Move Your Money: A New Year's Revolution

[oladub]

Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. The leaderships of both major parties are aligned with their paymasters. This became crystal clear when, just two weeks before the 2008 election, Congress handed President Bush a bill giving large bank $749B. Candidates McCain and Obama both left the campaign trail to lobby fellow legislators into supporting this bill. Even though the vast majority of Americans opposed this bill, Congress thumbed its nose at us.

Things have not improved. Barney Frank is sitting on proposed legislation to give another $4T to these big banks.[[1) Mother Jones claims that counting Treasury and Federal Reserve handouts, the major banks have already received $14T.[[2) On Christmas Eve, when no one was watching the news, President Obama passed an executive order allowing Fannie and Freddie to receive unlimited money from the Treasury to cover its bad loans.[[3) How about forbidding Americans from redeeming their money markets. The Obama Administration has even proposed that Americans be forbidden from redeeming their money market accounts.; that “market fund managers will have the option to "suspend redemptions to allow for the orderly liquidation of fund assets."�[[4)

A proposal to take things into our own hands was published in the Huffington Post. “We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?�

“The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the Big Six banks [[JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks.� http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariann..._b_406022.html

So there you have it; a practical, peaceful, middle-class revolutionary tactic to take some power away from Wall Street and its politicians. A list of Community Banks and Credit Unions and their financial viability as found in your state is available at http://www.bauerfinancial.com/consumersandcorps.htm .

[Sstashmoo]

Those banks aren't going to fail. Boycotting their business is just hurting us that much worse in the long run. They will not go out of business, and they will not lose any money as long as the Fed can borrow.

[oladub]

Those banks aren't going to fail. Boycotting their business is just hurting us that much worse in the long run. They will not go out of business, and they will not lose any money as long as the Fed can borrow.

The Fed is now printing when it cannot borrow. Over 2/3 of House members have at least co-sponsored HR1207 which , at least, would audit the Fed to see what it is up to. Barney Frank is now trying to de-fang that bill in the House. On the Senate side, 69 Senators have not signed on to the Senate version of the bill [[S 603) as sponsored by Bernie Sanders. Therin lies the problem. They will do nothing to alter the status quo.

You may be right. Even if half of depositors transferred their accounts from 'too large to fail' banks to community banks, there is no guarantee that Congress and the Administration wouldn't just give the big banks even more money but at least we wouldn't be personally holding up fig leaves to hide the slutty financial behavior of our elected representatives. Those politicians would be forced to be more and more transparently outragious and hopefully more subject to defeat.

Since I wrote the previous post, this related article popped up. The Obama administration is weighing how the government can incentivize workers to turn their savings into annuities. Some months ago, a professor from upstate New York addressed Congress with this proposal. In her presentation, the government would seize 401k's and pay them out as it chose. The government would keep any remaining money. The Business Week article doesn't claim the Obama proposal goes that far but there remains the sense that the Administration would like to have its hands on 401k money; for our good of course.

[oladub]

Yet another reason to stop doing business with Wall Street banks. Bloomberg video included. http://solari.com/blog/?p=5668

"Pretty cool idea to make money managing the poverty that you made money creating! You can finance your operation with trillion dollar bailouts while you outsource the jobs to your operations in India on the theory that it saves the government money, while the number of long term unemployment claims rise over 5 million and the [[official) unemployment rate rises above 10%." [[shadowstats.com).

more- "FOOD STAMPS PROFITS : how JP Morgan gets rich with increased poverty" Max Keiser talks to Stacy Herbert about how JP Morgan Chase makes more money when more people are forced to use food stamps swipe cards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYRG9f5F4gw [[8" audio)

[maxx]

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html

[EMG]

Those banks aren't going to fail. Boycotting their business is just hurting us that much worse in the long run.

That's right. See also the following link for more information.

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/...nks-make-sense

[Sstashmoo]

8 years of garbage securities, a 3 or 4 trillion dollar loan [[nobody will know until the fed is audited )from us and our kids, and their kids, where did the money go?

We have just witnessed the biggest outright cash robbery in the history of mankind. It's brilliance is people can't see it looking right at it. You gotta respect that.

[maxx]

From the PBS website I sited above.:

The latest issue of MOTHER JONES magazine looks into this discrepancy, calling it the "accountability deficit." The magazine commissioned a series of articles investigating why no one has been brought to account for crashing the economy.

Two contributors to the issue, David Corn and Kevin Drum, join Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL to explain how the banking lobby continues to hold so much power in the nation's capital.

While the great wealth of Wall Street allows it to lavish campaign contributions on Congress, it is not money alone that gives the financial industry so much power. The influence of Wall Street has managed to change the national conversation. MOTHER JONES political blogger Kevin Drum explained the phenomenon using a term used by economist Simon Johnson:

It goes beyond regulatory capture, where, say the banks control the S.E.C. That's one thing. "Intellectual capture" means that essentially the financial industry has convinced us — you know, in the '50s what was good for General Motors was good for America — now it's what's good for Wall Street is good for America. And they've somehow convinced us that we shouldn't ask about what's right or what works or what's good for America. We should ask what's productive, what's efficient, what helps grow the economy.

[maxx]

http://motherjones.com/special-repor...bility-deficit

As anyone who watches Dog Whisperer knows, rewarding bad behavior produces more of the same—so it's no surprise that Wall Street is back to business as usual. Derivatives are still unregulated [[thanks, Congress!), exotic sliced-and-diced securities are being resliced and rediced, and the biggest offenders in peddling subprime mortgages? They are raking in millions in federal grants to—wait for it—fix subprime mortgages.
And the worst part? These fat-cat recidivists don't even have the decency to fake contrition. The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin says that whenever he asked Wall Street CEOs "Do you have any remorse? Are you sorry? The answer, almost unequivocally, was no." When asked by MoJo's Stephanie Mencimer if he regretted helping to bring down the economy, former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg said flatly, "No. I think we had a very good record." Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs' CEO [[his haul between 2006-2008: $157 million) went so far as to tell the Times of London, "We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. It's a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose." Bankers like him are "doing God's work."