Wall Street Bailout

JOBS WITH JUSTICE has something to say about the $800 Billion Corporate Welfare scam and is asking for your help.

Over the past 30 years, conservatives successfully gutted regulation and preached 'smaller government' while millions of Americans lost good jobs and Wall Street and corporate America made record profits. Wall Street invented new, more complicated ways to make money off other people’s money

Now that the party’s over, Bush & Co. want to plunder the rest of us to pay the bill for Wall Street’s greedy rampage.

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.

Click here to write, and call your Representative and Senator through the Capitol Hill switchboard - (202) 224-3121 - to tell them:

1) No Bail-out for Wall Street. They had their fun, now they deserve the hang-over.

2) Don’t be panicked by the very people that caused the crisis. Take the time to develop a REAL recovery plan for our economy that puts people first, by addressing foreclosures, jobs, affordable housing, pensions, infrastructure and health care.

3) Restructure our financial systems, with renewed public oversight, to meet the needs of our entire economy, not just the finance sector, and end the excessive political clout of these few firms.

4) Bring in fair taxation, honoring work over wealth, and stop subsidizing excessive CEO salaries.

Send a letter to the following decision maker(s):
Your Congressperson
Your Senators

Below is the sample letter:

Subject: Stop the Bail-out; Pass a recovery plan instead.

Dear [decision maker name automatically inserted here],

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.