"Words that make actions speak louder."
The Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), CREDO, and MoveOn have launched a petition campaign to ensure that the House/Senate deliberations on financial reform be “fully transparent.” The good news? The government has the ability, the resources, and the talent to make this process the breakthrough in “open government” the President has long promised. The bad […]
If you have a yellow “Support Our Troops” sticker on your car – or even if you don’t – you should know the name of the Senators who just traded in our troops, their families, and our military readiness for the easy cash offered by auto dealers. There’s no rational policy reason for this exclusion: […]
Momentum is building for putting a historic conference between the House and Senate online and on live television, as they debate the future of financial reform. This is the time to contact Senators and Representatives to support this critical step toward open government – and a stronger, fairer, safer economy. Yesterday we asked conservatives to […]
Here are the words they used for health care reform (or the buzzwords their consultants told them to use): “Secret”! “Backroom”! “Behind closed doors”! “Dealing”! Or, as one especially unsubtle pol put it, “secret backroom dealing”! These right-wing politicians and activists had a zeal for open government when they demanded that the House and Senate […]
Turning conflicts of interest into “win/win” situations can be a form of brilliance. Pretending those conflicts don’t exist can be a form of indifference. That’s why it was troubling to hear the President say today that financial reform “is not a zero sum game where Wall Street loses and Main Street wins. As we’ve learned […]
Things have been moving pretty quickly lately in the interlocking worlds of politics and financial reform. While there is a lot we don’t know, here are three statements we can probably make with a high degree of certainty: 1. If the banks had been on the ballot yesterday voters in both parties would’ve voted them […]
Anyone who’s ever seen a Terminator movie knows that civilization ended when a computer system called “Skynet” came alive and tried to terminate the human race by starting a nuclear apocalypse. After last week’s “flash crash” on Wall Street, they might have wondered if Skynet wasn’t working on a financial apocalypse instead. We still don’t […]
“Budgetball is an innovative sport that combines fiscal strategy and physical play.” – Budgetball Rulebook, “Pass the Ball – Not The Buck” Billionaire Pete Peterson is funding an elaborate campaign to convince a nation with more than 15 million unemployed citizens that the most urgent crisis we face today is not unemployment … or poverty, […]
The trade association for payday lenders objected to what they called my “name calling” in their blog yesterday … then called me a “pig.”Why? Because I quoted Aristotle and told a story about Jesus. Well, to be fair, I did suggest their industry might be “evil” according to traditional definitions of the term. But that […]
There are basically two dimensions to the financial crisis. One is the way finance has evolved into a gambling operation that’s fundamentally risky and fails to contribute to the real economy. The other is plain, old-fashioned greed – the kind that exploits the weak and vulnerable in a shameful manner, the kind that depends on […]