13 bankers

Letters
Issues Beyond Palo Alto, posted by Editor, Palo Alto Online, on Nov 5, 2010





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http://www.PaloAltoOnline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=13871 posted Friday, November 5, 2010, 12:00 AM



Comments

Well, I think it’s important to look at who the tea party are, what the tea party is. I mean, let’s remember, it’s many different organizations. They wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t been for an enormous amount of money from a few—well, Simon Johnson calls them the "13 bankers." 13 Bankers is the rise of concentrated financial power and the threat it poses to our economic well-being. Over the past three decades, a handful of banks became spectacularly large and profitable and used their power and prestige to reshape the political landscape.


More remarkable, the responses of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the crisis–bailing out the megabanks on generous terms, without securing any meaningful reform–demonstrate the lasting political power of Wall Street. The largest banks have become more powerful and more emphatically “too big to fail,” with no incentive to change their behavior in the future. This only sets the stage for another financial crisis, another government bailout, and another increase in our national debt economic well-being.



The Wall Street world that Barack Obama told, "I’m the only thing that stands between you and the pitchforks," turned around, and for all the compromising that Barack Obama did to Wall Street and to the banksters who had brought us the crisis that he inherited when he was elected president, they turned around and poured money into the organizations that we think of as the tea party. Other the people, as well, but, you know, $75 million from the US Chamber of Commerce, most of it, almost all of it, anonymous money.



Posted by Ted Rudow III,MA, a member of the Palo Alto High School community, on Nov 5, 2010