Dead-on posting from "A New Way Forward"

Another rare posting I didn't create, but want to enter because it's that good:


This is the age old fight for power between large corporations and regular people

June 3rd, 2009 by tyc

People are starting to wage a battle with the financial companies, but if people don’t really start to see the battle for what it is — a fight for power between the banks who currently control Congress and the public who untimately pays for it — we’ll again lose any chance for real reform that restores our political system and economy in the interest of working families doing better than they are now.

Arianna Huffington argues that we could have had some structural reform happen after Enron, but the way politics are usually played, the fight for reform usually is assuaged by the companies for politeness’ sake and then completely dwindles:

Remember how during the 2008 campaign there came a moment when candidates hoping to win the White House realized they had to declare that, like Obama, they were all in favor of “change”? Hillary did it. McCain did it. So did Romney. Giuliani too.

In the same way, today everyone agrees that we need reform of our financial system. Even Wall Street knows it is inevitable.

So the question becomes: are we going to get real reform or are we going to get the DC version of “reform”?

The citizens who are fighting with ANWF are trying their hardest to not let that happen. We simply can’t lose our chance to create real structural reform that can ACTUALLY put large corporations back in their place. Push for breaking up the banks, please!

As Rep. Brad Miller wrote on Talking Points Memo,

It will be a fierce battle, even with the full support of the Obama Administration. “All of the signature economic reforms the President has promoted…are under siege,” The Nation reports. “Without a grassroots uprising that challenges business as usual in Washington, we aren’t likely to get the change we were promised, much less the change we need.”

We’ve won some battles. A couple of weeks ago the President signed into law the credit card reform bill that Carolyn Maloney introduced. A few weeks ago the House passed a solid bill–not perfect, but solid–to reform mortgage lending that I introduced along with Mel Watt and Barney Frank.
But we can’t possibly anticipate and prohibit every new predatory financial product that the industry claims is “innovation.” Requiring the industry to show that innovative new financial products are a positive contribution to society–and get approval before selling the products to consumers–fundamentally changes an industry desperately in need of fundamental change.

That is the kind of change that we cannot achieve without a “grassroots uprising that challenges business as usual in Washington.”

Link to original post here:
http://anewwayforward.org/blog/?p=344

Back from Mo Rage:

And folks, the foxes who raided the chicken coop--the big bankers who screwed us all, individually and nationally and got us into this financial crisis, Goldman/Sachs, etc.--are the very same foxes who are supposed to be cleaning up this banking mess, now.

And they're getting paid handsomely, now, too--again--to do it.