From the Huffington Post "Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He's losing.
On Monday night in an interview with a radio host back home, he came to a stark conclusion: the banks own the Senate."
"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place," he said on WJJG 1530 AM's "Mornings with Ray Hanania." Progress Illinois picked up the quote.
Earlier Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told the Huffington Post that the most important provision of bankruptcy reform -- the authority for a bankruptcy judge to renegotiate mortgages, known as cramdown, which banks strongly oppose -- could get ripped out of the bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back, saying that a bill without such a provision wouldn't be reform at all.
While Durbin has been negotiating with individual banks over the last several weeks, bank lobbyists and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) have been whipping up opposition to it. A growing number of Democrats have announced opposition to cramdown, including Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Jon Tester (Mont.)."
And we're just going to shrug and cynically comment that the banks have always owned the place. Are we all collectively so confused and cowed that we can continue to ignore the obvious fact that American society, with it's strong middle class, is being destroyed by the financial oligarchs?
This feels more dangerous than the depths of 2003 when the converstions around here frequently centered on the authoritarian takeover and the destruction of our way of life. And how truly bad it got after the 2004 election. Those of you who were here at the beginning probably remember the sense of defeat we felt, the talks about leaving the country and the worry about whether what we were writing was going to get us in trouble.
There was plenty of cynicism about our hopeless position and how we just didn't have any way to fight the system. But as we started talking to one another, we began to recognize that we had a new weapon in our hands that was very powerful. We didn't know quite how best to use it, and it's power at times was growing faster than anyone could control. Remember how we were stunned by "the Macaca moment"? And the implications for the future of politics.
Well now we must destroy the power of the major banks. We must do it because our representatives won't. They're all corrupted to some degree. We worked so hard to elect Jon Tester and that sonofabitch has betrayed us on every major issue.
Now before things get so bad that anarchy looms, I suggest we begin to speak truth to power. But the power isn't Congress, it's the banks. And the only language they understand is the language of money. And we need to resist playing the game by their rules. Right now, many of us are whining about our alleged ownership of majority interests in these banks. I've heard too any people say, Well since we own the banks why don't we just take control and clean the criminals out. Well, it ain't gonna happen. Dick Durbin's comments are a better reflection of reality.
WE DON'T OWN THEM, THEY OWN US. That's reality.
But I for one am not going to stand for it. And I think that the weapon already exists to do the job - grassroots activism. Those mega-criminal cartels have a fatal weakness. They need us to give them our money every payday. They need us to pay our bills with their checking systems. They need us to give them our savings in money market funds and CD's. The need us to sink deeper into debt by making regular payments to their usurous credit card system. But what happens if we take our business elsewhere? What if we all closed our checking accounts ad opened new accounts at local banks? What if we made a real effort to convince our family and friends that to withdraw their funds from the major banks and transfer them to local institutions?
How long would it take before the shit hit the fan in Congress and the media? Remember how we were mocked as DFH's and kooks who could never change anything?
I think it's time we started planning on doind it again. Directly. Not through the voting booth but through our checking accounts.
I sincerely thank you for having read this far, and I apologize for not creating a better organized diary, with references and links and all that other good shit. But right now, I'm too damned mad to think straight.