Robert Reich: Wall Street can't have it both ways - too big to fail, and also able to make wild bets anywhere around the world

our criminal bankers really like their tbtf, protected status...

robert reich in truthout...

One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you can choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging U.S. regulations. It’s a win-win.

Wall Street would like to keep it that way.

For two years now, squadrons of Wall Street lawyers and lobbyists have been pressing the Treasury, Comptroller of the Currency, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, SEC, and the Fed to go easier on the Street for fear that if regulations are too tight, the big banks will be less competitive internationally.

Translated: They’ll move more of their business to London and Frankfurt, where regulations are looser.

Meanwhile, the Street has been warning Europeans that if their financial regulations are too tight, the big banks will move more of their business to the US, where regulations will (they hope) be looser.

[....]

If Wall Street banks demand a free rein overseas, the least we should demand is they be broken up here.

our super-rich elites will fight to their last breath to maintain their power over us and their ability to command the world's resources and reservoirs of capital...

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Chomsky on May Day: If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions

i'm inclined to think we're at that point...

noam chomsky...

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called, “Law Day”—a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They’re not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

[...]

Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won’t, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is a necessary step to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense.

[...]

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

i am not now nor have i ever been in favor of revolution... the history of the world is littered with revolutionary legacies that have turned out to be worse than the insanity they were meant to remedy... even the "soft" revolutions we've seen in recent years have spawned regimes that, while well-intentioned at first, have ultimately resulted in the same old super-rich elites calling the shots... however...

given the current state of world affairs, i'm strongly inclined toward a need to wipe the slate clean and start over... i've thought that perhaps a constitutional convention for the u.s. might serve that end but that is really only taking the idea of reform to a more advanced level and that's not even taking into account that our rulers would never allow it to happen...

so, what's left...? i'm not sure exactly what form "eliminating the institutions" might take but i think it's rapidly becoming the only viable option...

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Occupy the SEC - the Occupy suits take on the Wall Street suits

a superb use of some of the higher-level talent in the occupy ranks...

To attempt to oversee the unwieldy bloated tyrants, Congress passed 848 pages of financial reform legislation in 2010. But it was so difficult to comprehend that to implement just one piece of it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) together with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency filed a 530-page public proposal seeking comment on how the legislation might impact the markets. The deadline for those comments came last week.

[...]

Hoping to derail the derailers is a new SEC sheriff: Occupy the SEC, a spinoff of Occupy Wall Street. Going forward, it will be tougher for right-wing corporate media to spin the Occupy movement as smelly hippie radicals desperate for a cause; any cause. Last week, Wall Street spin doctors just got chewed up in the spin cycle and hung out to dry with Occupy the SEC’s filing of a mesmerizing 325-page treatise on redesigning Wall Street to meet the Nation’s needs rather than its perpetuation as a wealth extraction scheme by lawyered up 1 percenters. (The number of lawyers providing public comment was exceeded only by Wall Street firms.)

Far removed from the unstructured demands of the overall Occupy movement, the 325-page tome is precise, hard hitting and essentially nails the core corrupting elements of the current system and lays out what must change. It shows an uncanny insider’s grasp of the minutiae in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. And, it is more than 171 pages longer than the collective rant of Wall Street’s own sycophant trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the Clearing House Association. The trade group letter called the proposal “absurd” and lectured the regulators that they should first “do no harm.” There is striking and arrogant amnesia in this letter regarding the staggering harm done to this Nation by their constituents.

it takes brainy, experienced people to take on brainy experienced vermin...

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