As the Huffington Post's Sam Stein recently reported, three days after Bank of America accepted $25 billion in TARP funds, it hosted a conference call with movement conservatives and business heavyweights in order to organize opposition to a piece of pro-union legislation. But Bank of America's anti-worker crusade is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. As a recent report at Overruled reveals, the banking industry has continued a massive anti-consumer lobbying campaign, even as it took hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP funds to stave off insolvency.
TARP was enacted to ensure that credit markets would continue to operate and to prevent the collapse of America's financial industry. The industry, however, has chosen instead to spend a portion of its funds lobbying Congress on bills that would curb some of the banking industry's worst excesses. Among the bills which the banking industry lobbied on after it began receiving TARP funds are bills to prohibit abusive arbitration practices, such as the Arbitration Fairness Act, the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act and the Fair Contracts for Growers Act; bills to help foreclosure victims and prevent irresponsible mortgage lending, such as the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act and the Helping Families Save Their Homes in Bankruptcy Act; bills to prevent the exploitation of credit card holders, such as the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights and the Stop Unfair Practices in Credit Cards Act, and even bills to hold TARP recipients accountable for how they spend taxpayer funds, such as the TARP Reform and Accountability Act.
The banking industry's anti-consumer lobbying campaign also highlights the importance of one issue in particular, binding mandatory arbitration. As I have blogged about in the past, one of the credit card industry's most abusive practices is the use of binding mandatory arbitration clauses, which force credit card holders to sign away their right to hold the bank accountable in court if it breaks the law---and instead shunts the cardholder into a biased, privatized forum. Credit card companies increasingly refuse to issue credit cards unless the cardholder signs an arbitration agreement, and when the cardholder does sign this agreement, they effectively give the company carte blanche to violate any laws it chooses. As one study of almost 20,000 arbitration decisions found, the corporate party prevails a massive 94% of the time in suits between a credit card company or debt collector and an individual cardholder. We now know that the banking industry has aggressively lobbied to continue this abusive practice even as they were relying on government handouts to avoid bankruptcy.
The full report on the banking industry's post-TARP lobbying activities can be read here.
That's the core of the "conservative movement": "free market" means, in actuality and reality, "lawless".
Send that suggesion to your elected representatives and see what response you get.
Why in the world would we want to give people who have proven that they are greedy and cannot manage money, more money top manage?
Simple as that...
If this is what they insist on doing, why should we give them any more money? they refuse to Get IT! They have no interest in helping this nation recover from their greed & corruption. freeze all of their assets, both public & private, including any assets that their families obviously gained through transfers made to hide the profiteering. Take control of all of it through a system similar to the Resolution Trust of the 80s & 90s, & use those funds & assets to help fix the financial system, & recover some of the money stolen from the Pension funds. NO MORE FUNDING FOR THESE CROOKS
As of Jan 2009, there are about 153.7 million people in the U.S. labor force (employed and unemployed).
There's $350 billion in TARP funds remaining, right?
Why don't we just split it up among the workforce?
That would work out to about $2200 a person, or more if we exclude people earning over $75K a year.
Wouldn't that be a much more effective stimulus than the paltry 400 bucks that most people will be getting in their paychecks at about 12 bucks at a time?
Surely that would be a much better use of the funds than giving it to poorly managed auto company dinosaurs.