Saturday, November 16, 2013

CitiGroup Writes its Own Law

Staff Writer, DL Mullan
News / Politics
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What's worse than ALEC, where corporations write our laws, bribe our elected officials with a nice weekend conference, and then those same politicians introduce those laws into State legislatures verbatim... including Arizona? 

Megacorporations that caused the recent economic collapse writing legislation to deregulate their deceptive and gambling practices to let another economic collapse happen with derivatives, that's what.

Frank-Dodd protects Americans from bearing the cost of FDIC backed gambling by banks. “After inflicting so much pain and suffering on the American people, now is not the time to let the largest banks back into the casino,” Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) said in a statement. Yet, they are.

The House passed this gutting of Frank-Dodd. 292-122 vote with which 70 Democrats and all but three Republicans granted. So if you ever believed the two party system is really a one party system, here is another clue that you are correct. 

To add insult to injury: "Citigroup was responsible for recommendations made in 70 lines of the 85-line bill, according to Eric Lipton and Ben Protess of The New York Times. In fact, reported the writers, a couple key paragraphs in the bill had been copied word for word from Citigroup’s submitted draft, which it had developed in conjunction with other Wall Street banks."

When will the American people begin to stand against such blatant disregard for the economic impacts of banks swapping, gambling, and doing what they want? CitiGroup had to be bailed out at a tune of $45 billion and the market collapse ruined other companies such as: Countrywide Mortgages, Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Wachovia. 

Too big to fail should become: monopolies that must be broken up for the public good. Instead Congress keeps handing these duplicitous, unprofessional, and unethical monstrosities every advantage at the cost of our National Security. 

This corporate writing of our laws needs to come to an end. These entities are using the People's money to hedge their bets, so the People should be in charge of the till.