Holt Baker: ‘We Want Our Jobs Back’
Shouting, “We want our jobs back,” union members and community allies rallied and marched in Cincinnati yesterday to send Morgan Stanley the message that if it can thrive on taxpayer bailout money, it needs to make sure the community prospers as well. The action was part of the AFL-CIO’s more than 200 “Make Wall Street Pay” events taking place through the end of this week. Speaking to the crowd, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker blasted the selfish actions of the Big Banks:
At a time when young people across the country are worried about whether they will lose their jobs out there when they graduate or whether they will find a job, Morgan Stanley paid—get this—$3 million to their lobbyists to kill financial reform. While Morgan Stanley refuses to lend money to small businesses here in Ohio, they’re keeping the company afloat with $10 billion of your hard-earned money. We bailed out these Big Guys behind us, so now it’s time to take that money and give it to the community and local banks so that bank will start to hire people.
Bailout Oversight Panel Recommends Eight Changes to Avoid Future Crises
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 says the nation needs smart regulation to help prevent another financial crisis and protect our economic future.
The Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) released a report today, which discusses how regulation would have helped avert the financial crisis and how it can help avoid future troubles.
Treasury Dept. Not Looking After Taxpayer Money
President-elect Barack Obama has a laundry list of Bush disasters to clean up after he gets in office, and he says fixing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is among his first priorities. Good thing, too, because the congressional oversight committee charged with examining how the first $350 billion of our taxpayer money was spent finds the U.S. Treasury Department isn’t exactly looking after our money. The oversight committee released its second report in recent days, and The Washington Post sums up the findings as follows:
The report says the department has not articulated a plan for restoring lending to consumers. It asks again why the Treasury has refused to spend any money on foreclosure prevention programs. And it says the department is sowing confusion in the financial markets, undermining the stated purpose of the rescue program, by failing to require companies to report how they are spending federal investments of taxpayer dollars.
‘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.
