Preach It, Brother Bernie!

Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) has a remarkably detailed post up at the Daily Kos. In it, he excoriates Wall Street and the federal government, and then provides some good sense solutions to the problems caused by the banksters and their style of doing business.

More than three years ago, Congress rewarded Wall Street with the biggest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. Simultaneously but unknown to the American people at the time, the Federal Reserve provided an even larger bailout. The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed’s lending programs during the financial crisis.

As a result of this audit, the American people have learned that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in low-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, huge foreign banks, multi-national corporations, and some of the wealthiest people in the world.

In other words, when Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the federal government acted boldly, aggressively, and with a fierce sense of urgency to save our financial system from collapse with no strings attached.

Now that the middle class is collapsing and a record-breaking 46 million Americans are living in poverty, the Federal Reserve has failed to act with the same sense of urgency to make sure that small businesses receive the affordable loans needed to put millions of Americans back to work and prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes. [Emphasis added]

Those too wealthy to fail got the benefit of an extraordinary bailout by the feds, so extraordinary that our government tried to keep it secret from the rest of us and almost pulled it off. If the move was necessary to keep us from utter destruction, why hide it? Was the government afraid that the 99% of us who paid for that extra bit of corporate welfare might catch on too soon that we were being sold out yet again? Apparently so.

Sen. Sanders then issues six legislative proposals designed to put Wall Street back under control in a manner they should have been so as to avoid the catastrophe --the near catastrophe for them, the complete disaster for everyone else. Go read them and then forward them on to your congress critters. Explain to them that there's a reason the Occupy Wall Street protests are catching on with the 99%.

And Bernie has a few words about those protests in his conclusion:

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are shining a light on one of the most serious problems facing the United States -- the greed and power of Wall Street. Now is the time for the American people to demand that the president and Congress follow that light – and act. The future of our economy is at stake.

Preach it, Bernie!