Tell Congress: No Wall Street Bail-out! We need you to STEP UP!

Save the Economy, Pronto! Undo Profiteering!

Over the past 30 years, conservatives and Wall Street moguls 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 bill each American over $2,000 to pay the bill for Wall Street’s greedy rampage.

Tell Congress: No Blank Check for Wall Street; Save the Economy, Pronto.

Sample Letter for Campaign

Subject: Put Main Street before Wall street.

Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,

I am appalled at the proposed "blank check" 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, and many economists agree that it's not a panic situation. 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) Make Wall St. pay for the clean-up. They created the mess and got rich in the process. Pay for any bail-out or recovery program with a tax on accumulated wealth over $10 million, a financial transaction tax or similar plan. Cap executive pay, too.

2) Rescue the system, not the Wall Strret profiteers, and put Main Street first. -- Short Term: Taxpayers must get $1.25 of ownership for every public dollar of rescue. -- Long Term: Restructure our financial system, from the Fed on down, re-regulating private finance and building public and community-owned alternatives to the reckless private profiteers.

3) Address the 'housing bubble' and foreclosure crisis with bankruptcy reform and eviction prevention (e.g. allow families to rent their homes)

4) Commit to Fast Tracking a real recovery plan that puts people first honors work over wealth. We need fair taxation, good jobs, affordable housing, health care, retirement security, infrastructure, and disaster relief (e.g. Katrina). Restrict lobbying by the financial sector.

Sincerely,

Campaign Launched:
September 23, 2008

Background Information

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.