September 14, 2018\u00a0<\/span><\/span>by Common Dreams<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

To avoid another crash, the Massachusetts senator says the U.S. must “force law-breaking bankers to trade in their pinstripe suits for orange jumpsuits.”<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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by\u00a0 Jake Johnson, staff writer<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Protesters join the March on Wall Street Rally in New York City on April 29, 2010. (Photo:\u00a0Jens Schott Knudsen<\/a>\/Flickr\/cc)<\/em><\/p>\n
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With Saturday marking the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared Thursday night that the only way to avoid another crisis is to break up the Wall Street banks that caused it and hold wealthy executives\u00a0 accountable for their crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\n
“If we want to avoid another financial crisis, we need to start holding Wall Street executives accountable. I introduced the Ending Too Big to Jail Act to force law-breaking bankers to trade in their pinstripe suits for orange jumpsuits.”
\n\u2014Sen. Elizabeth Warren<\/span><\/p>\n
“Oh, yeah. Give me a chance,” Warren said when\u00a0 asked<\/a>\u00a0by Andrew Sorkin of the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0if she still supports breaking up big banks, many of which are far larger than they were before the 2008 crash.<\/p>\n
“We have got to change the rules,” Warren declared, highlighting her effort to implement a\u00a021st century Glass-Steagall Act<\/a>\u00a0to separate commercial and investment banking. “This Congress rolling back regulations on the biggest financial institutions, rolling back regulations on Wall Street, this is absolutely the wrong direction for us to go.”<\/p>\n
Asked if the United States is prepared for another crisis\u2014which a\u00a0 bipartisan deregulatory measure passed in March makes far more likely<\/a>\u2014Warren responded: “No, not even close.”<\/p>\n
In addition to pushing for stronger safeguards against big bank speculation, Warren also argued in a tweet on Thursday that “we need to start holding Wall Street executives accountable” if we are to avoid another crash.<\/p>\n
Far from being held accountable for their actions, former Lehman Brothers executives and staffers are\u00a0 reportedly holding a ritzy tenth anniversary get-together<\/a>\u00a0on Saturday to celebrate the anniversary of their firm’s collapse.<\/p>\n
“I introduced the Ending Too Big to Jail Act to force law-breaking bankers to trade in their pinstripe suits for orange jumpsuits,” Warren said,\u00a0 highlighting legislation she unveiled in March<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Warren’s warning about the vulnerability of the American financial system and renewed call to break up the big banks were echoed by progressive commentators, lawmakers, and journalists ahead of the official tenth anniversary of the crisis\u2014which, for most Americans,\u00a0 never actually ended<\/a>.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>‘s Matt Taibbi\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0in a crisis retrospective on Thursday, the overwhelmingly “poor, nonwhite, and elderly” victims of the crash have been neglected by much of the corporate press in favor of heroic-sounding narratives of bankers teaming up with regulators to save the financial system from total catastrophe.<\/p>\n
“In an effort to inflate profits for big banks, the Trump administration and Congress are setting us up for another crash.”
\n\u2014Morris Pearl, Patriotic Millionaires<\/span><\/p>\n
“Persistent propaganda about what happened 10 years ago not only continues to warp news coverage, but contributed to a wide array of political consequences, including the election of Donald Trump,” Taibbi argued. “One of the main things the financial press missed in its countless crash post-mortems is that the subprime scam was significantly about race. In its particulars, it was really just a rehash of ancient race crimes like ‘contract selling,’ a predatory white-on-black home loan scam from the Jim Crow days.”<\/p>\n
These scams ultimately had a disastrous impact on black families in the U.S., which lost an astonishing\u00a0 50 percent of their overall wealth<\/a>\u00a0when the system came crashing down.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0The Week<\/em>‘s Ryan Cooper\u00a0has argued<\/a>, the meltdown was made worse by the fact that the Obama administration\u2014which was\u00a0 stuffed with ex-bankers<\/a>\u2014deliberately chose to prioritize bailing out Wall Street over assisting homeowners who were devastated by the foreclosure crisis that\u00a0 continues in the present<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the Obama administration’s bailouts and the Trump administration’s massive gifts to Wall Street in the form of tax cuts and deregulation, America’s five biggest banks\u2014JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs\u2014have\u00a0 raked in more than $583 billion<\/a>\u00a0in combined profits since the crisis, according to a new analysis by Public Citizen published this week.<\/p>\n
In an\u00a0 op-ed<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0USA Today<\/em>\u00a0on Friday, Morris Pearl\u2014former managing director of the financial firm BlackRock Investments and now chair of the Patriotic Millionaires\u2014argued that by allowing Wall Street firms to continue to expand and engage in risky betting, the Trump administration is actively heightening the risk of another major crisis.<\/p>\n
“In an effort to inflate profits for big banks, the Trump administration and Congress are setting us up for another crash,” Pearl concluded. “Without adequate regulation, there’s no world in which bankers voluntarily refrain from taking reckless bets again and again, until we’re right back where we were 10 years ago.”<\/p>\n
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
September 14, 2018\u00a0by Common Dreams To avoid another crash, the Massachusetts senator says the U.S. must “force law-breaking bankers to trade in their pinstripe suits for orange jumpsuits.” by\u00a0Jake Johnson, staff writer Protesters join the March on Wall Street Rally in New York City on April 29, 2010. (Photo:\u00a0Jens Schott… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}