Astroturf Organizations Spreading Propaganda: "Don't Make Us Pay"

I was sent an email from a concerned citizen about this seemingly grassroots organization concerned about consumer welfare:

Don't Make Us Pay

I use Sourcewatch to check up on suspected manipulative/misleading propaganda.

I looked at who funds this organization and it is "Electronic Payments Coalition" (look at the bottom of their "about" website page)

Sourcewatch: Electronic Payments Coalition) Which is a credit card organization fronting as a citizen rights group (we call these types of propaganda groups, "astroturf" organizations--because they are bogus, misleading, corporate fronts)

Also found this youtube video "Don't Make Us Pay": A Lesson in Astroturfing" where the author breaks down the misleading/manipulative nature of this campaign.

They are very sneaky -- we need to combat these forms of disinformation/misinformation and call them out for their manipulative propaganda.

Mary Bottari: What Does Wikileaks have on Bank of America?

What Does Wikileaks have on Bank of America?
By Mary Bottari
Campaign for America's Future

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). In 2010, he told Forbes that the information was significant enough to "take down a bank or two," but that he needed time to lay out the information in a more user-friendly format.

Recent new reports suggest that BofA is now moving into high gear on damage control, creating a "war room" and buying up hundreds of derogatory Internet domain names including BankofAmericaSucks.com and BrianMoynihanblows.com (BofA's CEO).

Before the big banks start calling for Assange's internment at Guantanamo, the question worth considering is what does Wikileaks have on America's largest bank?

Legal Liability for Toxic Mortgages

BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits from private investors as well as Fannie and Freddie demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages-backed securities. The firm stopped issuing subprime mortgages in 2001, but it kept underwriting subprime mortgage-backed securities for many years. In September 2009, for example, BofA underwrote $239 million worth of securities backed by subprime loans. BofA has reserved $4.4 billion for these "put back" lawsuits. If Assange has emails showing that top executives at BofA knew they were peddling toxic dreck to investors, it would rock the firm and give tremendous ammunition to the army of lawyers already knocking on BofA's door.

Reckless and Illegal Foreclosures

BofA is at the heart of the robo-signing scandal and has wrongfully foreclosed on countless American families. One poor woman returned to a vacation home to find it locked, all her possessions gone -- including the ashes of her late husband. How could such a mistake be made? A BofA employee deposed in February 2010 said that she signed as many as 8,000 foreclosure documents a month without reviewing them, in violation of the law. Mounting questions about the fraudulent and illegal foreclosure practices at the big banks and mortgage service companies prompted BofA to temporarily halt foreclosures nationwide in October 2010. If Wikileaks can document that top BofA officials have a callous disregard for legal processes and constitutionally protected property rights, BofA's mounting legal liability may not be sustainable.

Countrywide Headaches

In 2008, BofA acquired Countrywide, one of the most aggressive and fraudulent lenders during the housing bubble. The result has been a trainwreck of liability and lawsuits for the megabank that now has over 1.3 million customers in foreclosure. To settle the lawsuits with Illinois, California and eight other states over predatory lending, BofA came up with an $8.4 billion loan relief plan for those holding Countrywide mortgages. In June, 2010 BofA paid $108 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission case that charged Countrywide with having extracted excessive fees out of borrowers facing foreclosure. BofA paid $600 million in August 2010 to settle shareholder claims that Countrywide had concealed the riskiness of its lending standards. There is no end in sight for these suits. In June 2010 the State of Illinois sued Countrywide again, this time over racial discrimination in its lending practices. Wikileaks could have further documentation of Countrywide's illegal and reckless underwriting practices or ongoing fraud at BofA.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Robert Scheer: Payback at the Polls

In this live chat session, Robert Scheer responded to readers’ questions and comments about his latest column, “Payback at the Polls,” dealing with the 2010 midterm election.
TruthDig



...

Anderson: The first question is from Bob from Fulton, Mo.: With the president already on record more or less intending to govern as a moderate Republican, what should progressives do in the next two years to influence the conversation?

Scheer: Well, a moderate Republican in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower, who was far better than any of the presidents who came after him, would be welcome. You know, even Richard Nixon favored a guaranteed annual income. What I’m worried about is Obama may do what Clinton did, which was move to the right—to the right of Richard Nixon, to the right of Dwight Eisenhower. And it was Bill Clinton, in response to his reversal in the ’94 election, who ushered in the disastrous radical financial deregulation that caused this whole problem. And Obama, in his extreme stupidity—and I use those words advisedly—turned to the same fools that created this mess under Clinton, to Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the protégés of that raging genius, Robert Rubin, and gave us this stupidity that said that Wall Street did not need any brakes on the system, any road rules, any rules of engagement.

And as a result, we have 50 million Americans that have either lost their homes or have their mortgages underwater and are thinking of walking away from their homes. We have 44 million Americans living under the official poverty line. We have a disaster going on here, and the people who call themselves progressives, that have sold their soul to the Democratic Party, seem to have an inability to recognize this. They’re yapping cheerleaders. Even Jon Stewart, who I’ve respected in the past, would have Obama on just before the election, and accept this nonsense that, oh, “Summers did a heckuva job.” He only quibbled about the word? This is a disaster that we’ve had. And as a result, the right wing, which can be very dangerous—if they start blaming immigrants, if they cut back needed social programs, yeah, they’re a real danger. And if we don’t do what we have to do to get out of this mess, it’s a really big problem.

Anderson: [Question from Truthdig member chacaboy]: There’s a preamble here. It says, “If Obama had not shown so much deference to Wall Street and the military and such eagerness for an exorbitantly expensive occupation of Afghanistan and excessive military budget, I could have sympathy. But as it is, I cannot distinguish Obama from most Republicans, including George W. Bush.” So now he says: “I would like to ask if there is any truth to the idea that we have something to lose by our critique?” I guess progressives critiquing Obama is the context there. “Is there anything to the argument (i.e. columnist Ruth Marcus) that Obama passed a stimulus package, he got health care done, and he passed financial regulations, and to withdraw support from him now would be to lose more ground by throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

Scheer: Well, you know, we live in a democracy, and the key to democracy is that we not surrender our common sense or our ability to think. And what she [Marcus] said in that article was just gibberish. I mean, what are we talking about? First of all, the American people have rejected health care. At least half of them find it terrible, and the other half seem to be quite tepid about it. I’m tepid about it. You know, yeah, there are some good things in the health care thing, but there’s no cost control. It forces people to buy health insurance from insurance companies that are not going to do us any favors. This administration gave us something called health reform which is really, at best, mild, and at worst quite costly and disastrous. It certainly is not the thing they should have moved on when they had a banking meltdown, when we had a disaster in the economy. It was a feint. It was an attempt to find some win-win thing which didn’t work out. Health care should not have been the big item on the agenda; it was done for opportunistic reasons, you know, because they didn’t want to confront Wall Street. And instead of spending his capital on making the Wall Street system correct and putting sensible regulations in, he settled for very mild regulations on Wall Street and a very weak consumer agency; he couldn’t even push through Elizabeth Warren as a confirmed appointee with some real power. And as a result, you know, health care basically did not help him, and it’s been mostly a distraction. And the right wing has used it—you know, “socialized medicine” and all that garbage; of course, it’s nothing of the sort.

And so the real problem is that Obama has not only failed to deal with our meltdown; he’s exacerbated it. The stimulus was not effective. An enormous amount of money has been spent making the banks whole. I don’t know why these columnists can’t look at the numbers—the apologists for Obama—why don’t they talk about the over $2 trillion that were spent to take toxic assets off the books of the banks, but not a penny—not a penny really being spent to make people whole who are hurting. Where is the mortgage forgiveness, where is the moratorium on mortgage foreclosures? We don’t even know who owns these homes, 65 million homes, thanks to a system that Bill Clinton helped put in place, with the great liberals at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cooperating with the swindlers at Countrywide Mortgage, put in place this Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems so 65 million American homes are owned by a computer bank in Reston, Va., owned by the banks, and we don’t even know who owns these homes.

And so last month we had the highest number of foreclosures, people are in great pain, and progressives still blindly support the president out of some idea that he’s the lesser evil. That’s a betrayal of democracy. We’ve got to call it the way we see it. And the best thing you can do for Obama is to have sharp criticism from the progressive side, and he hasn’t been getting it. He was able to roll over the progressives, he was able to take them for granted, and unfortunately some of those very same progressives were the victims of this folly, like [Sen.] Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. My God, I mean the poor guy was one of the few people who stood against this, and he got overwhelmed by this rage out there. So I really have no sympathy at all for this position. We keep going this way, and it’s going to be a real, a bigger Republican sweep in two years.

To Read the Entire Live Chat and/or Listen To It

Forbes: An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
by Andy Greenberg
Forbes

...

These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale as for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

Is it a U.S. bank?

Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.

One that still exists?

Yes, a big U.S. bank.

The biggest U.S. bank?

No comment.

When will it happen?

Early next year. I won’t say more.


What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.

You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

To Read the Entire Interview

Inside Job (Charles Ferguson, 2010)

Simon Johnson: The Quiet Coup

The Quiet Coup
by Simon Johnson
The Atlantic Monthly

...

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

To Read the Entire Essay

On the Media: Banking Concern; Ad Hominem

On the Media (NPR)

Banking Concern

NPR’s economics correspondent Adam Davidson has spent the last two years breaking down the financial crisis with clear, simple language. But Davidson is stymied by regulation, which he says has proven resistant to even his brand of explanatory journalism.

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Ad Hominem

Despite how overwhelmingly complex and boring financial regulation is, one group wants to help the public understand the issue – the banks and businesses who would be regulated. They’ve spent millions on ads and lobbyists to spin regulation as just another government takeover. Bob surveys their ad campaign.

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Democracy Now: Juan Gonzalez -- Big Banks Making a Bundle On New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost

Juan Gonzalez: Big Banks Making a Bundle On New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost
Democracy Now

"Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction," Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez write in the New York Daily News. "The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years."

Read/Listen/Watch

Louis Brandeis: "The dominant element in our financial oligarchy..."

"The dominant element in our financial oligarchy is the investment banker. Associated banks, trust companies and life insurance companies are his tools... . The development of our financial oligarchy followed ... lines with which the history of political despotism has familiarized us: usurpation, proceeding by gradual encroachment rather than violent acts, subtle and often long-concealed concentration of distinct functions... . It was by processes such as these that Ceasar Augustus became master of Rome."

Louis Brandeis -- Other People's Money (1913)

Ben Craw: The Ultimate Goldman Sachs Metaphor Reel

Huffington Post

Noam Chomsky: Globalization Marches On -- Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power.

Globalization Marches On: Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power.
by Noam Chomsky
Commond Dreams

...

Bringing Obama to Heel

Popular anger finally evoked a rhetorical shift from the administration, which responded with charges about greedy bankers. "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama told 60 Minutes in December. This kind of rhetoric was accompanied with some policy suggestions that the financial industry doesn't like (e.g., the Volcker Rule, which would bar banks receiving government support from engaging in speculative activity unrelated to basic bank activities) and proposals to set up an independent regulatory agency to protect consumers.

Since Obama was supposed to be their man in Washington, the principal architects of government policy wasted little time delivering their instructions: Unless Obama fell back into line, they would shift funds to the political opposition. "If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose" the support of Wall Street, Kelly S. King, a board member of the lobbying group Financial Services Roundtable, told the New York Times in early February. Securities and investment businesses gave the Democratic Party a record $89 million during the 2008 campaign.

Three days later, Obama informed the press that bankers are fine "guys," singling out the chairmen of the two biggest players, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That's part of the free-market system," the president said. (Or at least "free markets" as interpreted by state capitalist doctrine.)

That turnabout is a revealing snapshot of Smith's maxim in action.

The architects of policy are also at work on a real shift of power: from the global work force to transnational capital.

Economist and China specialist Martin Hart-Landsberg explores the dynamic in a recent Monthly Review article. China has become an assembly plant for a regional production system. Japan, Taiwan and other advanced Asian economies export high-tech parts and components to China, which assembles and exports the finished products.

The Spoils of Power
The growing U.S. trade deficit with China has aroused concern. Less noticed is that the U.S. trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has sharply declined as this new regional production system takes shape. U.S. manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for China to assemble and export, mostly back to the United States. For the financial institutions, retail giants, and the owners and managers of manufacturing industries closely related to this nexus of power, these developments are heaven sent.

And well understood. In 2007, Ralph Gomory, head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, testified before Congress, "In this new era of globalization, the interests of companies and countries have diverged. In contrast with the past, what is good for America's global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American people."

Consider IBM. According to Business Week, by the end of 2008, more than 70 percent of IBM's work force of 400,000 was abroad. In 2009 IBM reduced its U.S. employment by another 8 percent.

For the work force, the outcome may be "grievous," in accordance with Smith's maxim, but it is fine for the principal architects of policy. Current research indicates that about one-fourth of U.S. jobs will be "offshorable" within two decades, and for those jobs that remain, security and decent pay will decline because of the increased competition from replaced workers.

This pattern follows 30 years of stagnation or decline for the majority as wealth poured into few pockets, leading to what has probably become the greatest inequality between the haves and the have-nots since the end of American slavery.

While China is becoming the world's assembly plant and export platform, Chinese workers are suffering along with the rest of the global work force. This is an unsurprising outcome of a system designed to concentrate wealth and power and to set working people in competition with one another worldwide.

Globally, workers' share in national income has declined in many countries-dramatically so in China, leading to growing unrest in that highly inegalitarian society.

So we have another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth's most powerful states.

The future depends on how much the great majority is willing to endure, and whether that great majority will collectively offer a constructive response to confront the problems at the core of the state capitalist system of domination and control.

If not, the results might be grim, as history more than amply reveals.

To Read the Entire Essay

Andy Kroll: JP Morgan’s War on Nature

JPMorgan’s War on Nature: How the Wall Street darling underwrites environmental Armageddon.
by Andy Kroll
Mother Jones

Unlike virtually all of its competitors, JPMorgan Chase steeled itself early for the collapse of the subprime market and emerged from the rubble of the global financial meltdown with both its balance sheet and reputation intact. But the storied firm stands alone among its Wall Street rivals in another area, too. JPMorgan backstops one of the most destructive mining practices in the world: mountaintop removal coal mining. And it continues to do so even as other major banks have cut ties to this practice.

"Chase is the single largest remaining player in this game," says Scott Edwards, advocacy director for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group comprised of lawyers, scientists, and activists, among others. "They just absolutely refuse to take responsibility for their role in this absolutely devastating industry."

Mountaintop removal (MTR) mining, focused in Appalachian states like West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, involves deforesting huge swaths of land and blasting the summits off of mountains to expose the black veins of coal underneath. The waste and rubble from the demolition is then dumped into nearby rivers and streams, burying local water sources in toxic byproducts, choking off tributaries that feed into larger rivers, and wiping out plants and wildlife, according to numerous scientific studies. Despite the mining industry's claims, there are no successful ways to mitigate the effects of MTR, according to Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The effects on the nearby environment, she says, are long lasting and often irreversible.

The impact of MTR mining is global, too. When mining companies deforest a mountaintop before demolition, they engage in a practice that overall contributes 25 to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions each year. Between 1992 and 2012, MTR will have leveled 7 percent of Appalachian forests in areas studied by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Nonetheless, over the past 17 years, JPMorgan Chase has helped to underwrite nearly 20 bond or loan deals, worth a combined $8.5 trillion, for some of the biggest players in the MTR mining business, according to data from Bloomberg. Other large banks have either halted financing companies engaging in the practice outright or signaled their intent to do so. In December 2008, for instance, Bank of America publicly announced plans to "phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal." Wells Fargo has cut ties with coal giant Massey Energy. And a Credit Suisse official says the bank has a "global mining policy" that ensures "we explicitly do not finance the extraction of coal in a mountaintop removal setting." But JPMorgan continues to back the practice.

By underwriting MTR, JPMorgan ties itself to some of the nation's biggest polluters. Take Massey Energy, which leads the nation in MTR mining. In 2008, the company extracted more than 21 million tons of coal using mountaintop removal mining, according to opensourcecoal.org, an online database for coal production statistics. That same year, JPMorgan acted as lead manager on a $690 million bond offering by Massey, according to financial records.

Over the past decade, Massey has mined nearly 190 million tons of coal in Appalachia using mountaintop removal, according to opensourcecoal.org—and it has essentially disregarded the law and surrounding landscape to do so. Between 2000 and 2006, Massey violated the Clean Water Act more than 4,500 times by dumping sediment and leftover mining waste into rivers in Kentucky and West Virginia, the EPA said in 2008. (Environmental groups say the EPA's tally is a lowball figure; they estimate that the true number of violations is more than 12,000.) As a result of these breaches of the law, the company agreed to pay the EPA a $20 million settlement.

To Read the Rest of the Article

John Nichols: Banking for the People

Banking for the People
By John Nichols
The Nation

That's a question that a growing number of candidates and legislators across the country are answering with proposals to create state-owned banks. Though these initiatives borrow from an old model--North Dakota has run a successful state bank since 1919--they are a response to a new reality: the hundreds of billions of public dollars plowed into big banks by the federal bailout have done little to free credit for job creation or economic development in recession-ravaged communities. So, taking a cue from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and other critics of private-bank bailouts, latter-day populists are proposing to put public money to work for the public good.

Oregon Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Bradbury is calling for the creation of a Bank of Oregon, which would keep money in the state and invest in sustainable development. "It is time to declare economic sovereignty from the multinational banks that are responsible for much of our current economic crisis," says the former State Senate president and secretary of state. "Every year we ship over a billion dollars in Oregon taxpayer dollars to out-of-state and multinational banks in the form of deposits, only to see that money invested elsewhere. It's time to put our money to work for Oregonians."

Michigan's Virg Bernero, a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor in that hard-hit state, is another public-banking proponent. "We can break the credit crunch and beat Wall Street at their own game by keeping our money right here in Michigan and investing it to retool our economy and create jobs," says the populist mayor of Lansing. In Illinois, Green Party gubernatorial nominee Rich Whitney, who won 10 percent of the statewide vote in 2006, proposes depositing all state tax revenues and pension contributions in a state bank. "Instead of using state funds as a means to further enrich private banks, a state-owned bank could earn additional revenue for the state while at the same time help spur economic development in Illinois," he argues.

It is not just candidates who are talking up bold remedies to the challenges created and perpetuated by "too big to fail" banks. Legislators from Vermont to Virginia, from Michigan to Washington State, are proposing to start state banks. They take inspiration from the Bank of North Dakota, created ninety-one years ago by radical Non-Partisan Leaguers to serve as the depository for all state tax collections and fees. The nation's only state-owned bank avoided subprime lending and the derivatives markets during the recent real estate bubble and now has $4 billion under management. It maintains the faith of its founders and, in the words of bank president Eric Hardmeyer, continues to "plow those deposits back into the state of North Dakota in the form of loans. We invest back into the state in economic development type of activities." What that means, according to Ellen Brown, author of the book Web of Debt, is that North Dakota has avoided the credit freeze "by creating its own credit [and] leading the nation in establishing state economic sovereignty."

That sounds good to Massachusetts Senate president Therese Murray, who wants her state to look into creating its own bank. Washington House finance committee vice chair Bob Hasegawa, a Seattle Democrat, has formally proposed a State Bank of Washington. "Imagine financing student aid, infrastructure, industry and community development. Imagine providing access to capital for small businesses, or otherwise leveraging our resources instead of having to do it with tax incentives," he says. "Imagine keeping our resources local instead of exporting them as profits, never to be seen again--that's what this bank could do."

To Read the Rest

John Nichols: Iceland Busts the Banksters -- In a symbolic decision, democracy trumps capital as Icelanders say "no" to big bank bailouts

Iceland Busts the Banksters: In a symbolic decision, democracy trumps capital as Icelanders say "no" to big bank bailouts.
by John Nichols
Yes! Magazine

What if Americans had been asked whether they wanted to bail out big bankers and Wall Street speculators?

How many would have voted "no"?

A measure of patriotism feeds the hope that they would have made their opposition known as resoundingly as have the voters of Iceland, who on Saturday rejected demands by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands—working hand-in-hand with the rapacious International Monetary Fund—that the people of the tiny island nation cover losses triggered by the failure of a private bank.

A "yes" vote on Saturday's referendum would have saddled each citizen of Iceland with $16,400 of debt, with the money to be paid to compensate the British and Dutch governments for expenditures to cover depositor losses stemming from the failure of the Icelandic bank Icesave.

The overall debt of $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of Iceland's economic output for last year, would have impoverished the country.

As Icelandic President Olafur R. Grimsson explained this week: "Ordinary people, farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers, (were) being asked to shoulder through their taxes a burden that was created by irresponsible greedy bankers."

Fortunately, Iceland is a democracy. So those farmers and fishermen, taxpayers, doctors, nurses, teachers got to decide whether they were inclined to pay for a bank bailout.

They shouted "no" as loudly as that word could be uttered.

An early analysis suggests that roughly 98 percent of the Icelanders who cast valid ballots rejected the "deal."

To Read the Rest of the Article

Doonesbury: A Banker's Progress

Doonesbury

Donnesbury: "never has so much been owed by so few to so many"

Doonesbury

Media Matters: Michael Moore "Capitalism: A Love Story" and Sue Wilson "Broadcast Blues"

Michael Moore "Capitalism: A Love Story" and Sue Wilson "Broadcast Blues"
Media Matters with Bob McChesney

Filmmaker Michael Moore sits down with Bob McChesney this week to discuss his new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story."



Sue Wilson will then join us live to talk about her movie "Broadcast Blues" the movie "the media does not want you to see." The website for Broadcast Blues.

To Listen to the Episode