via AlterNet:
Fast-Rising Protest Group Challenges the Outrageous Power of the Bankers
By Kristina Rizga,
WireTap. Posted April 7, 2009.
Why it's time to nationalize the banks, and enforce tough financial regulations to stop the massive theft from the public purse.Editor's Note: Click here to join the protest!The Rip Off Must Be Stopped!
Big bankers ruined our economy and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped.
On April 11th, 2009, the public will come out in cities across the country to express their frustration and disapproval with how our elected officials have handled the economic crisis. No one has been left unscathed; this protest is yours.
Sign AlterNet's pledge that you aren't going to let this rip-off happen and join New Way Forward's national protest on April 11.
***
Tiffiniy Cheng, 29, never imagined she'd spark a populist movement influenced by a former IMF banker. Three weeks ago Cheng and her co-founding partners launched A New Way Forward, a volunteer-run website that advocates for a new approach to bank bailouts and is organizing a nationwide protest on April 11. Cheng and her friends are not new to online organizing. In 2006, some of them launched OpenCongress.org, a nonpartisan website that lets people track the legislation in Congress, and Downhill Battle, a music activism website, but they never had a burning desire to study and reform the financial system. Then, as 350 billion of taxpayer money went to the same CEOs who helped bring the global economic system down, Cheng and her friends, as many in America, became angry. Why reward the same people who broke the system, they asked.
On February 19, the co-founders of A New Way Forward heard Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), interviewed on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal argue for an alternative bailout plan. Until recently, Johnson spent 20 years at the IMF working on international bank bailouts, among other things. Dissatisfied with the current bailout process, he decided to show his ex-colleagues at the IMF the balance sheets of some of America's leading banks receiving bailouts (concealing their names). Every one of his former colleagues gave a similar prescription: Recovery will fail unless Americans break up the financial oligarchy. In the short term, that means the failing banks would have to be temporarily taken over by the government, cleaned up, broken up and sold off in the private markets. The board members and CEOs of those banks would have to be fired and replaced. This contradicts the administration's current plan.
In an appearance on NPR's Fresh Air, host Terry Gross asked Johnson why the government hadn't fired the current CEOs. He argued that the American government allowed banks become too big and powerful through lax regulation. When banks grow too big and become major financial supporters of politicians, it becomes much harder to fire them Johnson explained. .........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/135390/fast-rising_protest_group_challenges_the_outrageous_power_of_the_bankers
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