Don’t Make Working People Bail Out Wall Street, Says U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders

[Union Thug]

"A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION


http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1789

By Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont)

This country faces many serious problems in the financial market, in the stock market, in our economy. We must act, but we must act in a way that improves the situation. We can do better than the legislation now before Congress.

This bill does not effectively address the issue of what the taxpayers of our country will actually own after they invest hundreds of billions of dollars in toxic assets. This bill does not effectively address the issue of oversight because the oversight board members have all been hand picked by the Bush administration. This bill does not effectively deal with the issue of foreclosures and addressing that very serious issue, which is impacting millions of low- and moderate-income Americans in the aggressive, effective way that we should be. This bill does not effectively deal with the issue of executive compensation and golden parachutes. Under this bill, the CEOs and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits.

This bill does not deal at all with how we got into this crisis in the first place and the need to undo the deregulatory fervor which created trillions of dollars in complicated and unregulated financial instruments such as credit default swaps and hedge funds. This bill does not address the issue that has taken us to where we are today, the concept of too big to fail. In fact, within the last several weeks we have sat idly by and watched gigantic financial institutions like the Bank of America swallow up other gigantic financial institutions like Countrywide and Merrill Lynch. Well, who is going to bail out the Bank of America if it begins to fail? There is not one word about the issue of too big to fail in this legislation at a time when that problem is in fact becoming even more serious... <SNIP>

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1789

[raccoon]

1. Sometimes I think Sanders is the only Congresscritter who cares a happy rat's ass about us ordinary

Americans.

[clixtox]

2. No party "Kool-Aid" for Bernie!

He is truly independent and not beholden to the party bosses, Dem or Rep, who surely don't give a rat's ass about anything except power, control and more power.

The party bosses take our votes for granted as long as they can effectively "whack a mole" any third political party that might lessen their grip on their absolute control of the voters.

They are in it together, the two parties need each other to maintain their hegemony

Our political system has hoodwinked the voters for a hundred years into believing that the Dems and Reps are divergent enough that which one is in power will make a real difference.

I hope that the blinders are coming off and the hypocrisy and bullshit is too obvious to fool all of the dumbed down, fearful consumer/producer ants.

You and me!

[Spike from MN]

3. Excellent post!

Bernie represents the people, not the corporations. We definitely need more like him in both Houses.

The Dems and Reps try to maintain the illusion that there are vast differences between the two parties but it's nothing more than a charade. Hopefully the bailout bill will cause people to finally wake up and see these guys for who they really are. We need a third party but before that can happen, we'd need an actual second party. Right now, we only have a single party that's masquerading as two.