We have a bill here, a bill of more than a hundred pages, that we haven’t had a single hearing on the bill, on the concept, yes, on what Paulson and Bernanke asked for initially. But, we need to have hearings on this. There’s 400 economists and three Nobel Prize-winning economists who have said, “Whoa, wait a minute! What are you doing? Why are you rushing this?” This thing doesn’t smell right, frankly.
I said we’re the Congress of the United States; we’re not the board of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is struggling to survive. And, their former chief is now the head of the US Treasury. He’s in a position to be able to direct assets in a way that would help enhance his own financial standing. I mean, that’s a clear conflict of interest. And, that’s something that needs to be said. Why are we permitting the person who has essentially been in a position where he’s managed assets that, many of which are now in trouble, and he can come back and help clear the books for a lot of his friends? This is wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong. And, it’s one of the things that adds a degree of stench to this.
There’s been a number of suggestions about the homeowners, and, one is by an economist by the name of Nouriel Roubini, who says that we should come up with a plan that’s very similar to what’s happened in the ’30s, where you have a home loan process called the HOLC, and this would enable homeowners to actually be protected, that people wouldn’t go out of their—wouldn’t find themselves in a position where they’re going to lose their homes. It’s called the Home Owners’ Mortgage Enterprise. And this would be a means of helping—several steps that would help assure that we address directly the issue of people losing their homes, often through no fault of their own, and finding themselves in a position where they’re not getting any help from the government, because one of the real conceits of this bill is that it has the word “homeowner” all over it, but when you look deeper at the fine print of the text, it does not provide any direct aid for homeowners and doesn’t even require that the government set itself on a path to help homeowners. This is not about homeowners. This bill is about bailing out Wall Street speculators with $700 billion of taxpayers’ money.
There’s many ways that you can stimulate the economy. One is that you can have massive infrastructure spending. You could get that started right away. It would have to go far beyond what Congress passed the other day. If you want to spend money into circulation and move the money in the economy, you can do that through spending on things that are tangible: bridges, water systems, sewer system. You can stimulate the economy by having a national healthcare plan. I mean, that would take a little bit longer to set up, but that would be a huge break for all these businesses that are having difficulties.
There are many ways that we could address this, but the plan that they’ve put to us, they said this is the only option. Isn’t it interesting that the only plan that we get up, for an up or down vote is one that gives a complete bailout to Wall Street without any restraints or protections for the investors who might come into this now.
The Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way while all these—all this fast-paced trading was going in derivatives and derivatives of derivatives. We have about a four—$500 trillion, almost a half a quadrillion dollars of derivatives floating out there that no one really understands how that’s going to affect the underlying economy when some of these things start imploding.
I think we’re looking at a situation here where it is precisely the lack of regulation and the lack of oversight by the administration that has caused this. Congress is going to have hearings next month, but frankly, we should be having hearings now, before we pass a bill. I mean, it’s just upside-down that you have hearings about the underlying problem after you pass a bill, because you have hearings first, you do the analysis, and then you come up with a fix that can protect investors, strengthen the economy.
We should be concerned about the strength of the FDIC. We’re told that there’s more than a hundred banks that are in trouble right now and could collapse. We have to make sure depositors’ money is protected. This bill doesn’t have anything to do with that.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, chief executives of large US companies made an average of $10.5 million last year, 344 times the pay of the average worker.
This is really a fundamental issue in our society. Again, it’s all about how the wealth accelerates to the top and how work is not respected or rewarded for its own intrinsic value. We’ve really moved. We’ve made a transition in our economy from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. And with this debt-based economy that we have, where we keep—this public and private debt keeps exploding, as it has under—as it did under Alan Greenspan, quadrupling in a period of twenty years, we see ourselves in a position where the debt just keeps building and building and building, and we’re calling that economic progress. It is not.
We need to challenge again the underlying assumptions about a debt-based economy, about whether or not we should revisit the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, which has an unfortunately privatized monetary system and created a system which includes banks having the ability to create money almost out of thin air with a fractional reserve. We have to look at the implications of that, maybe put the Federal Reserve under the Treasury and have the Treasury really be responsive to the interests of the American people and keeping the economy going.
We’re looking at the potential here for some positive changes, if we address them directly. But what this bill does, unfortunately, it just kind of helps things keep going until the next trillion-dollar crisis, which is coming in a few months when the Alt-A or jumbo mortgages, which are being reset in ’09 and 2010, will find their maximum financial stress on marketplaces. So I think that you have to realize that this—what we’re doing today is not going to forestall a recession, it is not going to solve the problem of a collapse of mortgages, it’s not going to help homeowners.
When all is said and done and the jeweler’s eye is applied to this bill, this bill is about Wall Street. And unfortunately, Goldman Sachs, with their man now as the Secretary of the Treasury, is going to be able to have some of its policies escape scrutiny. And this is probably a way to keep them afloat, I’m sure. Well, I don’t want anybody to go down or out of business, but it seems to me that when the Secretary of the Treasury has massive holdings in Goldman Sachs and he’s going to be in a position of being able to direct investments and buy out bad investments, I think that we could easily conclude what that would do for his former firm.
Discussion: Dennis Kucinich, Amy Goodman
Democratic Congress member Dennis Kucinich. He voted against the bailout.
– from DemocracyNow
I agree with you on that, but the us economy is a very dark spot at this point will take a lot of work and more then that, Time to let things call down!