts on Bay Street (Toronto), The City (London) and across the world tanked our economy in 2008. They caused a crisis that we’re still suffering from – record job losses, home foreclosures, cuts to schools, public services, police, fire and so much more. They’ve gambled with our pension funds and our futures for far too long.
They should have gone to jail. Instead, they got bailed out, while we got left out. And now they want us to go down the same path.
The Occupy Wall Street movement represents what most Americans believe: Enough is enough! It’s time to hold those who caused our economic crisis accountable, to ensure they don’t get away with it again, and to demand that everyone pay their fair share. It’s time to stand and fight for the creation of real wealth by focusing on making real things and creating family- and community-supporting jobs.
The USW is proud to join with the brothers and sisters of the Occupy Wall Street movement as we continue this important fight for a more just economy and a brighter tomorrow.”
The United Steelworkers is the largest industrial union in North America and has 850,000 members in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. It represents workers employed in metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining, atomic energy, airline, health care, public sector and the service sector. For more info: http://www.usw.org .
Contact: Connie Mabin, USW, 412-562-2616 or cmabin@usw.org
SOURCE United Steelworkers (USW)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/usw-supports-the-occupy-wall-street-protest-movement-2011-09-30
If the Banksters Are Worried About Deficits, Let Them Close up the Gap
No Mr. Boehner, America is Not ‘Broke’
By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post
Feb 15, 2011 – Once again on the Sunday news shows, Republican Leader John Boehner declared that "America is broke" — his premise for why we "can’t afford" important investments that are critical to America’s future.
In fact, of course, America is far from "broke". It is the largest economy in the world. After collapsing as a result of the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks — and Republican economic policies in late 2008 — the economy has, in fact, grown for six consecutive quarters. The stock market has almost doubled since the crash — regaining most of its value. Corporate profits are soaring. And American corporations are now sitting on close to two trillion dollars in cash.
What’s more, we still have the same highly-skilled, productive labor force and the same stock of plants and equipment that we did before the financial meltdown — the same ability to create the goods and services that are the real measures of economic wealth.
The problem isn’t that America is "broke." The problem is that economic growth is not being shared with most Americans. The problem is that the very rich are wealthier than ever and everyone else is falling behind. Not only does that mean that the massive store of wealth that we create today is not widely shared. It also means that — taken together — we have less wealth as a nation because so many Americans who could be creating goods and services are unemployed, creating nothing.
Continue reading If the Banksters Are Worried About Deficits, Let Them Close up the Gap
Why Not Public Banks of Our Own? The North Dakota Model
Washington State Joins the Movement for Public Banking
The legislature will consider whether to move its funds from Bank of America to a publicly owned bank that would keep the state’s money working locally.
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Strawberries at a farmer’s market in Yakima, WA. The state’s proposed creation of a Washington Investment Trust would help support the local economy. Photo by Jay Cox.
By Ellen Brown
Beaver County Blue via Yes! Magazine
Jan. 24, 2011 – Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.
The bills, House Bill 1320 and Senate Bill 5238, propose creation of a Washington Investment Trust (WIT) to “promote agriculture, education, community development, economic development, housing, and industry” by using “the resources of the people of Washington State within the state.”
Currently, all the state’s funds are deposited with Bank of America. HB 1320 proposes that, in the future, “all state funds be deposited in the Washington Investment Trust and be guaranteed by the state and used to promote the common good and public benefit of all the people and their businesses within [the] state.”
Continue reading Why Not Public Banks of Our Own? The North Dakota Model
Why Finance Capital Is Making You Sick of Voting
What To Do Nov 2?
Follow the Money…
By Robert Creamer
Huffington Post
In the movie version of the story of Watergate — “All the President’s Men” – the Nixon administration source who met Bob Woodward in the underground garage to provide him clues — “Deep Throat” — famously tells Woodward to “follow the money.” Apparently those lines were never uttered in real life, but it’s good advice in politics nonetheless.
The other day, California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger – with whom I rarely agree – said something that should be repeated over and over between now and the mid-term elections. Schwarzenegger was referring to oil company financial support for California’s Proposition 23 that would shelve the state’s four-year-old climate legislation until the state’s unemployment rate hits 5.5% when he said:
“Does anyone really believe that these companies, out of the goodness of their black oil hearts, are spending millions and millions of dollars to protect jobs?” He continued. “….It’s not about jobs at all, ladies and gentlemen. It’s about their ability to pollute and thus protect their profits.”
Continue reading Why Finance Capital Is Making You Sick of Voting
Tea Party: Pawns in the Bankster Game
[Note from Editor: With the caveat that people vote BOTH on facts and emotions, this is a fairly good analysis on the topic]
5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda
Screws Tea Party Supporters
By Adele M. Stan
AlterNet,September 4, 2010
If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.
To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.
As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 