-"I don't want these guys forced to take their shoes off in airport security lines with every one else" - CNBC commentator Melissa Francis on whether the bailed-out banks should provide private jets for their CEOs.
Thanks to the big banks, we are all in pain, a lot of it.
We have lost our jobs and our homes and our children's teachers and our savings and our good names and our economic security. To prevent it from being even worse, we have mortgaged our children's futures, provided those big banks with our tax money, and then seethed as they awarded themselves obscene bonuses.
And, after all this, we are going to "reform" them? Then they will become good little boys and girls, stop listening only to their shareholders and start showing care and concern for the country instead?
And, we are expected to rest our futures on that outcome, one that has never happened before in world history?
Us? No.
We suspect not any of you, either.
Think of it: in world history, what other industrial sector has ever, singlehandedly, by its own actions, brought down the entire economy? True, in agrarian societies, poor harvests have killed economies, but those have been due to drought or pestilence or ignorance of sustainable farming techniques. True, too, the oil embargo of the 1970s caused a major recession in the industrialized world -- but, that was primarily caused by Mid-East countries upon whom we have become dependent.
But the financial sector has been directly, and often singlehandedly, responsible for systemic economic catastrophes that were brought on by their own actions. Not necessarily malicious -- but certainly selfish and utterly indifferent to the risks to the rest of the economy.
Is this any way to for an economy to run? Is this a life any of us choose?
The big banks need to be broken up -- not for vindictiveness, nor punishment nor even blame, but for the good of the country and every single person in it.
It is as simple as this: the big banks have too much economic power and too much political power to be compatible with our economic security or political democracy. Either alone is sufficient justification for breaking them up. Together, it makes it imperative.
No villainy or conspiracy need be asserted. The existence of this power is sufficient reason to act. Indeed, if it were villainy or conspiracy, it would suggest that just changing the people would cure the problem.
It will not.
When any institution or company gets too large maintaining high growth rates, the categorical imperative of the economic system, becomes more and more difficult, and thus there is a great built-in incentive to push the envelope. With big banking, pushing that envelope can, and has, caused general and worldwide economic disaster and they had no reluctance to employ their political power to try to save themselves -- with your money.
We are therefore launching BreakUptheBigBanks.com to rally political action behind the only remedy that can prevent banks, in rational and legal pursuit of their own private profit and power, from wiping out a lifetime's worth of your hard work, and bankrupting the country.
That is not free-enterprise capitalism. That is not the world Adam Smith described of an efficiently running economy.
Nor is that political democracy.
So long as banks are large and powerful, they cannot be regulated effectively. Witness, for example, the AIG bonuses that even this year(!) caught the government by surprise. The banks will always be several steps ahead of regulators in the intricacy of their transactions.
The only way to restore our economic security and political democracy is to break up the big banks. Click on the link, sign our petition, go viral to your friends and family, and let's get this moving. This is an issue where liberal-conservative -- or Republican-Democrat-Independent-Libertarian -- does not matter: none of us wants a system in which a tiny handful of unaccountable companies, pursuing private profit and power, can wreak such havoc for the rest of us and then force us to rescue them to save ourselves.
We can do it. It is an issue that cuts across all sections, all parties, all philosophies. Conservatives have traditionally distrusted political power. Liberals distrust concentrated, unaccountable economic power.
The big banks have both.
We cannot allow that to continue. It is perhaps the one domestic issue behind which the entire country can unify....even the big banks could not resist that onslaught.
Act as if your whole future depends on it. It does.
Please visit BreakUpTheBanks.com or our Facebook page to learn more.
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I believe these bailouts are a bad idea whatever the size of the bank, and an needless gift of massive taxpayer money to the bank bondholder
John Hussman has written many excellent articles on this subject ... here is one:
http://hus
Stay tuned, more to come on the subject over the next few days.
Please join us by going to the website.
I have a blog post on the subject that I wrote a while ago: http://fad
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Say what you want, modern market theory says otherwise.
"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishi
Now that an effectivel