John McCain said during the campaign that he would stop wasteful spending in government by naming names and making people famous. Well, that's a pretty good idea. So, we've adopted it (call us bipartisan). Except we're going to apply it to the bankers who took our money.
Last week we led a protest at the Treasury Department to demand that they get our $13 billion back from Goldman Sachs for the AIG backdoor bailout (read about the reason for the protest here).
On the same day, a Congressional report came out saying basically that we were exactly right. The Congressional watchdogs said that not only should Goldman not have gotten paid a hundred percent of their bets by the American taxpayer but that doing so " undermin[ed] the basic tenets of capitalism" and had a "poisonous effect on the marketplace."
People came from all over the country to this protest. Someone took a 24 hour bus ride from Minnesota to join us at the protest. Others flew in from Wisconsin and Illinois. Someone also took a train from Minnesota (maybe Al Franken is energizing the state to get them so active). People drove in from Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, etc. Somebody even came in from Switzerland.
Sam Seder, RJ Eskow, Michael Shure and I all spoke at the event. We had great media coverage, from MSNBC to Voice of America to Russia Today to the conservative website Townhall. Strong progressive organizations like Campaign for America's Future, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America all chipped in.
We had a great time and delivered a message. We also delivered a petition with over 5,000 signatures on it. Now, that petition is up to 6,000 signatures. You can add your own name to it here.
But it's time to take it to the next step. The DC protest was just the beginning. Now, we've started a wiki protest. We want your contributions, ideas and actions in getting the money back. People have already started to put up the names and pictures of all the people who work at Goldman Sachs on the website. We also have many of the addresses for their offices. But we need more info. Please help us build this wiki protest by going to this link and taking part.
In its first year, Wikipedia was actually run by experts in different fields. The scholars put up a grand total of 12 articles that year. When they opened it up to everyone to contribute, they had the world's largest encyclopedia by the end of the next year. We hope we can do the same here with our wiki protest. I am sure that all of you will come up with better ideas and more effective actions than we could on our own. This way we just might get our money back.
We just have one cardinal rule - nothing physical under any circumstances. We want to ask these people to give our money back but in a very civil and polite way. Anything else is unacceptable. Please go to their offices but don't go to their homes. No yelling, no crazy confrontations, just politely ask them to return the money.
Remember, they're real people, too. They're not some evil comic book character. They're simply acting on normal human instincts. There was great money to be made by duping our government and they took advantage. In fact, they were pretty smart to do it. It's not personal. We just want the money back and that's it.
One of my high school friends works at Goldman. He's a good guy but I put his name on the list. Why? It's not because I don't like him. It's because he made a smart bet with AIG, not with me or you. We had no business paying off that bet. That's not capitalism; that's not fair. As soon as we reverse that, then there is no further issue with Goldman. I don't dislike them; I just don't want to pay their bets with our money.
Lastly, remember what Tim Geithner said at the time and continues to say to this day. He said that if we hadn't paid Goldman and the other banks for the side bets they made with AIG that the whole world economy would have collapsed. Well, luckily we're not on the edge of disaster anymore. Goldman made $25 million a day - every day - last quarter. And that was the bare minimum. They made more than $100 million 60% of those days. They're not on the brink of extinction anymore. In fact, they're making record profits. That's a perfect time for them to return the American taxpayers' money.
This has to be an issue conservatives and liberals can agree on. So, everyone please join our wiki protest and let's figure out how to get that money back to its rightful owners - the American taxpayers.
Follow Cenk Uygur on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks
The Tea Party has been protesting bailouts for almost 2 years now ... after havng giving up sending petitions, calls, email etc to stop TARP and subsequent bailouts and scams.
Both Obama and McCain suspended their campaigns to rush back to Washing to pass the criminal TARP and rip of the taxpayers. A majority of Dems and a minority of Reps (both houses) voted for it over 100:1 objection to TARP.
But Congress won't stop sending boatloads of money to banskters and other scam artists.
People have been protesting this for 18 months now ... thanks for not mentioning that ... but its nice to see "some" Democrats finally getting a clue.
Although... I was a little disappointed, I wanted to go and scream "God will judge you!" at them, like the Town Hall debacles during the Health Care "debate". But I *suppose* I can keep it civil.
I personally think that they (congress) need to take these big banks like Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo and break them up under anti-trust laws. That's the best way to avoid a "too big to fail" problem in the future. But I honestly don't believe that will ever happen.
Legally, just how is this supposed to work? To get the money back from Goldman Sachs, the feds would have to 1) retroactively rewrite the contracts between Goldman and AIG; 2) make sure that Goldman repaid AIG (or AIG FP or some SPV) the difference between the old contract payment and the rewritten contract payment and 3) accelerate the repayment from AIG FP to the gov't for that amount. (Perhaps the gov't could step into the shoes of AIG FP and combine 2 and 3.)."
Under what authority can the administration do this, particulary step 1?
Perhaps one could structure taxes to get the money back, but a tax cannot apply to AIG counterparties only.
Please clarify the legal steps you intend for the feds to take to collect from Goldman.
wrong. It wasn't smart but criminal. He and others at Goldman defrauded homeowners of their life savings and sold fool's gold as the real thing.
"We had no business paying off that bet. That's not capitalism; that's not fair."
Now that's right.
"As soon as we reverse that, then there is no further issue with Goldman."
wrong, again. As soon as the crooks at Goldman are thrown in jail and their ill-gotten gains are returned to their rightful owners, then maybe there will be no further issue.
I would go further. Shut Goldman down for good as a threat to our democracy.