Tell Obama: You've Arrested the Wrong People
Five years after the greed and recklessness of Wall Street criminals crashed our economy, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is finally making some arrests. But it’s not Wall Street bankers sitting in jail. Nope, it’s struggling homeowners and foreclosure victims who went to DC to demand the end of Too Big to Jail.
Yesterday, 500 people surrounded the Department of Justice headquarters. 27 got arrested - 17 last night and 10 more this morning at 6 AM - and are refusing to leave until the Obama Administration agrees to get the DOJ to start launching criminal investigations into the actions that led to the Great Recession. We need your support to make this happen!
Please call the White House and tell them you support the homeowners and foreclosure fighters they’ve arrested at the Department of Justice and also want to see Wall Street criminals held accountable.
Here’s the contact info and a short script.
The White House Comment Line: (202) 456-1111
Hi, my name is _______________ and I’m calling in support of the 27 people you had arrested at the DOJ yesterday and this morning. You’ve arrested the wrong people. You should be arresting the Wall Street bankers who caused the Great Recession, not jailing struggling homeowners and foreclosure fighters just trying keep their homes from being stolen. Please end your policy of Too Big to Jail and start making Wall Street pay us back.
After you complete the call, tell us how it went by clicking here and leaving a comment.
Bank of (Insert Country Here)
The Bank of America was originally the Bank of Italy. It was founded in San Francisco in 1904 by Amadeo Giannini. The bank served fellow Italian immigrants, who American banks refused to do business with. At the time, banks only worked with the wealthy; storing money under the mattress was very common for common people.
This isn’t the only interesting thing about Giannini. He managed to save all his deposits from his bank buiding during the great earthquake and fire in 1906. With all the other banks smoldering ruins, he set up a makeshift office with a desk of a plank over two barrels. Giannini lent the saved money to whoever was willing to invest in rebuilding; later in life he was very proud that all those loans were repaid.
How The Banking System Works.
- Banks: Trust us with your money
- People: What if you lose our money, who will insure our money?
- Banks: The government
- People: You mean the government that's funded with our money?
- Banks: Yes.
- People: So we are giving you our money and if you lose it we will be paid back with money that the government taxes from us?
- Banks: Yes.
- People: Where will that new money come from if you lost it in the first place?
- Banks: We'll lend it to you.
- People: How does that work?
- Banks: It's complex. No need to worry, the system can't fail because if it did, everything would come to an end.
- People: ...
- Banks: ...
- People: ...
- Banks: Trust us with your money.
Elizabeth Warren Comes Out Swinging Against Banks | TPMDC
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.comProgressives fell in love with Elizabeth Warren because they saw in her a fighter — someone who would break from Washington’s longstanding tradition of cozying up to big banks and instead hold them accountable for bad behavior.
She hasn’t disappointed.
Just two months into her new job as Massachusetts senator, the former consumer advocate has used her perch to publicize and rail against shady practices by financial institutions and what she views as leniency from the regulators tasked with overseeing them.
The latest example came last Thursday during a Banking Committee hearing, when Warren demanded answers from a panel of federal regulators as to why the multinational bank HSBC got off with a fine for money laundering for Mexican drug cartels — along with violating international sanctions against several countries, including Iran and Libya — when people caught with drugs go to jail for life.
“At the dawn on the twentieth century, Wall Street was losing power in the banking industry. Powerhouses like J. P. Morgan and the Rockefellers were losing significant market share to the new banks arising in the West…Wall Street needed the government to help it to devise a way to capture the market once more and put an end to these smaller banks. To answer their quandaries, they devised the Federal Reserve. It is a rights-violating, property-stealing, unconstitutional cartel that is sponsored by the government, which is the only thing which makes it legal.”
—Judge Andrew NapolitanoReal Smart.
I go to De Anza Community College; therefore, I am dumb and unmotivated.
I got accepted into Berkeley; therefore, I am an intelligent individual that will make positive contributions to society.
We have been brainwashed into thinking that grades define how ‘smart’ we are. We disregard all other types of intelligence that have nothing to do with numbers and algorithms. We devalue those that aren’t interested in mathematics and hard sciences simply because they are more inclined to invest their time into gaining knowledge about nature, music, linguistics, etc.
The truth is, grades are just an indicator of how well one is able to regurgitate information. We live in a society that advocates and revolves around banking education. We are encouraged to learn, memorize, and repeat information we couldn’t care less about.
Quite honestly, the majority of the things we are learning aren’t even going to be applied to the real world, and most likely won’t help us prepare for the daily tasks that our career will call on us to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe I am extremely privileged to have access to higher education. I’m not saying taking all these classes will prove futile in the end. School is more about getting good grades -it’s about expanding your mind, as cliché as that may sound. I digress, but what I’m trying to say is, we all need to stop letting grades define how ‘smart’ we are or aren’t. Our education system is highly flawed for the basic reason that we all learn differently, and are interested in different subjects; yet, we are all being graded and evaluated the same way.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein
