Dylan Ratigan to Barack Obama: Fire Timothy Geithner

This is part of a mass emailing I received from Dylan Ratigan today:

In my last piece, I talked about how Tim Geithner's job over the past five years has been to (a) print money, (b) give it to rich friends, and (c) deny everyone else legal and financial rights. This shows up everywhere, from the 0% you get on your savings account versus the insider information the rich get, to your lack of access to the Fed discount window. It's a symptom of bought government, which I try to expose on our show every day. . . . I find it laughable to hear President Obama's spokesperson talking about how his campaign represents the 99%. For starters He'd have to fire Geithner, to prove he's not the leader of a bought government. After all, it is Geithner who took a system indirectly rigged to profit the 1% at the expense of everyone else, and institutionalized and formalized it during a crisis.
The article Ratigan wrote at Huffpo reads like a long detailed indictment of Wall Street, but the word "indictment," when used in the context of Wall Street, is always and only metaphorical, as Ratigan points out:
It's not the scandals that matter, or rather, it's that the scandals are the new norm that matters. The larger context here, what the Occupiers are protesting, is that Tim Geithner formalized a financial elite and gave them special rights they had not previously had, notably a government guarantee for their investing, rights which ordinary people don't get. You can see this in bank borrowing spreads; large banks get a subsidy of $34 billion of dollars a year, simply because investors think their bonds are backed by the US government. This is now written into law - Dodd-Frank requires regulators to draw up a list of systemically significant firms. These are pretty explicitly firms that are too big to fail. Behind these investing advantages are legal advantages. No elite bankers have been prosecuted for the financial crisis, or the foreclosure crisis. NONE.
For Barack Obama to regain some of my trust, yes, he should immediately fire Tim Geithner and replace him with someone who will make Wall Street scream. And then Obama should do everything in his power to see that the big banks Ratigan describes as being on the "systemically significant firms" list are thoroughly investigated by funding hundreds of financially sophisticated investigators.  To top it off, Obama should do everything in his power to effect thorough annual audits of the Federal Reserve. If he will do all of this, I'll start listening to Obama once again, though it will still be with considerable apprehension. And for all of you tried and true "Democrats" out there who still believe that Barack Obama is a President that is on your side, it's time for all of you to closely consider the damage this President has done to our country (by judging him the way you would judge him had he been a Republican) and to start spending some time on the streets with the Occupy protesters.

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Constitutional Amendment proposed for getting money out of politics

How can it be that most of our politicians believe the following: - That Wall Street so-called banks deserved a federal bailout when they were largely responsible for causing the economic collapse of the United States, and despite the fact that after bank "reform" the Wall Street banks are bigger than ever. - That the United States needs to keep spending more on its war machine than all of the other countries on earth combined, and that we somehow need to be in a state of perpetual unfunded war? - That Congress passed "health care reform" that forces Americans to purchase coverage from monopolistic for-profit corporations, instead of passing some form of single payer coverage, which is overwhelmingly preferred by Americans. - That private money political campaigns and an over-consolidated for-profit media pre-choosing candidates is a good thing. - That they shouldn't repeal the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The answer is lots of money. When it is handed to politicians in large wads, it makes them vote in ways that keeps the money coming, regardless of what they claim. Here's the inner logic from a politician's viewpoint: "How would I keep my job if I didn't keep the money rolling in by voting for corporate interests even when those votes conflict with the interests of ordinary citizens." I agree with Dylan Ratigan that our politicians can't have any meaningful conversations, and can't make rational decisions, given the amount of private money in politics. The money they receive turns virtually all of them into psychopaths. Getting private money out of politics has become the most important issue of them all, because it keeps us from rationally discussing every other issue. How could we possibly get private money out of politics? The politicians won't do it, because it is like crack cocaine to them. Dylan Ratigan has proposed the following as an Amendment to the United States Constitution to get money out of politics, effectively reversing Citizen's United in the process: No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, campaign contributions to candidates for Federal office shall not constitute speech of any kind as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or any amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office. [More . . . ]

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