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Roll Call of Shame on 'Too Big to Fail'
May 09, 2010
Future historians will look back on the financial crisis of the last couple years and wonder why Congress didn't act sooner or more aggressively to prevent such a crisis from recurring.
Last week, by an astonishingly wide margin, the Senate voted down a bill sponsored by Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman that would have limited the size of financial institutions.
No more too big to fail, they proposed. Let's chop them down to size before they bring the economy down with them once more. Their bill would have forced the six largest banks in the country to sell off part of their business, since it would have capped nondeposit liabilities of each bank at 2% of GDP.
Well, the vote on "The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010" was 61 against, 33 in favor. And get this: A whopping 27 Democratic Senators sided with the big banks on this crucial vote.
Here's the roll call of shame:
Daniel Akaka
Max Baucus
Evan Bayh
Michael Bennet
Thomas Carper
Kent Conrad
Chris Dodd
Dianne Feinstein
Kirsten Gillibrand
Kay Hagan
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
John Kerry
Amy Klobuchar
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Frank Lautenberg
Claire McCaskill
Robert Menendez
Bill Nelson
Ben Nelson
Jack Reed
Chuck Schumer
Jeanne Shaheen
Jon Tester
Mark Udall
Mark Warner
Several of these Senators, like Conrad and Tester, pretend to be progressive populists.
Schumer and Dodd pretend to be leaders on financial reform.
And John Kerry?
"Wall Street won and the American people lost," said Mary Bottari, director of the Real Economy Project for the Center for Media and Democracy. The bill was "the single best way to prevent the growth of 'too big to fail' firms that threaten to collapse the global economy," she said. And it was "the single best way to protect taxpayers from future bailouts."
As Dick Durbin, who voted in favor of this legislation, said of Congress a while back: The banks "frankly own the place."
They own it, and they subdivide it.
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© 2023 The Progressive
Matt Rothschild
Matt Rothschild is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Prior to joining the Democracy Campaign at the start of 2015, Matt worked at The Progressive Magazine for 32 years. For most of those, he was the editor and publisher of The Progressive.
Future historians will look back on the financial crisis of the last couple years and wonder why Congress didn't act sooner or more aggressively to prevent such a crisis from recurring.
Last week, by an astonishingly wide margin, the Senate voted down a bill sponsored by Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman that would have limited the size of financial institutions.
No more too big to fail, they proposed. Let's chop them down to size before they bring the economy down with them once more. Their bill would have forced the six largest banks in the country to sell off part of their business, since it would have capped nondeposit liabilities of each bank at 2% of GDP.
Well, the vote on "The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010" was 61 against, 33 in favor. And get this: A whopping 27 Democratic Senators sided with the big banks on this crucial vote.
Here's the roll call of shame:
Daniel Akaka
Max Baucus
Evan Bayh
Michael Bennet
Thomas Carper
Kent Conrad
Chris Dodd
Dianne Feinstein
Kirsten Gillibrand
Kay Hagan
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
John Kerry
Amy Klobuchar
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Frank Lautenberg
Claire McCaskill
Robert Menendez
Bill Nelson
Ben Nelson
Jack Reed
Chuck Schumer
Jeanne Shaheen
Jon Tester
Mark Udall
Mark Warner
Several of these Senators, like Conrad and Tester, pretend to be progressive populists.
Schumer and Dodd pretend to be leaders on financial reform.
And John Kerry?
"Wall Street won and the American people lost," said Mary Bottari, director of the Real Economy Project for the Center for Media and Democracy. The bill was "the single best way to prevent the growth of 'too big to fail' firms that threaten to collapse the global economy," she said. And it was "the single best way to protect taxpayers from future bailouts."
As Dick Durbin, who voted in favor of this legislation, said of Congress a while back: The banks "frankly own the place."
They own it, and they subdivide it.
Matt Rothschild
Matt Rothschild is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Prior to joining the Democracy Campaign at the start of 2015, Matt worked at The Progressive Magazine for 32 years. For most of those, he was the editor and publisher of The Progressive.
Future historians will look back on the financial crisis of the last couple years and wonder why Congress didn't act sooner or more aggressively to prevent such a crisis from recurring.
Last week, by an astonishingly wide margin, the Senate voted down a bill sponsored by Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman that would have limited the size of financial institutions.
No more too big to fail, they proposed. Let's chop them down to size before they bring the economy down with them once more. Their bill would have forced the six largest banks in the country to sell off part of their business, since it would have capped nondeposit liabilities of each bank at 2% of GDP.
Well, the vote on "The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010" was 61 against, 33 in favor. And get this: A whopping 27 Democratic Senators sided with the big banks on this crucial vote.
Here's the roll call of shame:
Daniel Akaka
Max Baucus
Evan Bayh
Michael Bennet
Thomas Carper
Kent Conrad
Chris Dodd
Dianne Feinstein
Kirsten Gillibrand
Kay Hagan
Daniel Inouye
Tim Johnson
John Kerry
Amy Klobuchar
Herb Kohl
Mary Landrieu
Frank Lautenberg
Claire McCaskill
Robert Menendez
Bill Nelson
Ben Nelson
Jack Reed
Chuck Schumer
Jeanne Shaheen
Jon Tester
Mark Udall
Mark Warner
Several of these Senators, like Conrad and Tester, pretend to be progressive populists.
Schumer and Dodd pretend to be leaders on financial reform.
And John Kerry?
"Wall Street won and the American people lost," said Mary Bottari, director of the Real Economy Project for the Center for Media and Democracy. The bill was "the single best way to prevent the growth of 'too big to fail' firms that threaten to collapse the global economy," she said. And it was "the single best way to protect taxpayers from future bailouts."
As Dick Durbin, who voted in favor of this legislation, said of Congress a while back: The banks "frankly own the place."
They own it, and they subdivide it.
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