wall street

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has thrust anti-big bank policy into the 2016 presidential Democratic primary, presenting a new political challenge for front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Warren’s re-introduction on Tuesday of Glass-Steagall, which would require big banks to split up commercial and investment banking, is popular among the liberal base. …

Adam Green, co-founder of the liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said that the bill’s re-introduction “is great news and a reminder the Wall Street’s irresponsible actions deprived millions of people of their homes and life savings.”

“Wall Street reform should be among the economic populist issues at the center of the 2016 debate, we hope to see bold proposals from presidential, Senate and House candidates,” said Green, who is pushing for Democratic candidates to adopt a more progressive agenda, similar to Warren’s.

Last week, Elizabeth Warren gave what some are calling a historic speech against bank power, telling Citigroup, “[we] should have broken you into pieces.”

Thursday, right on Wall Street, the PCCC is holding a big media event to amplify to the need to break up Citigroup and the other too-big-to-fail banks. Are you in New York City? RSVP here.

Sign our petition calling on Congress to break up the “too big to fail” Wall Street banks.

This petition will be featured at the Wall Street event, and the PCCC will use the growing number of signers to convince other senators to support Warren’s agenda. Your signature will have an immediate impact.

The PCCC will also be working hard — through grassroots phone calls and in-person Capitol Hill meetings — to get more support for Elizabeth Warren’s big ideas on Wall Street reform.

After Senator Elizabeth Warren famously told Citigroup the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill “should have broken you into pieces,” she said this:

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt was America’s trustbuster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trusts deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatened the very foundations of our democratic system.

And now we’re watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of the country. And it’s attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.

Think about this kind of power. A financial institution has become …

Since the election, the PCCC has been telling Democrats to run on Elizabeth Warren’s bold agenda of big, popular ideas like Wall Street reform.

When rumors swirled around Washington D.C. last week that Nancy Pelosi might nominate former Goldman Sachs executive Jim Himes to chair the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the PCCC got alarmed.

Like the PCCC, the DCCC recruits Democrats to run for Congress. Unlike the PCCC, they don’t always choose progressive candidates. Having the DCCC chaired by a banker who Businessweek called “Wall Street’s Favorite Democrat” would have been disastrous for progressives and hurt Democrats’ chances of winning back the majority in 2016.

That’s why PCCC members took immediate action to head off Jim Himes’ appointment — calling Nancy Pelosi’s office, sending her tweets and, in the process, making headlines in Time Magazine, The Hill, Politico, The Associated Press, and more.

PCCC members calls and tweets made a difference!

Here’s the statement PCCC co-founder Adam Green made when Pelosi announced that Rep. Ben Ray LujA?n of New Mexico will chair the DCCC:

We thank Leader Pelosi for not selecting Jim Himes to lead the DCCC — thereby rejecting the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. In order to win key House races, Democrats must run on big, bold, populist ideas like those championed by Elizabeth Warren. This means recruiting economic populist candidates — especially in red and purple states — and working with them to integrate a populist vision into their campaign messaging. The PCCC will be doing this, and we hope to partner with Rep. Ben Ray LujA?n and others to achieve success in 2016.

To see the difference this will make, read the statement Rep. LujA?n made when the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill was signed into …

Ever since it caused an outpouring of indignation on the left by attacking Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Wall Street Journal, Third Way, the neoliberal think tank, has been ducking questions about where, exactly, its funding comes from.

But at a demonstration on Wednesday outside its Washington, D.C., office, senior vice president Matt Bennett admitted that, contrary to the impression Third Way initially gave of the finance sector providing a minuscule amount of its funding, Third Wayai??i??s money comes overwhelmingly from its board of trustees ai??i?? which, as Daily Kos and others have shown, is itself overwhelmingly composed of people who make their living in finance.

Asked by Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green to name a percentage of Third Wayai??i??s funding that comes from peopleAi??in the finance sector ai??i?? rather than institutions ai??i?? Bennett concededAi??that ai???the majority of our financial support [comes] from trustees.ai???Ai??When Green pressed Bennett for a ai???ball parkai??? or a ai???percentageai??? guess, Bennett demurred. ai???Iai??i??m not going to get into that,ai??? he said.

Last week, corporate-funded think tank Third Way attacked Elizabeth Warren in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — saying her bold economic populism is “dangerous for Democratic Party.” Wrong!

Polls show Warren’s ideas are popular in red, purple, and blue states. That’s why Wall Street fears her.

The PCCC is leading the fight against Third Way’s corporatist strategy and calling them out for refusing to make their Wall Street ties public.

Over 100,000 people have joined our petition calling on Third Way to disclose their Wall Street donors. Click here to sign on.

The petition and actions by PCCC members have already been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, and more!

The New York Times reported:

In a sign of the leftai??i??s new aggressiveness, a coalition of liberals is trying to marginalize a centrist Democratic policy group that was responsible for a Wall Street Journal op-ed article this week that said economic populism was ai???disastrousai??? for the party.

The coalition, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and three other liberal advocacy organizations have urged their members to contact a group of congressional Democrats who are honorary leaders of the centrist group, Third Way. It published the op-ed article on Monday contending that the liberalism of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio of New York City and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would lead Democrats ai???over the populist cliff.ai???

The article ai??i?? written by Jon Cowan, president of Third Way, and Jim Kessler, its senior vice president for policy ai??i?? criticizes progressives like Ms. Warren and Mr. de Blasio for opposing measures to cut ai??i?? Social Security and Medicare.

The liberal groupsai??i?? campaign has already gotten results, the latest indication that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is ascendant.

Help us continue to put pressure on Wall Street-backed …

The Liberal Fix team was very excited to sit down with the Press Secretary for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and talk about the challenges that progressives face, the opportunities that exist, as well as their recent focus on expanding Social Security.

The PCCC has played a large part in moving the dialogue on Social Security away from decreasing benefits to expanding existing benefits.

Most recently and notably Senator Warren offered her full support for expanding Social Security and made a very public statement in support of the effort.

Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) aggressively questioned Treasury Secretary Jack Lew about efforts to break up so-called “too big to fail” banks. She noted that under the previous Treasury Secretary, the administration failed to support a Senate amendment to break up these banks.

She then probed Lew about if he would support such efforts.

LEW: I think we’re on a path now which is the right path, which is to implement Dodd-Frank and then to take stock when we’re done implementing Dodd-Frank. […]

WARREN: Ai??The question is though, Secretary Lew, this is about concentration. We all said back in 2009, 2009, the problem that caused the financial crash in part was concentration in the banking industry. And what do we see now? We see more concentration. […] How big do the biggest banks have to get before we consider breaking them up? They’re thirty percent larger now than they were five years ago. Do they have to double in size? Triple in size? Quadruple in size, before we talk about breaking up the biggest financial institutions? […]

LEW: There are many things going on and I’m not trying to avoid addressing the question of “too big to fail,” I’m trying to address quite clearly that that’s an unacceptable policy. But I think we have to take in account all the factors that together add up to systemic risk.

WARREN: Fair enough, Mr. Lew, Secretary Lew. But I really think the evidence suggests that concentration is one of those factors. And that when we see the largest financial institutions getting bigger and bigger, it tells us we are not clearly on the path to resolving “too big to fail.”

Watch it:

We’re launching a campaign to pass the bipartisan Brown-Vitter bill that would break up …

As Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has said, the nation’s biggest banks have essentially gained “too big for trial” status, and the federal government has failed to prosecute any executive at a Big Bank for financial fraud.

While Wall Street has escaped prosecutions, thousands of Americans have been arrested in the course of protests against the banks. Yesterday, at protests at the Department of Justice, at least 17 Americans were arrested — and there were more arrests today. In October 2011, one month after the start of Occupy Wall Street, at least 1,000 Americans had been arrested in these protests. As of May 2013, that number is 7,736 — according to the website Occupy Arrests, which tracks arrests.

Help us stand with these protesters.Ai??Click here to sign our petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking it to end ai???too big for trial.ai???

This afternoon, dozens of homeowners who have faced abuses by Big Banks rallied outside the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington, D.C. They demanded that the agency finally prosecute Wall Street banks who have become, as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has said, “too big for trial.”

The march, consisting of well over a hundred demonstrators, started at Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza. The marchers came from as far as Portland, Oregon, and large contingents came from cities plagued with foreclosures, such as Atlanta and New York City.

“We’re really excited over the last two and a half days we’ve had residents from around the country who’ve lost their homes or who are fighting to save their homes, come together toAi??commitAi??to training for change, to bring the movement back to their community, to keepAi??fightingAi??for their homes, and also to risk arrest today as we march to the DOJ and refuse to leave until we get a meeting with Eric Holder, until we get aAi??commitmentAi??that he’s going to start going after banks,” said Tim Franzen, who works for the quaker social justice group American Friends Service Committee. “And it’s not just about jailing bankers, it’s about bringing resources back into our communities. Wealth that has been stolen. Trillions of dollars of wealth has been stolen from our neighborhoods and you can just drive through them and see the consequences. The boarded up homes. People on the street. We are not on a crisis of economic resources, it’s one of priorities. And that’s what we’re here to say today.”

The demonstrators marched to the Department of Justice, where they rallied outside the main entrance. At that entrance, several police armed with pepper guns and other crowd control weapons at first pushed the demonstrators back, …

The U.S. government offers very low-interest — in some cases, near-zero interest rate — loans — that is, if you are a Big Bank on Wall Street. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) doesn’t think it’s right for the government to give a better deal to the banks than to the American people.

So she has introduced a bill that would require federal student loan interest rates to match the rates given to banks. She spoke about this bill today on the Senate floor:

WARREN: Right now as I speak the federal government offers far lower interest rates for loans every single day. They just don’t do it for everyone. Right now the Big Bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of about three quarters of one percent. but this summer a student who’s trying to get a loan to go to college will pay almost seven percent. In other words, the fed gov is going to charge interest rates nine times higher than the rate they charge the biggest banks. The same banks that destroyed millions of jobs and nearly broke the economy. That isn’t right. And that’s why I’m introducing legislation today to give students the same deal that we give the banks.

Watch Warren’s speech:

Warren’s legislation, called the Bank On Student Loan Fairness Act, will mandate that the Federal Reserve work to provide funds for the Department of Education to provide the same rates that it provides to Big Banks for a period of one year while Congress works on a long-term solution.

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Lanny Breuer

LannyAi??Breuer, who was theAi??Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice under President Obama, conceded in a recent PBS documentary that “no Wall Street executives” were prosecuted under his tenure.

Now we know one reason why Breuer may’ve been so soft on the Big Banks. He has just announced that he will be returning to Covington & Burling, a white collar defense law firm that “represented corporations that were investigated by the criminal division” of the Department of Justice.

Ethics law prevents him from “appearing before the DOJ on a clientai??i??s behalf for two years. He can, however, counsel a client on a new matter before the department from behind the scenes.”

Breuer isn’t the only big get for the firm this year. Former Republican Senator Jon Kyl (AZ) and former Democratic Rep. Howard Berman (CA) both joined the firm’s lobbying practice recently. It also happens to be the firm that Attorney General Eric Holder — who notoriously failed to hold banks accountable as well — worked at.

UPDATE: The American Bankers Association was one of the firm’s clients in 2012, giving it $40,000. Wells Fargo was as well, giving it $120,000.

Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

You should follow BoldProgressives on Twitter here.

A growing number of people across the ideological spectrum are calling for breaking up the Big Banks — which would threaten to harm the global economy if they go under.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year, I discussed this idea with William Temple, a Tea Party activist and colonial re-enactor from Brunswick, Georgia:

THE DAILY CHANGE: There was another thing in [Rand Paul’s] speech that I think should appeal to everyone, people who aren’t even into politics. He said it’s not conservative to bail out bankers, Big Banks.

TEMPLE: That’s right.

THE DAILY CHANGE: There’s actually a group of Republicans, David Vitter is one of them, who are saying if these banks are going to get so big that they demand bailouts we should just break them up, we shouldn’t let them run our country. What do you think about that?

TEMPLE: Ai??I agree. That we should never have any entity in this country that is propped up by our government. It also shows that our government and big corporations are in bed together. You rotate out of a big company and you go right into politics. Or you go right out ofAi??politicsAi??and into a big company. And these companies are such, there’s nothing wrong with being a big company, but when a company gets so big that they can influence legislation — and work the system to such a degree that the small mom and pop shops, the small businesses that are trying to get started can’t compete. And when you’ve got government passing legislation that makes it almost impossible for any new entity to even get started, things are out of whack […]

THE DAILY CHANGE: And you would agree with people like David Vitter that say when an institution is …

Bill Halter

Former Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter, an Arkansas Democratic Party candidate for governor, today unveiled a new proposal that would allow all students in the state who have at least a 2.5 grade point average to attend a state college tuition-free. An except from a statement Halter released about his plan:

ai???I call it the Arkansas Promise. Simply stated, if you go to high school in Arkansas, qualify for a lottery scholarship, maintain a 2.5 GPA, and plan to attend college in the state, we promise to pay your college tuition. The overall scholarship level would be set at the tuition level of the highest-cost, four-year public university in Arkansas.ai???

As millions of Americans face steep college debt, the Arkansas Promise could be a model for college affordability and achievement across the nation.

ai???If you wouldnai??i??t hire a football coach who doesnai??i??t aspire to winning the national championship and have a plan to do so, then why would you hire a Chief Executive Officer of the state who doesnai??i??t aspire to help make Arkansas the best state in America and have a plan to make it happen,” continues Halter’s statement.

Recall that Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) members mobilized in huge numbers to back Halter in his primary against conservative Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). As a result of that primary, Lincoln backed and passed a tough measure to regulate Wall Street banks.

We’re launching a campaign today to support Halter’s bold plan to guarantee tuition-free college to students who work hard. Click here to sign on as a citizen supporter of the Arkansas Promise.

Why has Wall Street escaped prosecutions?

During a Reddit question and answer session today, top Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling responded to a question from one user about how a “free market economy” can “exist when big actors cheat, break laws, and only get fined. They just consider this a business expense. Should we break up the banks?”

Sperling’s full response is here. He starts by dodging the question about whether we should break up Wall Street banks, instead simply saying that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law “creates new tools to unwind large financial firms without destabilizing our entire economy.”

He then goes on to defend the administration’s record of prosecuting Wall Street banks, saying, “I think we have a strong record.” To justify this statement, he says the administration “has filed 10,000 financial fraud causes against nearly 15,000 defendants ai??i?? including more than 2,900 mortgage fraud defendants.”

Notice that Sperling does not note who it is these defendants were — he fails to mention, for example, that not a single major executive at a Wall Street bank has been prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis. Rather, the prosecutions have been tilted towards loan officers and other low-level fraud. As Lanny Breuer, who was theAi??Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice under Obama, admitted in a recent PBS documentary, “no Wall Street executives” were prosecuted by the administration.

As Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has noted, the real problem is that too big to fail has become “too big for trial.” Watch her remarks at a recent Senate hearing, where she castigated federal regulators for failing to bring criminal cases against Big Banks:

Click here to join Warren in demanding that federal regulators hold Wall Street accountable.

Money in politics isn’t just about campaign funds, is also involves what happens after a lawmaker leaves office.

In office, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) saved Wall Street banks tens of billions of dollars by writing loopholes in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law.

Today, the law and lobbying firm Nixon Peabody announced that it will be hiring Brown to assist its “practice on business and governmental affairs as they relate to the financial services industry as well as on commercial real estate matters.”

Nixon Peabody has clients that include Goldman Sachs, which paid it $140,000 in 2012.

Keep in mind that while it would be illegal for Brown to register as a federal lobbyist before his cooling off period ends, he is free to unofficially act as a lobbyist.

While Brown will literally work for Wall Street, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been aggressively taking on the Big Banks. Last week, at a stunning hearing before federal regulators, she asked why banks that launder money for drug lords are not being put out of business. Watch it:

Click here to join Warren in demanding that federal regulators hold Wall Street accountable.
Click here to join our Take Back Democracy campaign to help stop the influence of money in our politics.

You should follow BoldProgressives on Twitter here.

Ai??

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) great performance at the Senate Banking Committee — where she asked if “too big to fail has become too big for trial” — has gone viral, with nearly 750,000 views. Watch it:

Fox News contributor and right-wing activist Erick Erickson has a truly bizarre response to Warren’s video. In an op-ed titled “If Elizabeth Warren wants to lay blame for the financial mess, she can look in the mirror,” heAi??claims that Warren is an advocate of regulations that caused the financial crisis and that she wants to prevent lawsuits against Wall Street banks:

The rich irony of Elizabeth Warren asking her question to these regulators, whose ranks she would have joined but for a Republican effort to block her nomination prior to her Senate run, is that she is an advocate of increasing the very regulations that contributed to the financial meltdown and that prevent suits against Wall Street banks. After all, Wall Street was just complying with Washingtonai??i??s orders. […] If she wants a scalp, she should look in the mirror.

Erickson’s critique is strange given the fact that the financial crisis occurred in 2008, long before Warren became charged with setting of the consumer protection bureau or was elected to the Senate. In the meantime, she has been a long-time advocate of breaking up the banks by calling for a return to Glass-Steagall. She petitioned for this in May of 2012.Ai??Erickson, on the other hand, did write about how it would be good to break up the Big Banks — but that was three months after Warren petitioned her supporters to back such an effort.

Sign our petition to the SEC calling on it to listen to Warren and end “too big for trial.”

On Sunday, the liberal advocacy group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which was a major supporter of Warren’s Senate campaign, launched an online petition urging the SEC to try banks.

“Taking Wall Street banks to trial is necessary for real accountability,” the group wrote. “As Elizabeth Warren says, trials allow the public to learn the truth and allow regulators to better do their job of protecting the public. We call on you to end your practice of ‘too big for trial.’”

Yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) took part in a Senate Banking Committee hearing titled “Wall Street Reform: Oversight of Financial Stability and Consumer and Investor Protections.”

Warren asked the committee — consisting of bank regulators from the federal government — about the “last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial.” Not a single witness was able to bring up anAi??occurrenceAi??of the government actually taking a big bank to trial in recent times. This is how Warren followed up on that shocking response from federal regulators:

WARREN:Anyone else want to tell me about the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? [silence] I just want to note on this, there are district attorneys and U.S. Attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example as they put it. I’m really concerned that too big too fail has become too big to jail. That just seems wrong to me. [applause from audience]

Watch it (relevant section at 03:26):

(Photo credit: Flickr user Serenitbee.)

Corporate lobbyists have a terrible idea they’re pushing during the budget debates. They want to lower the corporate tax rate while also cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. Most Republicans and an unfortunately significant number of Democrats have endorsed this bad idea.

But what if instead we asked corporations that are dodging taxes to actually simply pay the statutory rates asked of them?

In the spring of 2011,Ai??National Peopleai??i??s Action and the Public Accountability Initiative put out a report looking at tax dodging by the nation’s biggest banks. It found, shockingly, that if these big banks simply paid the rates that were asked of them — much as many Americans pay their tax rates withoutAi??exploitingAi??excessive deductions and loopholes — we could re-hire all 132,000 teachers laid off during the recession for another year of teaching — twice:

Six banks ai??i?? Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan StanleyAi??together paid income tax at an approximate rate of 11% of their pre-tax US earnings in 2009 and 2010.Ai??Had they paid at 35%, what they are legally mandated to pay, the federal government would have received an additional $13 billion in tax revenue.Ai??This would cover more than two years of salaries for the 132,000 teacher jobs lost since the economic crisis began in 2008.

Some of these very same banks who have dodged their tax responsibilities are now trying to attack social spending that Americans worked hard for. Remember that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein recently advocated for cutting Social Security. This is a bank that received a $10 billion taxpayer bailout.

Seniors on Medicare and Social Security did not cause the Great Recession, Wall Street did. And Wall Street and the richest Americans should be asked to …

The Republican Party has a history of telling its base one thing and then doing another while in office. Take, for example, the Christian right. Leading Republicans tell thisAi??sizableAi??voting bloc to vote for them because they share their social values, but when the party actually gets into power, it pursues the agenda it really cares about: empowering economic elites.

Here’s one example of extreme cynicism from a leading Republican. In the summer of 2011, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty spoke at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event to thousands of Christian activists. He told them that he “went to Wall Street and told them to get their snout out of the trough, because they’re some of the worst offenders when it comes to bail outs and carve outs and special deals.” Watch it:

It’s hard to disagree with anything Pawlenty said. But unfortunately, today there’s this bit of news:

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take over one of K Streetai??i??s most prestigious jobs as CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable.

The Financial Services Roundtable is one of the top lobbying outfits for Wall Street. Maybe Pawlenty just wanted Wall Street to get its snout of the trough long enough for him to stick his in it?