What to Do When a Bank Collapses. Web of Debt - Ellen Brown - 1 of 5. Web of Debt - Ellen Brown - 2 of 5. Web of Debt - Ellen Brown - 3 of 5. Web of Debt - Ellen Brown - 4 of 5. Rescuing America from Wall Street. “It’s a confluence of planned and unplanned demonstrations,” says Stephen Lerner, a longtime organizer for the Service Employees International Union who once spearheaded the union’s successful campaign to organize big-city janitors and today helps guide the groups in New Bottom Line.
“We build on each other. We go ping-ponging back and forth.” Planned and unplanned, the groups are coming together. The imminent mixing of largely young and countercultural Wall Street occupiers with more seasoned and hard-nosed unionists and middle-class liberals may produce some clashes of style, but their shared anger at what banks have done to them — to all of us — should be sufficient to cement this nascent coalition.
At the moment, this fledgling movement is awash in a range of demands. That the proposed reforms are all over the map is understandable given the enormity of the problem. Once the servant of industry, banking became our dominant industry. Meyersonh@washpost.com. Web of Debt - Ellen Brown - 5 of 5. Bailout Blues: Why Bank Nationalization Makes Sense. In one of the many historic excerpts from the forthcoming 100th anniversary issue of The Progressive magazine, Socialist Norman Thomas scoffs at Republican accusations that FDR is a "socialist. " No socialist, Thomas explains, would stage a short-term government takeover of the banks, only to return them once they were solvent to the same Wall Street millionaires who broke them in the first place.
The passage struck me, because I had just been listening to an economist friend with liberal, free-market views, who manages a mutual fund prescribe exactly that unsocialist cure for the current banking crisis. The government should take over all of the failing financial institutions, clean them up, and turn them back over to private management after letting the shareholders eat their losses, he suggested. The Obama/Geithner alternative: feeding the shareholders with taxpayer money, is an outrageous waste.
Here is some good reading on the subject: This view is becoming mainstream.