Jobs with Justice Letter Campaign

by Dollars and Sense

This is from Jobs with Justice; hat-tip, again, to John Miller.

What's At Stake?
Tell Congress: No Wall Street Bail-out! We need you to STEP UP!

Tell Congress: Stop the Bail-out; Pass a recovery plan, instead.

Now that they’ve made so much money, they say that the huge Wall Street firms, paying grotesque salaries, are "too big to fail," so a quick-fix blank check is making its way through Congress.

Apparently, conservatives think our health care crisis isn't big enough to fix (and it would certainly take less than $700 billion). Apparently, the loss of millions of good jobs due to so-called 'free trade' is not a big enough crisis to fix. The disaster from Hurricane Katrina was not big enough to fix, and New Orleans could be left to fail. The looming pension crisis and the affordable housing crisis -- none of these, apparently, deserves a bail-out.

For conservatives and financial elites, when working class people face a crisis, plants close or health care costs triple, the system is working. They take all the private profits, but when the bubble bursts, and they can no longer sustain their profiteering rampage... well, they're too big to fail. And who pays the bill? The CEOs are telling Congress to send the bill to working people – the very people who have been forced out of their housing, out of their jobs, out of their healthcare and out of their pensions by Wall Street’s greed.

Call and write. Time is short.

The site helps generate letters to members of congress:

Dear [decision-maker]:

I am appalled at the proposed bail-out of Wall Street, the very people and firms whose reckless behavior, combined with 'anything goes' deregulation and the housing price bubble, created this disaster in the first place.

Strong government action is definitely needed, but the Bush administration's plans are entirely wrong-headed. The proposals to 'fix' Wall Street, like the entirely inadequate foreclosure fix, prop up private profits without helping average Americans or the economy as a whole. It's time for a new regime that puts family security before the securities industry, and uses public power and resources to benefit the public interest.

I ask you to commit to the following:

1) No Wall street bail-out. It's wrong-headed and bails out the CEOs who got us in the mess, not the working people suffering the consequences of bad economic policy.

2) Take the time to craft a real recovery plan for our economy, a plan that puts people first and addresses our multiple economic crises, including good jobs, affordable housing, health care, retirement security, infrastructure, and disaster relief (e.g. Katrina).

3) Restructure our financial systems, from the Federal Reserve on down, re-establishing public oversight, preventing the predatory practices and establishing public alternatives to the reckless privatized system that brought us this crisis. Prevent the victims of predatory lending from losing their housing. Restrict lobbying by the financial sector.

4) Establish fair taxation that honors work over wealth, including the establishment of taxes on financial transactions, ending subsidies to excessive CEO pay and offshoring, ending the tax system that taxes earned income more than unearned income, and establishing a progressive inheritance tax.

Labels: bailout, financial crisis, Jobs with Justice, Step Up

 

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9/24/2008 12:40:00 PM