Bail Out Average Americans, Not Bankers
Behind all the hype and technical jargon surrounding the nation’s banking and mortgage crises, the bottom line comes down to answering this question: Does the nation want to spend its resources on rich bank stockholders or on roads, bridges, schools and other necessary projects?
Speaking during a workshop at the America’s Future Now conference this morning, several members of a panel on the banking crisis said the financial system is broken and that the Obama administration’s plan to fix it doesn’t address the scope of the problem. The three-day conference is sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future.
(Click here to read more news and views from the America’s Future Now conference. You also can listen to the conference sessions live on BlogTalk Radio here.)
The administration is holding its breath, hoping big banks will recover the value of some of their assets over time if taxpayers bail them out over the short haul, said Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
Time to Restructure Mortgages, Bank System
The home foreclosure crisis and the implosion of the nation’s banking system are so closely linked the federal government must address both at the same time—and time is running out, says Damon Silvers, a member of the congressional oversight committee examining how the U.S. Treasury Department is spending taxpayer money in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to help bailout the financial system.
At a field hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel on Friday in Prince Georges (P.G.) County, Md., Silvers, who is associate general counsel of the AFL-CIO, pointed out that policymakers seem to forget that what happens on Main Street affects the rest of the world.
Time to Think Big, Push for Progressive Government Action
President Obama’s economic stimulus package is just the beginning of a long-overdue public investment in rebuilding our nation’s economy. And now is the time to seek broad solutions—to think big about what can be done.
Today at the Thinking Big/Thinking Forward conference, hundreds of progressives took the first steps to building a movement to coalesce public support for a more activist, progressive government to rebuild our nation’s economy.
The one-day conference in Washington, D.C., was co-sponsored by The American Prospect, Institute for America’s Future, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
‘Shockingly Little Oversight’ of Taxpayer $$$ in Wall Street Bailout
It should come as no surprise that the same Bush administration that gave suitcases full of taxpayer cash to Iraq with no accountability about how it was spent has done pretty much the same thing in its handling of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
As Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren puts it:
There has been shockingly little oversight of the money.
