Mary Bottari's blog

While parents all over America called their local doctors, school boards and public health officials trying to find out when their small children would be given the H1N1 vaccine which was famously in short supply, news broke that "hi-risk" workers at Citibank and Goldman Sachs received 1,400 doses of the vaccine. It is unclear what is meant by the term "hi-risk," prompting Jessica Pressler, New York Magazine to write: "Hand 'em all over. Even if they do have any pregnant women working there, it's not like they're human." And Michael Corkery, Wall Street Journal to note: "It is official: Goldman Sachs is more important than you are." But the most amusing commentary comes from Saturday Night Live.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has trouble understanding that the core responsibility of any federal official is to be thrifty with taxpayer dollars.  This has been confirmed with new revelations from Bloomberg about Geithner's role in the secret AIG-Goldman bailout.

William K. Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. As a senior regulator at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp, he played a critical role in the crack-down on savings and loan officials in the 1980s and 1990s and the unraveling of the Keating Five scandal. He is the author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE about the S&L fiasco. He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007.

On Monday, the "Showdown in Chicago" once again started on a festive note. Activists from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition took up their electric guitars and broke into the Bailout Blues: "They hate regulation, it stifles their plans. So they pay the lawmakers, to free up their hands. We're coming together, our eyes on the prize. When they are held to account, don't be surprised."

With the newspapers full of talk about “zombie” banks and parasitic “vampire squid” financial institutions, it was particularly fitting that the “Showdown in Chicago” started with a ghoulish group of zombies rocking out to Michael Jackson's “Thriller.”  Chicago's own South Shore Drill Team opened the three days of banks protests with a bang and had the crowd of a thousand activists dancing in no time.

This week the Center for Media and Democracy is rolling out a new campaigning website for battling the big boys on Wall Street, check it out at www.BanksterUSA.org.

The Smackdown Starts Now

This fall is a critical time. Congress is now taking up a series of bills to restore confidence in the financial sector. If you want to rein in the Banksters and if you think America deserves better than a "boom and bail" economy, you need to muscle up and weigh in. We want BanksterUSA.org to be your go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fights in Congress and for progressive netroots campaigning against the big boys on Wall Street.  

Our "Action Center" is a hotbed of popular campaigning on the crisis.

What do Americans need most right now? Jobs. If you wanted Americans to buy your snake oil, what would you promise them right now? Why, jobs of course, even though the snake oil being peddled is the very thing that sank the economy in the first place.

Tomorrow, the Obama administration's principal piece of financial service reform legislation, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, will be up for committee consideration in the House Financial Services Committee. The most important thing to know about the bill? It creates a new federal agency in Washington whose sole purpose is to protect consumers from the deceptive tricks and traps of the financial services industry. The most important thing to know about the committee reviewing the bill? It's on FIRE.

Today, the Real Economy Project of CMD is introducing a new award we are fondly calling our "Golden Throne Award." The Throne salutes the behind-the-scenes lobbyists and spinmeisters who have managed to maintain the status quo and hold off any meaningful reform of the financial services sector since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG rocked the world one year ago this week. The award invokes fond memories of the $1.2 million bathroom renovation ordered by Merrill's CEO, John Thain, shortly before the firm lost $27 billion and collapsed into the arms of Bank of America (BofA).