In the last several weeks…
The National Debt is close to $9.8 trillion and just raised to $10.615 trillion. That rounds off to about $100,000 debt pertaxpayer! Do you have a spare $100,000 kicking around to hand over? On Sept. 19, 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. proposed a massive bailout our financial institutions shattered by bad mortgages and aloss of investor confidence. Mr. Paulson's proposal called the Troubled Asset Rescue Plan asks for $700 billion from the American people to buy up mortgage-backed securities whose values have plummeted and can’t bes old. Federal Reserve Chairman Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson claim that without this huge immediate bailout, we risk a deep recession and President Bush underlined those warnings in a televised address to the nation on Sept. 24th. It would be added to our National Debt. So far this bailout has failed to pass. Also, we have learned… --Wall Street's five largest firms were paid more than $3 billion in the last five years to their top executives, even while they presided over packaging and sales of loans that brought down our investment-banking system. --Merrill Lynch & Co. paid its chief executives Stanley O'Neal $172 million from 2003 to 2007, John Thain $86 million, and Bear Stearns James Cayne made $161 million before the company collapsed and was sold to JP Morgan Chase & Co in June. After Hoover’s 1931 bailout of the banks failed, FDR did a cold reboot of the entire system, putting into place strong rules to prevent speculative abuse. And he doubled the STET tax, both producing revenue that more than funded the Securities and Exchange Commission and further prevented a repeat of the speculative bubble of the1920s that led directly to the Republican Great Depression. FDR considered the impact on generations to come. These decisions of FDR have now been rolled back by a new set of Republicans for short-term gains and we are again facing a new Republican Great Depression. FDR also put a New Deal into place that set a floor where citizens couldn’t fall below - between 1933 to 1938. The Roosevelt administration implemented banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, agricultural programs, labor union support, the WPA relief program, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid farmers, including tenant farmers and migrant workers. Some of the relief programs were shut down during World War II by the Conservative Coalition (i.e. the opponents of theNew Deal in Congress). In the 1970s and 1980s many regulations were ended during the wave of deregulation. Several New Deal programs remain alive and well with a few still operating under the ir original names, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The largest programs still in existence today are the Social Security System and the Security Exchange Commission (SEC). The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down. As citizens who care – let’s vote in the type of representatives, senators and the executive branch this November 2008 thatcan help bring about our next New Deal and prevents the next Republican Great Depression. Thom Hartmann
