AFL-CIO leads the charge to rein in Wall Street

While average Americans watched helplessly as the value of their retirement funds and their homes sank lower and lower, Wall Street bigwigs were still reaching into our pockets for bills to light their cigars.  Now Congress is trying to rein in the wheeler dealers and the labor movement is pushing for legislation with real teeth.

 

The AFL-CIO is urging members to call or write their U.S. senators and representatives and urge them to pass legislation that:

• Creates an independent agency to protect consumers from predatory lenders – the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency;
• Sheds light on the shadow financial system; and
• Puts mandatory limits on bank size and risky behavior.

The federation’s Web site tells you what you can do to help and explains why this is important:

“After tanking our economy, helping to put us in an 11 million job hole and, to top it all off, taking hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailout dollars, the big banks are right back to business as usual:  by lobbying against meaningful financial reform.

 

“Instead of lending in their communities, they are choking off much-needed credit.  And instead of working with Congress to develop good, commonsense regulations to prevent another financial meltdown, they are spending millions lobbying to protect their own narrow interests.

 

“We can’t let it happen again.  Regulating our financial markets is central to securing the economic future of America’s working families.”

 

The site’s Executive Pay Watch also includes case studies in how some of the biggest Wall Street financial houses took federal bailout money and still figured out a way to pay their executives tens of millions.

 

And a blogger on Huffington Post answers “yes” to his question, Were the big banks all knowingly running Ponzi schemes?