We continue to pour tapayers dollars into the big banks

The decade ended with the stock market recovering 61% from the low nine months earlier. The big Wall Street banks see the good times as being back -- so “bonuses all round”.  The bonuses may actually be larger than the record set in 2007. Analysts estimate that Wall Street’s 2009 bonus pool could top $200 billion. Goldman Sachs’ is number 1 on the list with $23 billion. Even though they needed taxpayer loans to survive  the return to big bonuses will also allow Wall Street banks to claim billions in deductions. 

Altogether, the top three Wall Street banks — Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will increase the federal deficit by $20 billion due to tax breaks based on their employee compensation this year. In 2008, Goldman Sachs paid an effective tax rate of just 1% thanks to a variety of deductions and keeping profits offshore.

How to clean up the big banks and avoid the lobbyists buying congress

We can fix the big bank problem by switching to local banks and in my opinion an equally responsive counterpart Credit Unions. The best part of this approach is lobbyists can't get in the way. Changing laws is a difficult way to change business practices since individuals can't stuff money into politicians pockets. If we (the customers) negatively reinforce institutions that misbehave I think we could see very swift reform of their outrageous practices.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-explains-move-you_b_408768.html

An amazingly simple way to reform banking

Conservatives will likely water down financial reform just as they did health insurance reform. This web site suggests a way of correcting the problem with the nation's banks in an elegantly simple way that lobbyists can't buy congress into blocking. Spread the word.

http://moveyourmoney.info/ 

The Move Your Money story.

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, a few friends were having dinner wondering what personal actions they could take to help limit the power of the big banks and create a more sane, stable financial system. How, they wondered, could they help end the era of Too Big To Fail? The financier at the table recommended that everyone could move their money out of the Wall Street banks and into community banks. Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses who live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. In other words, they have the values that more people would want banks to have.

The filmmaker at the table reminded the others of the story told in the classic film It’s A Wonderful Life — a tale about a small banker, played by Jimmy Stewart, who almost gets crushed by a big banker. In the end, though, the community rallies around the small bank and helps save it.

Three days later, the filmmaker made a short video, displayed on this site. The editor wrote a commentary about the idea. And others started pulling various resources together.

This site was set up as a modest home for the effort. A seed. But the idea will only have an impact if others take it from here.

How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank. To do so, click on the button that says Find A Bank. But there are dozens of other possibilities: You can get your friends or organizations to do the same. You can use your online social networks to help broadcast the idea. You can look into where your town government keeps its money and, if it uses a big bank, you could try to get it to use a smaller bank. Start your own website (to improve upon or replace this one), dive into the research about smaller banks, and help give rise to a bigger, broader effort.

There is no official organization here. It’s a volunteer project. If you have ideas about how this idea can grow, send us a note and we’ll display the best ideas in the Updates section of the site.

We hope this idea will spread in a thousand different ways.

Thanks for whatever you can do.

More herbicide use reported on genetically modified crops

This is scary. First the over use and misuse of antibiotics causes antibiotic resistant diseases. Now it seems by putting the round up resistant gene into soy beans we may be creating super weeds. Great article in the Christian Science Monitor.

Go to the Christian Science Monitor

I'm a sucker for an explosion