Make a Resolution!

Arianna Hoffington and Rob Johnson think you should Move Your Money To Community Banks.

Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, growing bigger.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so. [...]

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best.

Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

So WATCH filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki's amazing video, then go to www.moveyourmoney.info to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).

Put action into your hands! Support the George Bailey's of this world.

Big Banks Helping Only Themselves

The nation's banks will be bombarding customers with new fees and products in 2010.

The nation's banks will be bombarding customers with new fees and products in 2010 as they try to replace more than $50 billion in revenue wiped out by new rules that clamp down on certain business practices.

So far, the changes are mostly concentrated in checking accounts and credit cards. In addition to attaching new fees to old products, banks are introducing new types of accounts that they hope will reel in new customers and reduce their funding costs. [...]

In addition to the credit-card rules, the government will crack down next year on ways banks charge overdraft fees, which are assessed when a customer overdraws an account. [...]

Other banks are expected to eliminate free checking completely, raise fees on safe-deposit boxes and charge customers more for issuing a stop-payment on a check.

Arianna Hoffington and Rob Johnson think you should Move Your Money To Community Banks.

Invest in Blue-Chip Members of Permanent Washington

Here's a unique but prosperous way of getting rich:

Feeling sorry for yourself? Struggling to get by? Wondering how you can get a bailout? Well, stop moping, because it's not too late! [...]

— I'm going to help make you rich beyond your wildest dreams!

Look, we've all heard about Wall Street's losses. But you probably didn't hear about Corporate America's newest sure thing: a path to financial freedom far more reliable than any decent-paying job. It's something so old-fashioned that even amateur investors can understand it!

It's called graft — a surefire wealth creator that takes your investments, modifies laws, and delivers returns that the best stock trader could never dream of. [...]

That's right, the surest way to make big cash is not to invest in people with proven business experience or in valuable entrepreneurial ventures, but in blue-chip members of Permanent Washington — career politicos and bureaucrats who inevitably get back into positions of power and payback!

Now I know you think that I sound like the guy in the question-mark suit and that my plan seems like a scam. But it's perfectly legal!

But wait ... there's more!

Economic Crisis: Money & Power

Matt Taibii says the global economic crisis isn't about money-it's about power. Below is an excerpt from his Rolling Stone article "The Big Takeover."

How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Read the complete article here.

Obama's First Priority

Via Robert Reich:

In the wake of AIG: We've also learned that much of the 170 billion has been used by AIG to pay off AIG's putative obligations to other Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs. Goldman has maintained that it got no bailout money from the Treasury. But in fact it received some $13 billion through AIG. More troubling is that the original plan to bail out AIG was concocted at a meeting held last fall, run by then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson who, before becoming Teasury Secretary, had been CEO of Goldman Sachs. Also attending the meeting was Lloyd Blankenfein, the current CEO of Goldman Sachs. Also at the meeting: Tim Geithner, then head of the New York Fed.

Before it can clean up Wall Street or do much of anything else, the Administration has to clean up the way it's been trying to clean up Wall Street.