Sanders: Scream and Shout for Wall Street Reform

What would you do if you discovered that your spouse drowned because of a faulty life preserver, and that the person who sold the life preserver won a $1 million bet on whether your spouse would drown?

That would seem downright sinister, almost like the salesman wanted your spouse to die so they could turn a profit.

In essence, that's what Wall Street, and particularly Goldman Sachs, did to make a killing: they sold people risky mortgages and then bet against their success. In other words, Wall Street fat cats made gobs of money not by turning an honest profit on sales of a solid product, but instead by selling you a faulty product and betting against it's collapse.

Now imagine how hypothetical life preserver salesman used the $1 million in gambling profits to buy off public officials so he could keep selling those bad life preservers and betting that more people would drown.

That's exactly what Wall Street is doing [h/t Huffington Post], and for the moment, it's working:

While Senate Republicans joined Democrats in pounding on the Goldman executives at the hearing and expressed comparable outrage over what they described as blatant conflicts of interest in the structuring of Goldman deals, they confidently trooped over to the Senate floor to vote again to block the bill.

This week, I spoke with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had this to say about the need for financial reform:

Stand up and yell and scream and make it clear to Congress, that when you have a Wall Street, who's greed and recklessness and illegal behavior caused the terrible recession we're in now...it is absolutely imperative that Congress stand up to the huge amounts of money that Wall Street is throwing at Congress and, in fact, go forward with strong Wall Street reform.

Here's your chance to holler at Wall Street. Watch our new video and send Senator Sanders your message to Wall Street. He'll read some of them on the Senate floor.