Sure, nationalize failing banks. Everyone preaches a free market economy but they practice oligopoly,protectionism, tariffs and rule of the rich. The rich are running/ruining this country. Reign them in!

consolidate, nationalize, liquidate, default, new currency.

Nationalize the banks and re-regulate the banking industry to where the rampant speculation is reigned in permanently. Revamp the economy to a bottom up economy,that will provide for the many not the few.

A strong majority agree that Mr. Obama is doing the right thing with the stimulus plan.

He will not listen to progressives. He does not need you.

I will not sign any more petitions like this.

But, if you have an impeachment petition, I will sign it. He is pretty much like Mr. Bush, just a better talker.

Alan MacDonald

CommonDreams, while this is a great campaign to show support for Obama to take appropriate action in the financial sector it would be far better, more attractive, and accurate to say that Obama is 'democratizing the banks' --- instead of using the loaded negative PR term that fear-mongering opponents are using ('nationalizing') which the radial right may try to make Obama seem like Hugo Chavez or Castro, since 'nationalization' is the PR term that the corporatist Empire always uses to seed images of socialism. [Not that Socialism is bad in my book, in fact I'm a socialist myself.]

But tactically, in the US today, and to avoid complaints, Obama would be much wiser to use the term 'democratization of the banks'!! In fact, I'm surprised that FDR wouldn't have used this term.

While they are at it:
- Impose a 1/2% transaction tax on stock transactions
- Cap capital gains at$300,00 of the gain with the remainder
taxed as ordinary income
- Put a usury cap on credit cards - perhaps 15% or 16%
- Leave the inheritance tax the way it is
- Consider taxing high incomes the same percentage as when
Kennedy was president

Just some thoughts.

If these banks and other industries are indeed indispensable and vital to our economic survival, why should we leave their ownership/control to private corporations which owe no loyalty to 'The Public Good'? I say we should nationalize ALL industries whose collapse would endanger our survival as a nation.

Who wants our economic well-being to be dependent on the greed or charity of boards of directors whose only goal is to profit from our business? It's time we stopped treating the so-called "free" enterprise system as some kind of inviolate sacred cow. All vital industries should be owned by 'We The People', and operated in the Public Interest!

The corporate biggees are holding The People hostage...and extorting tons of public monies to keep these pigs living in high style. Enough is more than enough. Take this nation back from the robber barons!

If Adam Smith were alive today, he would be the first to condemn those who have gone so far beyond his 'free market' model that his brand of capitalism is irretrievable

snydly
Nationalize all banks that take, or will not return, public money.
Tax stock trades.
Remove the SS tax cap.
Legislate that war will be "revenue-neutral".
AND strip corporations of legal "personhood"!
And, for good measure, make speeding fines not a set fee, but a percentage of gross income.

And that's the short list.

Nationalizing the banks means nationalizing their losses and therefore it means that the taxpayers will guarantee the investments in risky “innovative” financial vaporware made by greedy trillionaire stockholders who are now mobilizing bribed demoblican economists, journalists, and politicians so they call wolf about the horrors of letting the “financial system” fail.

“Saving the financial system” is the catchy phrase invented by these bribed economists, journalists, and politicians to save this neo-feudal class of trillionaires that is “essential“ to what “America stands for” and to what “we would like to be”, as the “radical” Paul Krugman has repeatedly put it.

Not so. The banks should be allowed to go into an orderly bankruptcy that preserve their real-economy presence and protect the savings of their non-reckless customers up to say 200k per account and up to say 1 million total net worth (IRS-declared), where a sliding scale reflecting how "aggressive" the chosen (oh choice!) interest-gathering strategy of the account holder was and the extent to which he/she chose risky “lucrative’ financial-speculation products over investments in actual production. The necessary paper trail is available…

One would fire everybody in the banks' upper management except for whistle blowers and those essential to day to day operations and those managing customer accounts, and one would also keep those people with expertise in evaluating loans applications by companies who produce real goods, be they trinkets, essential insurance products, etc.

This crisis must teach harsh lessons to the most reckless of investors and bankers, and spare those investors and bankers who tried the hardest to stay away from the greedy madness of the last 30 years, even if only for moral reasons.

Social criteria like protecting pensions could also be used by simply dividing the amounts invested by each pension by the number of people the pension represents in order to define what the pension can get in terms of protection (and how to protect the pension of each participant). Indeed the least protected pensions should be those of fat cats (since this is a social intervention for the sake of the country’s well being, not to keep the fat cats acceptably fatter than the thin cats).

But pension-holders who chose especially reckless financial-speculation products should be protected less.

The only sure consequence of letting the “financial system” go bankrupt is that the trillionaires of the country (and of the world) would lose humongous amounts of money and thereby would lose much, if not most, of their economic and political power (but they wouldn’t be reduced to misery, far from it; yes, smaller investors who chose "risk" would also go down in flames and they would deserve it even if not as badly).

So it’s not time to nationalize the losses of this self-anointed neo-feudal class of trillionaires masters of the universe while preserving through state intervention the non-speculative parts of the banking system so the banks’ existing expertise in financing entrepreneurs whose projects are worthy is kept intact and given new prominence. (As you may remember, in the middle ages whenever the feudal class created a mess they “rescued themselves” for the “sake of the country” by taxing the hell out of the serfs and the bourgeois, but now with “the triumph of liberty” all of that has changed… yeah right!)

I implore you: swiftly form a commission of economists and other experts (like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman) to examine the merits of some such action as this petition, and the current disaster, cries out for. Decisive action must reject the false and predatory rationales that led from Reagan's deregulation to this anarchic predation. Forces and factions will oppose you with demagoguery, but you have the ear of the people--and they crave your courageous leadership to rescue our country and restore hope for the future.

It was Obama and McCain who urged congress to give that money to the Banking
industry before the election. Hold them responsible.

I think this is a case of Be Careful What You Ask For.

Every nationalization plan I've read about involves TEMPORARY government ownership; restore the banks' solvency then sell them back to "investors". So the "socialize the costs while privatizing the profits" M.O. still applies, it's just delayed. Taxpayers still get gouged.

No nationalization plan will be a long-term solution unless the Federal Reserve system is terminated. 

The real question we should be asking, the real cause for petitions and other forms of mass action, should be: Why do we have a privatized treasury in the first place? Why should the government borrow currency at interest from a private bank when it has the power to issue currency interest-free?

Three major problems here:
1-The crucial issues of currency and monetary policy are not yet on the table.
2-The unspoken and unchallenged premise for the undue focus on financial institutions - that the financial sector is the most important element of our economy - is false.
3-Left out of the discussion is the fact that a truly sustainable economy requires a permanent productive base that provides the workforce with adequate income to generate commerce and drive the economy. We have to end the "free trade" idiocy of exporting our manufacturing base.

The MUSTHAVES and getting Economically Stimulated

I was wondering to myself how I could get with the program and get myself economically stimulated in these trying times for the MUSTHAVES there in the biggest privy in the world. The one with the name of Washington D.C. there are others and the one in New York City is right there. Of course there are others but it would take to much of my time and patience to list them all

In all these privies the MUSTHAVES take care of their biological needs and maintain a superb style of living by shitting on all the Don’thavesomuches which are more numerous and lack the little things in life that would put them at least closer to the MUSTHAVES and those thing are big greed, and of course with greed there are always lobbyists and bribes.

Now the MUSTHAVES were going merrily along stealing, bribing and lobbying for more when there was a more greedy entity out there and they had to go begging the Donthavesomuches for the means to keep on being the greedy cretins they are. Since this privy is like a big public house and has differing parts and has more than one loo and MUSTHAVES change names but do maintain the status quo they think it is the duty of the Donthavesomuches to keep the privy clean by taking all the shit on themselves so that the MUSTHAVES don’t have to wallow in all the shit and we are talking muncho.

This was bad enough but now the MUSTHAVES in other privies and the same one as before want to spread the shit a ton more by asking the donthavesomuches to carry more of the shit left by the MUSTHAVES lying, cheating and bribing thru the banks using bank usury, auto license fees by other MUSTHAVES, A mileage tax and other methods that have not been brought forward yet and since the Donthavesomuches are all so full of shit anyway they think it is only fair that they take care of this also

If the is what getting Economically Stimulated is then I think it is time for me to go into rehab. Tony 2/20/09
If you get the idea that this word is expressive and on my to write list…You are right.

In the long run I think we are better off replacing large centralized banks with local credit unions we all own AND with no government involvement. Does this really get us closer to that goal?

Too big to fail means too big to be privately controlled.

Banking reform: 1. obtain rope. 2. Obtain several bankers. 3. Hang bankers. 4. Post video on Youtube. 5. Observe and monitor banking reform.

one old atheist

Patriotic citizen of the world

The statement does not go far enough. Executives should have no golden parachute and no deferred compensation. All recent bonuses must be disgorged. Supplemental Executive Retirement plans canceled, but IRS qualified pension plans and insured deposits funded from liquidated assets before being thrown back on PBGC or FDIC.

Craig Brown: „....the goal was TO RESCUE our banking system by propping up the banks that deregulation had allowed to become TOO BIG TO FAIL.”

As someone else has pointed out earlier here, the phrase “rescue the banking system” is Orwellian Doublespeak, to say the least. It means in reality to save the neo-feudal class of investors and the financial oligarchy created by the frenzy of deregulation in the last 20 years.

Michael Hudson on http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12265

“The first question to ask about any Recovery Program is, “Recovery for WHOM?” The answer given on Tuesday is, “For the people who design the program and their constituency” – ... the bank lobby. The second question is, “Just WHAT is it they want to ‘recover’?” Answer: the BUBBLE Economy. For the financial sector it was a golden age. Having enjoyed the Greenspan Bubble that made them so rich, its managers would love to create yet more wealth for themselves by indebting the “real” economy yet further while inflating prices all over again to make new capital gains.
The Clinton administration enabled banks to merge with junk mortgage companies, junk-money managers, fictitious property appraisal companies, and law-evasion firms all designed to package debts to investors who trusted them enough to let them rake off enough commissions and capital gains to make their managers the world’s highest-paid economic planners.
Today’s economic collapse is the direct result of their planning philosophy. It actually was taught as “wealth creation” and still is, as supposedly more productive than the public regulation and oversight so detested by Wall Street and its Chicago School aficionados. The financial powerhouses created by this “free market” philosophy span the entire FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate, “financializing” housing and commercial property markets in ways “guaranteed” to make money by CREATING AND SELLING DEBT. Mr. Obama’s advisors are precisely those of the Clinton Administration who supported trustification of the FIRE sector. This is the broad deregulatory medium in which today’s bad-debt disaster has been able to spread so much more rapidly than at any time since the 1920s.

The commercial banks have used their credit-creating power NOT to expand the production of goods and services or RAISE LIVING STANDARDS but simply to inflate prices for real estate (making fortunes for their brokerage, property appraisal and insurance affiliates), stocks and bonds (making more fortunes for their investment bank subsidiaries).....”

Michael Hudson goes on to say that the financial bubbles were engineered “by the political deregulatory power acquired by banks corrupting Congress through campaign contributions and PR “think tanks” ......to promote the perverse fiction that Wall Street can be and indeed is automatically self-regulating. The myth of “free markets” is now supposed to consist of governments withdrawing from planning and taxing wealth, so as to leave resource allocation and the economic surplus to bankers rather than elected public representatives. This is what classically is called oligarchy, not democracy..... This the road to debt peonage.”

Craig Brown: “We now know that the bailed out banks didn't use our money to START LENDING MORE...” Craig apparently does not get it: We are drowning in debt – “lending more” is the problem!

http://www.speroforum.com/a/17305/US-debt-approaches-insolvency

Michael Hudson: “No amount of new capital will induce banks to provide credit to real estate already over-mortgaged or to individuals and corporations already over-indebted.”

The banks are insolvent and given the staggering sums of outstanding derivatives (15 trillion in Credit default Swaps and 165 Trillion in notional derivatives) and the excessive Credit Exposure to Capital Ratio (JP Morgan Chase 400.2, Citi 260, Bank of America 177) the “real” economy simple cannot produce enough real wealth to “recapitalize” this madness...

Who wants to “nationalize” a black hole of debt? When Greenspan and Roubini use the “N”-word they mean socialization of unthinkable losses, not a state-run enterprise. Commercial banking (serving the real economoy) should be a public service, not a private business.

Glass-Stegall-
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html
must be re-enacted and derivatives must be outlawed.

Hudson: “Moody’s and other leading professional observers have forecast property prices to keep on plunging for at least the next year, which is as far as the eye can see in today’s unstable conditions. So the smartest money is still waiting like vultures in the wings – waiting for government guarantees that toxic loans will pay off. Another no-risk private profit to be subsidized by public-sector losses.

They know that the past ten years have been a golden age for the banking system and the rest of Wall Street. Like feudal lords claiming the economic surplus for themselves while administering austerity for the population at large, the wealthiest 1% of the population has raised their appropriation of the nationwide returns to wealth – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – from 37% of the total ten years ago to 57% five years ago and it seems nearly 70% today. This is the highest proportion since records have been kept. We are approaching Russian kleptocratic levels.”

“Jim Eldon”, has hit the nail on the head with his excellent comments:

“The real question we should be asking, the real cause for petitions and other forms of mass action, should be: Why do we have a PRIVATIZED treasury in the first place? Why should the GOVERNMENT BORROW CURRENCY AT INTEREST from a PRIVATE BANK when it has the power TO ISSUE CURRENCY INTEREST-FREE?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

1-The crucial issues of currency and monetary policy are not yet on the table.

2-The unspoken and unchallenged premise for the undue focus on financial institutions - that the financial sector is the most important element of our economy - is FALSE.

3-Left out of the discussion is the fact that a truly sustainable economy requires a permanent productive base that provides the workforce with adequate income to generate commerce and drive the economy. We have to end the "free trade" idiocy of exporting our manufacturing base.”

Precisely. I would only like to add that the WHOLE economic system needs to be fundamentally changed... (“Change” is what these financial crooks want to avoid at all cost...)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/13-6

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php