WHY WALL STREET IS WINNING: A Hated Financial Center Is Bouncing Back. How did they Do It?

Danny Schechter

A Hated Financial Center Is Bouncing Back. How did they Do It?

Two years ago as financial reform was put on the U.S. Congressional agenda, a skeptical Senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois, spoke of the power of the banks over the country’s legislative process.

“They run the place,” he said matter of factly.

The comment was then treated as a sidebar in the few newspapers that carried it, perhaps because it The remark about a shadowy power structure far more important than all the partisan in-fighting that dominates the news is worth recalling as a way of explaining how little has been done to rain in Wall Street in the years since its crash virtually wrecked the global economy.

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The “Deficit Problem” Isn’t Financial. It’s Political.

The federal budget deficit and its cumulative cousin, the national debt, are much more political and media phenomena than they are financial. Which isn’t to say that they don’t exist. Obviously, they do. But they have been invested with apocalyptic significance mainly for political purposes: to scare people and to coerce them into reducing the size and the scope of government.

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The Burying of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report

Late last month, the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued the first official report on the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown. The report is devastating. The commission interviewed over 700 witnesses, held 19 days of public hearings, and investigated millions of documents. Based on this research, it gives a fairly accurate picture of the fraud and criminality that led to the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression.

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Microcredit: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Unraveling the confusion behind microcredit: how some models help alleviate poverty, while others exploit the poor to make the rich richer.

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Census: Number of Poor May Be Millions Higher

WASHINGTON -- The number of poor people in the U.S. is millions higher than previously known, with 1 in 6 Americans — many of them 65 and older — struggling in poverty due to rising medical care and other costs, according to preliminary census figures released Wednesday. At the same time, government aid programs such as tax credits and food stamps kept many people out of poverty, helping to ensure the poverty rate did not balloon even higher during the recession in 2009, Obama's first year in office.

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10 Signs That Our Nation Is Becoming Poorer

As the middle class in America continues to be slowly wiped out, the number of working poor continues to increase. Today, nearly one out of every three families in the United States is considered to be "low income". Millions of American families are finding that they can barely make it from month to month even with both parents working as hard as they possibly can. Blue collar American workers from coast to coast are having their wages decreased at a time when it seems like the cost of virtually every monthly bill is going up. Unfortunately, there is every indication that things are only going to get worse and that average American families are going to be financially squeezed even more in the months and years to come.

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The Missing Vision for a New Economy

This is the first of a series of blogs based on excerpts adapted from the 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth [1]. I wrote Agenda to spur a national conversation on economic policy issues and options that are otherwise largely ignored. This blog series is intended to contribute to that conversation. -DK New and fortunate are those whose lives have not been directly touched by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and its consequences. People want to understand what went wrong and how we can set it right. Yet the public commentary continues to center primarily on finger-pointing. Who knew what when? Which regulators were asleep at the switch, and why?

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The Rich Can Already Call It a Year

Well, 2011, it’s been nice. But I think we’ve worked enough already. In any case, we’ve already made enough money. Time to call it a year. This is a ridiculous idea, right? Yet, as the Canadian Financial Post reported at the beginning of the week, “Top CEOs will have earned average workers’ full annual pay by 2:30 p.m. today.” The “today” in question was Monday, January 3, the first business day of the year. Here’s their explanation:

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