Senator Bernie Sanders Adds His Voice to the Failout Pushback

Needless to say, one doesn't want the swallowing up of sensible feel-good variations of what Atrios calls "pony plans" to render us oblivious or acquiescent in the face of the reckless marauding that actually takes place when the Congressional and Presidential Millionaires Clubs really get down to laying down the law, but the fact is that actually non-insane discussions of economic policy are finding their way to widespread mainstream audiences right now in consequence of this Wall Street debacle (and in consequence of the already ubiquitous Netroots, Air America, leftward-nudging MSNBC and other truly mass-mediated spaces actually now exist in which non-insanity can be expressed to a wide hearing in the first place), and this echo chamber -- think of it as a sanity-consolidating democratizing virtuous circle to countermand the divisive authoritarian vicious circle of Right Wing mass-mediated lies and hate speech -- really might just circumvent the worst destructive force of the corporate-militarist noise machines this time around, while planting who knows what in the way of future-flowering seedlings into American discourse.

[via Senator Sanders' Homepage]

The current financial crisis facing our country has been caused by the extreme right-wing economic policies pursued by the Bush administration. These policies… include[d] huge tax breaks for the rich, unfettered free trade and the wholesale deregulation of commerce….

While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president. In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.

Now, having mismanaged the economy for eight years as well as having lied about our situation by continually insisting, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” the Bush administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to spend many hundreds of billions on a bailout. The wealthiest people, who have benefited from Bush’s policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all. This is absurd…

(1) The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush’s economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout… Specifically, to pay for the bailout, which is estimated to cost up to $1 trillion, the government should:

a) Impose a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue;

b) Ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and

c) Require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the assumption of risk is rewarded when companies’ stock goes up.

(2) There must be a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy….

(3) Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999. That means re-regulating the energy markets so that we never again see the rampant speculation in oil that helped drive up prices. That means regulating or abolishing various financial instruments that have created the enormous shadow banking system that is at the heart of the collapse of AIG and the financial services meltdown.

(4) We must end the danger posed by companies that are “too big too fail,” that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation’s largest depository institution, has absorbed Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and Merrill Lynch, the nation’s largest brokerage house. We should not be trying to solve the current financial crisis by creating even larger, more powerful institutions. Their failure could cause even more harm to the entire economy.