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The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous, and secretive economic and political force in America.

If this country is to break out of the horrendous recession and create the millions of jobs we desperately need, if we are going to create a modicum of financial stability for the future, there is no question but that the American people are going to have to take a very hard look at Wall Street and demand fundamental reforms.  I hope these protests are the beginning of that process.

Let us never forget that as a result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, and life savings as the middle class underwent an unprecedented collapse.  Sadly, despite all the suffering caused by Wall Street, there is no reason to believe that the major financial institutions have changed their ways, or that future financial disasters and bailouts will not happen again.

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. (more…)

The Republicans have been so desperate to find new and clever ways to attack the president that they’ve managed to paint themselves into rhetorical corners with wafer thin sloganeering and laughable attempts at snark. It’s no wonder, then, why they’re dogged by an ongoing series of contradictions. These incongruities whiz past our faces so quickly these days, they’re almost imperceptible.

For example, during the Florida CPAC event last weekend, Governor Rick Scott cracked a joke about the president’s use of a Teleprompter. Not particularly shocking since it’s a desperately ridiculous attack that’s been popular since 2009 when the Republicans conveniently forgot that all modern presidents, including Saint Reagan, have used Teleprompters. Adding to the meta-irony, however, was the fact that Rick Scott read his Teleprompter joke… off of a Teleprompter.

Elsewhere, New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced that he doesn’t plan to run for president. Within his prepared remarks, Christie noted that President Obama “has not found the courage to lead.” (more…)

If a corporation is large enough, it should just be allowed to break the law.

That’s the message of H.R. 2597, a bill voted out of the House Education and Workforce Committee last week. With the rest of Washington caught in tumultuous negotiations over public debt and deficits that are ballooning as a result of a recession caused by Wall Street recklessness and a lack of public oversight, you might imagine that making it even easier for corporations to escape accountability would be low on the agenda. Yet the legislation, sponsored by Representative Tim Scott of South Carolina, would do just that, blocking an agency that protects the rights of working people from taking action to enforce the law.

By law, Americans have a right to a voice on the job: to organize themselves, form unions, and vote on whether to take last-resort actions — like going on strike. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established in 1935 to protect these rights and to deal with unfair labor practices carried out by unions and employers alike. 

Yet the NLRB has not been carrying out its mission effectively: An achingly slow dispute process accompanied by slap-on-the-wrist fines too often let corporations get away with illegal behavior. More than a third of employers illegally fire workers for exercising their legal right to form a union, according to research by a Cornell University professor, while more than half of employers make unlawful threats when their workforce tries to unionize. Weak law enforcement is a major reason why the proportion of Americans that belong to unions has been in decline for decades. Now, Scott and other members of the House Education and Workforce Committee want to weaken the NLRB even more.

The pretext is a labor dispute at a Boeing airplane plant where the company appears to have acted illegally to retaliate against workers exercising their right to go on strike. Boeing has tried to portray the issue as one of big government and big labor telling a beleaguered company whether it can build a plant. But the issue is far simpler: Should Boeing be permitted to ignore a law that has been in effect for more than 70 years? Should the NLRB lose its power to enforce workers’ rights in this case and others to come?

At a time when working Americans are already facing tremendous hardship, workers’ ability to join together to improve the quality of their jobs is more critical than ever. We can ill afford the step backward.

Yet the stakes are bigger still.

The latest bill is part of a larger effort to weaken not only the NLRB but a range of public law-enforcement institutions that hold corporations accountable for their actions toward employees, consumers, citizens, and the environment. Republicans in Congress have proposed crippling cuts to the NLRB budget and threatened to defund the agency entirely. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau faces a similar onslaught, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisting no one will be confirmed to lead the agency unless its power is significantly diluted. The Environmental Protection Agency, finally on the verge of regulating global warming emissions, is also under fire. 

All of these efforts threaten to weaken the rule of law and give corporations a free pass to ignore rules that inconvenience them or impede their ability to generate profits. We’ve already seen how that story ends.

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Amy Traub is Senior Policy Analyst at Demos, a non-partisan public policy and research foundation.

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This entry originally appeared at TheHill.com.

Statement Delivered on the Floor of the United States Senate — June 27, 2011:

Mr. President, this is a pivotal moment in the history of our country. In the coming days and weeks, decisions will be made about our national budget that will impact the lives of virtually every American in this country for decades to come.

At a time when the richest people and the largest corporations in our country are doing phenomenally well, and, in many cases, have never had it so good, while the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing, it is absolutely imperative that a deficit reduction package not include the disastrous cuts in programs for working families, the elderly, the sick, the children and the poor that the Republicans in Congress, dominated by the extreme right wing, are demanding.

In my view, the President of the United States of America needs to stand with the American people and say to the Republican leadership that enough is enough. No, we will not balance the budget on the backs of working families, the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor, who have already sacrificed enough in terms of lost jobs, lost wages, lost homes, and lost pensions. Yes, we will demand that millionaires and billionaires and the largest corporations in America contribute to deficit reduction as a matter of shared sacrifice. Yes, we will reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending at the Pentagon. And, no we will not be blackmailed once again by the Republican leadership in Washington, who are threatening to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States government for the first time in our nation’s history unless they get everything they want. (more…)

By Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont

Congress and the White House are now focused on how we deal with our huge deficit — a crisis brought about over the last 10 years by two wars, tax breaks for the rich, the Wall Street bailout and a prescription drug program — all unpaid for. The deficit also increased as a result of the declining tax revenues during a current recession, caused by the greed and illegal behavior of Wall Street.

The debate over deficit reduction comes at an unusual moment in American economic history. While the middle class is in rapid decline and poverty is increasing, the wealthiest people in our country and largest corporations are doing phenomenally well. Over the last several decades almost all new income created in this country has gone to the top 1 percent, who now earn more income than the bottom 50 percent. Further, the United States now has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any major country with the top 400 individuals owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million. (more…)

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect

If it does nothing else, the budget that House Republicans unveiled Tuesday provides the first real Republican program for the 21st century, and it is this:

Repeal the 20th century.

Republicans have never particularly warmed to the American social contract that governed most of the past hundred years. Its central elements, enacted during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, assumed a level of collective national responsibility for the well-being of the elderly and children, the two groups who could not benefit directly from employment, through such programs as Social Security, Medicare, funding for schools and for college grants and loans.

The logic behind these programs wasn’t simply humanitarian. It was also economic: Bolstering the purchasing power of the elderly increased economic activity and enabled the adult children of the elderly to invest more in their own children. Enabling more people to get good educations straight through college created a more productive workforce. A similar dual logic — both humanitarian and Keynesian — informed the programs that aided the poor and unemployed, such as Medicaid and food stamps.

Conservatives have never cottoned to this contract. They argue that a laissez faire economy can produce even greater or at least similar levels of prosperity and economic security, despite a striking lack of historical or economic data to back up this contention. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) made that claim Tuesday in presenting his budget proposal. But Ryan’s pieties notwithstanding, his budget is a prescription for diminishing prosperity and security, a road map, in fact, for national decline.

Ryan achieves the bulk of his savings through sharp reductions in projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid, converting the former into a right-to-purchase private insurance, subsidized up to a point, and the latter into a block grant program. (Scrapping Social Security remains, for now, a bridge too far.) Skyrocketing medical costs are the chief factor in rising government expenses, but rather than have government bring down those costs by, say, negotiating with drug companies on the price of their products, Ryan simply forces the elderly, their children and the poor to pick up more of those costs. As the number of retirees with defined-benefit pensions continues to shrink (thanks to corporate America and, this year, Republican governors), an increasing number of seniors will be unable to purchase the medications they need. (more…)

By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont

Republicans in the House want to balance the budget by denying more than 200,000 little children the opportunity to receive an early education through Head Start; reducing or eliminating Pell Grants for 9.4 million college students; eliminating primary health care services to 11 million Americans; and delaying Social Security benefits to half a million eligible Americans, among other things.

Before Congress cuts funding for Head Start, Social Security, and financial aid for college, we have got to make sure that large, profitable corporations are paying their fair share of taxes.

At a time when we have a $14.2 trillion national debt and a $1.6 trillion federal deficit, it is unacceptable that Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Bank of America, Chevron, Boeing, and other large, profitable corporations are not only avoiding paying any federal income taxes at all but have actually received huge refund checks from the IRS.

Loopholes in the tax code, offshore tax havens, tax breaks to companies that export American jobs to China, and other tax breaks have allowed giant corporations in America to receive billions in refunds from the IRS.

Meanwhile corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash on hand, and big banks have nearly a trillion dollars in excess reserves parked at the Federal Reserve.

In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all even though they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period. (more…)

By Hilda Solis
U.S. Secretary of Labor

I was “raised union.”

My mother, who immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua, worked the 3 p.m. to midnight shift at a toy factory after the birth of my younger twin sisters. She was a member of the United Rubber Workers, which later merged with the Steelworkers Union.

My father worked at a battery recycling plant and was a shop steward there for the Teamsters Union. His plant went on strike several times when I was a kid. During those times, he explained to my mother, my six brothers and sisters, and me that it would be tough. Although the union paid a small part of his wages when they were on strike, it was a hardship. But we understood that we had to make sacrifices. And we did.

When I was in ninth grade, my dad would come home at the end of the day and ask me to sit with him at our kitchen table. From his pockets, he would pull pieces of paper with writing in Spanish on them — notes given to him by his co-workers. There were all sorts of things scribbled on them: concerns about health and safety practices at the plant, questions about paychecks that didn’t add up, and ideas about how to improve the efficiency and productivity of the line. He’d ask me to translate them into English for him.

The first time, I didn’t understand what they were. When I asked, he explained: “They are the voice of the workers.” He said that the paper scraps started a conversation between the union and management. He told me it was a way to get them together “at the table.” After that, I understood. (more…)

By Sherrod Brown
U.S. Senator, D-Ohio

Progressives are an impatient bunch. We fight for people who have waited too long already — for health care, for educational opportunity, for jobs to keep them in the middle class.

But for generations, conservatives have appealed to fear to protect the privileged and preserve the status quo — fear of immigrants, fear of diversity, fear of big government. For conservatives in 2010, it’s easy:

“Stop.”

“No.”

“Repeal.”

Meanwhile, for more than a century — in churches and temples, in union halls and neighborhood centers, in the streets and at the ballot box — progressives have moved the country forward. Progressives brought us minimum wage and Social Security in the 1930s, civil rights and Medicare in the 1960s, and health care and Wall Street reform in 2010.

Opponents of these accomplishments — some of society’s most privileged and well-entrenched interest groups — have not changed much. The John Birch Society of 1965 has bequeathed its fervor and extremism to the Tea Party of 2010.

History tells us that rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged.

No one should be surprised over what has happened in the last 18 months:

•We passed health care reform, so the insurance companies are coming after us at election time. (more…)

By Les Leopold
Author “The Looting of America”

Say goodbye to 2009, the worst economic year since the Great Depression.

Say hello to the billionaire bailout society in which the super-rich gamble, lose and get bailed out by the rest of us.

To save the system from total collapse we poured trillions of dollars into the financial sector. The result? Banks still are refusing to lend. Thirty million Americans are looking for full-time jobs and 49 million are skipping meals including one out of four children. But Wall Street again is reaping record profits and bonuses.

Not only are we richly rewarding those who wrecked our economy, but also, we have to put up with hundreds of fabrications about how the big banks got us here. Here is my biggest, fattest lies list for 2009:

1. “Government programs for low-income home buyers caused the financial crash.” Wall Street defenders were quick to blame the Community Reinvestment Act, which urges banks to loan money in minority communities. In fact, almost none of the CRA loans are sub-prime and the vast majority are doing well, thank you. Blaming government programs deflects us from the real cause: Wall Street’s incredibly reckless creation, marketing, selling and trading of “innovative” new securities that supposedly removed the risk from pools of risky debt. It didn’t work. Wall Street, not the poor, crashed our economy.

2. “Income inequality is good for everyone.” Lord Brian Griffiths, Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs at least had the nerve to say what so many of the super-rich really believe:

“We have to accept that inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all.”

Unfortunately, the facts suggest otherwise. There is a high correlation between the mal-distribution of income and economic crashes. The last time our wealth and income distribution was as skewed as it is today was 1929, and that’s not an accident. When too much money is in the hands of the few it runs out of real world investment and gravitates towards speculative investments. This inevitably creates asset bubbles and crashes. Record pay and bonuses on Wall Street and high unemployment are connected. (See The Looting of America Chapter 11).

3. “The rising number of billionaires is a sign of economic health.” It’s accepted media wisdom that the more billionaires the better. China with 130 billionaires now trails only the US, which has 359, according to Forbes magazine. But in our billionaire bailout society, the rising number of billionaires signals a collapsing middle class. Ponder this statistic: In 1970 the ratio of the compensation of the top 100 CEOs compared to the average production worker was 45 to 1. By 2006 it was an astounding 1,723 to one. Does that look healthy to you?

4. “Paying back TARP means banks are no longer on government welfare.” Bank after bank is rushing to repay TARP funds during the worst economic year since 1937. They want to get out from under the Pay Czar (not that he’s been sufficiently tough on the banks under his purview.) Banks that were insolvent only a few months ago now say they have the financial strength to refund tens of billions of dollars to the government. Where did all that money come from? Much of it comes from other government welfare programs for Wall Street (over $12 trillion worth) that aren’t publicized. (See Nomi Prins’s excellent accounting.) It may be the case that our banks are paying us back with our own money. Now that’s financial innovation.

5. “Wall Street’s freedom to innovate must be protected.” Congressional leaders are tripping all over themselves to say new regulations will not discourage Wall Street innovations, something they claim is vital to our economy. Oh really? Do those “innovations” add anything useful to our country other than new casino games for the super-rich? Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volker, recently blew the whistle on this fabrication:

“I hear about these wonderful innovations in the financial markets and they sure as hell need a lot of innovation. I can tell you of two – Credit Default Swaps and CDOs – which took us right to the brink of disaster: were they wonderful innovations that we want to create more of?
…. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information….

The most important financial innovation that I have seen in the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine… How many other innovations can you tell me of that have been as important to the individual?” (“What Has Financial Innovation Done for You?”)

6. “To retain critically needed talent, Wall Street must be free to pay top salaries and bonuses.” Where would they flee if they just got paid like normal people rather than like gods? The British are putting in place a 50 percent tax on bonuses. Also, compensation is much, much lower in the European Union. But the real lie is that we need such “talent” in the first place. That kind of “talent” just crashed our economy. That kind of “talent” is widely overpaid – no way should bond traders receive 10 to 100 times what is earned by the best neurosurgeons in the world. Something is really wrong and it starts with the lie of banking “talent.”

7. “Overpaid American workers are the real cause of unemployment.” The New York Times writers who concocted this argument didn’t think they were lying. But this is one of the most preposterous ideas put forth during 2009. (“American Wages out of Balance” New York Times November 11, 2009) Edward Hadas, Martin Huchinson and Antony Currie informed us that:

“American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance.”

They don’t mention that the average non-supervisory worker has already taken an 18 percent cut in real wages between 1973 and 2007. What’s worse, they claim that if workers don’t take these additional cuts, these “overpaid” working stiffs will be the cause of another Great Depression. They write:

“But if American wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching Depression-era levels of unemployment.”

Not a word is mentioned about how Wall Street’s gambling caused all of this unemployment and how the continued failure of Wall Street banks to lend is stalling job growth, right now.

8. “I’m doing God’s Work.” Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman of Goldman Sachs said what too many Wall Street leaders truly believe: that they are so privileged and entitled that it seems as if the heavens bless their work. Why else are they earning hundreds of millions of dollars? Mr. Blankfein believes he is creating a virtuous circle by raising capital for corporations who create jobs and help our society prosper. But Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and the rest of the apostles helped to bring the entire world economy to its knees. Does that mean God likes unemployment and widespread hunger?

9. “We’re out of money.” Who’s we? Yes, the middle class is tapped out but the super-rich haven’t even begun to pay their fair share for the mess they created. Yet the top 400 richest Americans alone are sitting on $1.27 trillion or so in wealth. Here’s a dangerous thought. What if we had a very steeply progressive wealth/income tax that reduced the net worth of the super-rich to “only” about $100 million each? You wouldn’t be suffering if you had $100 million kicking around. Now do the math: The 400 richest x $100 million each would equal $40 billion. That would leave about $1.23 trillion to help pay back the country for the Wall Street meltdown that we, our children and their children will be subsidizing.

10. “We are becoming a socialist economy.” Somewhere between 68 and 78 percent of the US GDP is private sector activity, the highest among developed nations. And much of the government expenditures go to private contractors as well. But there’s a kernel of truth in the socialist scare: What do you call a society that encourages the private accumulation of wealth without limit, and then when the super-wealthy get into serious trouble, we bail them out with taxpayer funds – largely from a declining middle-class? That’s not free-enterprise. That’s not socialism either. It’s something new and it deserves to be called the billionaire bailout society.

Here’s hoping that in 2010 we can begin to undo it.

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Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.