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 .