Wall St. Run Wild—Here’s How It Happened
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Here’s a great video that shows in part how the nation got to the point where inequality is so rampant, CEO greed so unrepentent and Wall Street so not held accountable that people across the nation have taken to the streets—and are staying there.
As Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren says here:
We go with this idea of “Let’s get rid of regulation” and what happens? Late 1980s, savings and loan crisis—should have been a warning. Late 1990s, remember long-term capital management, hedge funds? Should have been a warning. Early 2000s, Enron—should have been a warning. But we let it go and where did we end up? In the biggest crisis since the Great Depression.
H/T to MoveOn.org for featuring this clip from Lance Baxter’s YouTube channel.
Trumka: AFL-CIO Supports Cordray as Consumer Financial Chief
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka announced support for President Obama’s plan to nominate Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, currently is chief of enforcement at the CFPB.
House Republicans Try to Gut Consumer Bureau
Last week, we told you how 44 U.S. senators are fighting to keep consumer and working family advocate Elizabeth Warren out of the top spot of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created by last year’s landmark Wall Street reform legislation.
Now House Republicans have jumped into the battle to help their Big Bank friends and gut the new rules that are designed to curb the worst abuses of Wall Street. They are trying to cut the CFPB’s funding before they even have the authority.
To prevent the consumer agency from falling prey to congressional political purse string pressure, it is funded independently by the Federal Reserve. But the fiscal year 2013 appropriations bill from the House Appropriations Committee would not only put the CFPB under the regular appropriations process, its funding level is $6 billion less than what President Obama’s budget plan calls for.
Urge Obama to Recess Appoint Warren to Consumer Bureau
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There are 44 members of the United States Senate who don’t want consumer and working family advocate Elizabeth Warren to run the new federal agency designed to protect consumers and working families from the kind of Wall Street and Big Bank abuses last year’s landmark Wall Street reform legislation outlawed.
Want to guess who they are? The entire Wall Street friendly Republican Senate delegation. President Obama has picked Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But the Wall Street water-carrier caucus has vowed to block Warren’s nomination. It just takes 41 votes to keep a filibuster alive.
They’ve said they would allow a vote on Warren only if CFPB’s authority is weakened and they are allowed the right to defund the now independently funded agency. In effect, making Wall Street happy and shutting down the CFPB.
President Obama can win this fight for working families if he uses a recess appointment to put Warren in the director’s office at CFPB. Click here to send a message to Obama urging him to use a recess appointment for Warren when the Senate is out of session. The CFPB is scheduled to open its doors July 12. So please act now.
Act Now: Tell Congress to Stand Up for Consumers, Not Wall Street Bankers
Wall Street and congressional Republicans are working overtime trying to prevent implementation of the Wall Street Reform law, which would help prevent the abuses that created the recent financial meltdown.
Unable to kill the law, the financial industry special interests are spending millions to stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which the reform law created, from having any real power. They are trying to take away its funding and delay its start. Most of all they want to prevent Obama from appointing a strong director like Elizabeth Warren.
You can take action. Write or call your member of Congress and tell them to stand up for consumers and not for Wall Street.
Silvers To Treasury: Can’t Resolve Foreclosure Crisis and Save Banks
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How can a housing advocacy group like the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) with a budget of less than $20 million, CORRECTLY process 20,000 people seeking mortgage modifications in one week in one city, and the United States government with a budget of $50 billion can only do 20,000 modifications a month across the whole country?
Damon Silvers, policy director of the AFL-CIO and a member of the Congressional Oversight Panel never got a straight answer to that question from U.S. Treasury Department officials at a hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday.
Netroots Nation 2010: Labor, Online Progressives and Union Beer
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Union activists are joining a couple thousand online progressives this week for the annual Netroots Nation conference. The July 22–25 event in Las Vegas brings political powerhouses like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) together with progressives from across the nation for workshops, panels and speaking events like the dynamic full-conference lunch session July 24 with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Along with Harvard legal professor Elizabeth Warren, Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson and others, Trumka will take part in the panel, “Building a Progressive Economic Vision,” where he will focus on the key steps the nation needs to take to rebuild our nation’s economy (hint: Trumka’s proposals don’t include slashing the deficit at the expense of jobs).
Netroots Nation: Tell Us Your Ideas for the Labor Caucus
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Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of some 2,000 progressive bloggers and activists, is coming up fast—July 22–25—and we need your input on topics we should focus on at the Labor Caucus we hold there every year.
Labor communicators from the AFL-CIO, Change to Win and independent unions take part in the Labor Caucus, as well as allies from groups such as Jobs with Justice. This year, Matt Browner-Hamlin from SEIU and I are co-hosting it, and we want your input to help frame the agenda.
Snow? Oh, No. It’s Still the Economy
Here are a few tidbits worth noting from around the nation’s economic scene.
Bob Herbert at the New York Times puts the sorry U.S. unemployment rate in clearer–and more painful–perspective today, pointing out how the workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with.
The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.
David vs. Goliath: The Fight Begins for Reform of the Financial Industry
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Most Americans want strong regulation of our nation’s financial markets, according to a poll released today by Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of nearly 200 investors and civil rights and community organizations.
The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners, surveyed 900 likely voters in 77 “Blue Dog” or conservative Democratic districts and those in politically competitive Democratic districts.
More than two-thirds of voters in all the districts support creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to “create and enforce a strong set of rules to require fair, affordable, understandable and transparent financial products like bank loans, mortgages and credit cards for families and small businesses.”
When asked if there was too much, too little or just the right amount of regulation of banks, the stock market and credit card companies, voters agreed, by a 23-point margin, there’s too little rather than too much regulation.
