Banking

After an exhausting week, I was sticking to my usual routine of collapsing on the couch and tuning in to Bill Moyers Journal on PBS last Friday night. I was excited that one of the guests was www.eji.org Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, who has long been a hero of mine for his uncompromising, long-term battle against the death penalty.

The show was terrific, a wide-ranging discussion about the struggle for economic justice from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama for "those folks at the bottom of the well," with Stevenson and civil rights lawyer and author of "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander. But deep into the show, well, to tell the shameful truth, I fell asleep. So I missed Moyer's great concluding essay and the big moment when he mentioned the Center for Media and Democracy and our Wall Street Bailout tally. The tally was the product of three months of hard work by our researcher, Conor Kenney, with contributions from half a dozen other staff.

Dick Fuld of Lehman Bernie Madoff is lonely.

Eighteen months after the collapse of the financial system, not one Wall Street Titan has joined the Ponzi King in the federal pen.

For a moment there, he thought maybe Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo might join him, but alas the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decided to give him the slap. Then those Bear Stearns guys were taken to court over those crazy emails that indicated they knew that the funds they were peddling were chock full of toxic swill, but the Feds screwed that one up too. Then Bank of America’s Ken Lewis came under fire from the New York Attorney General (AG) for not telling his shareholders the truth about that merger with Merrill Lynch. Since the AG has launched a civil and not a criminal case, Lewis too may face the slap. Now a bankruptcy examiner has revealed that Dick Fuld and team were busily cooking the books over at Lehman Brothers before its collapse, but the FBI apparently didn’t read these news stories. It can’t be stirred enough to even issue subpoenas.

With over 400 amendments readied for the committee debate on Senator Chris Dodd’s financial reform package, Banking Chairman Dodd decided to ditch the democratic process and vote his own version of the bill out of committee. This moves the real debate to the Senate floor and worsens progressive’s chance of improving the bill.

On Friday, Senators had readied their amendments, which included dozens of Republican amendments that were clearly intended to draw out the debate and delay final action. After tweaking the bill over the weekend, Dodd moved for an up or down vote on his draft in committee. It passed on a strict party line vote of 13-10. After a year of discussion, the committee “debate” and mark up took only 21 minutes.

Send the message to Congress that we need to break up the banks and end "too-big-to-fail." Call your Senator using the toll free number provided by SEIU 866-544-7573. This number will be open and available to consumers until March 31, 2010, or you can send an email at BanksterUSA.org under "Protect American Families."