If you are interested:

Monopoly Capitalism Is the Root of All of America's Problems

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet. Posted December 31, 2009.

Monopoly capitalism exemplifies everything that's gone wrong with American politics, and we need to do something about it -- soon.


Something is rotten in the state of American capitalism, and if you agree with Barry C. Lynn, almost all stinky paths lead to the monopolization of our economy. The rise of behemoths like Wal-Mart and Viacom are not only lowering the quality and safety of the products you use, but also undermining our so-called democracy.

I had a chance to speak to Lynn about just how bad things are -- and what we might be able to do about it. Lynn's new book, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, from Wiley Press, will be out in January.

Q: In the book you say we have no choice but to reverse the process of monopolization in our economy. How can we practically achieve that, at this stage of the game?

Barry C. Lynn: We can achieve it and there’s proof we can because we’ve done it in the past. In the late 19th century there was a really incredible process of monopolization. In the Guilded Age, you ended up with really tight concentration of control over finance in Wall Street. Think of Standard Oil, of U.S. Steel. There was some effort to break up those companies in the early 20th century but the real change took place after what people call the Second New Deal. The Roosevelt administration ended up breaking up a number of companies. What they did most successfully is stop the growth of massive companies and created space for new companies to grow.

In the middle of 20th century century, again there was a case in which we actually undid many of the powers and protected the entrepreneur. It was policy that at least three or four companies had to be competing with each other in each industry -- and preferably eight or ten. There’s the Alcoa case, for example. They had a 100 percent steel monopoly through the end of World War II. After the war, the government created opportunities for new companies and forced Alcoa to share its technology with new companies.

We have a lot of experience with this, we’ve done it on a whole-scale in the past, and doing so would be creating a lot of interest in these companies. There are lot of managers in Wal-Mart, for example, who won’t rise up in the ranks in such a large system, but if there’s 30 smaller Wal-Marts, lots of individuals can reach their full potential. Companies aren’t monolothic in nature. They’re made of people, and lots of these people have an interest in breaking them up.

Q: What about shareholders’ and board members’ interests? They surely wield more power and sway over these kinds of decisions than associates at a huge company like Wal-Mart.

BL: Right. Well, Alan Greenspan was one of the engineers of the roll-up of modern monopolization over the past 30 years. As a student, he studied the Standard Oil case, in which there was this argument that pretty much went: “Let’s not break up Standard Oil because it’s so much more efficient than the little pieces if they were separated.” The Supreme Court at the time said that didn’t matter, because we must have competition and broke Standard Oil up anyway.

Greenspan went on to use the flawed argument that big things are more efficient to aid in overturning antitrust law in 1981. After the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, he woke up to see all these too-big-to-fail banks. Greenspan has since been one of the people to say we have to break up the banks. We shouldn’t be afraid of this because, as we found with Standard Oil, after we broke it up, all the constituent pieces were actually worth much more for the investors than what Standard Oil had been valued at when it was a single entity.

Q: So what happens if we don’t reverse the monopolization of our economy?

BL: There’s two main types of problems. One is that antimonopoly law is a political law -- not economic, as you might suspect. You prevent monopolies because you don’t want a concentration of economic power that gives beneficiaries political power. So monopolies are a huge political problem.

Look at things now. We essentially have a merger of Goldman Sachs and the Treasury Department. So we don’t actually know who’s running the Treasury. We have a political crisis, in which we’ve had a coup by the bankers. And the bankers don’t only control banks but also all the large corporations. The way governance has been changed, we give financiers direct control over our largest corporations.

In Europe, when people invest $1 billion in Airbus, they get new machinery, new plants, new skills, and create jobs. When we invest in Boeing, a huge portion of that money goes straight out the backdoor and into the financiers who run the company.

The second [problem] is that our systems become more and more fragile. What we saw on Sept. 15, 2008, after the failure of Lehman Brothers, was how the entire financial system was tied together in such a way that unless a major infusion of money came at once, basically everything was going to go down. If you’re not able to move money around, you can’t move product around -- potentially a lights-out event. It’s pretty amazing that we would run our financial system so poorly, really.

This systemic risk is a result of monopolists preaching efficiency because they want to take cash out of the system. For example, let’s say they have two machines, and sell one. They get money for the machine they sell, and then the one left over will be more expensive to use so they can charge more for its use. They pocket the money from the machine they sell and get more money off the one machine they have left. The problem, though, is they only have one machine left. If something goes wrong, we can have huge systemic failures, especially if, say, the product this machine makes is something like semiconductors or chemicals that go into many products. If all production of these keystone items is in one place, it looks efficient -- financiers and economists will tell you this, and do -- but they have created the potential for catastrophic failure if something happens that takes that one machine or one plant or one foundry out of operation.

If we don’t do anything we have a truly massive political challenge. We can pretend we’re living a democracy, in a republic, but if you look at Obama’s background he was adopted by and promoted by the ruling machine, which was set up at [the Brookings Institution’s] Hamilton Project. Those were the people who vetted this man and who’ve surrounded this man. Though I have huge admiration for him and retain faith in his potential to stand up these people, he is still essentially inside this circle.

The other problem is the longer we wait the greater the chance that we’ll have another event like what happened last year. And the next event could be much worse. We could see truly catastrophic crashes affect our system. We have no choice but to fix the concentration of power. It’s politically unacceptable and it’s unacceptable from an engineering perspective.

Q: The Obama administration has been cautious to aggressively confront too-big-to-fail banks. Do you observe the administration taking actions to address monopolies in other areas of our economy?

BL: Well, recently the FCC brought charges against Intel. That was a pretty easy move because against Intel you’ve already had the Japanese and South Korean government take action, as well as the the EC in Brussels, and even New York State. Even the Bush administration almost did. But now they actually pulled the trigger. And that’s a good thing.

I’m hearing very good things in agriculture. Part of the problem with the Obama administration, which is the same problem with the Clinton adminisration, is that even though you’d think they’d be more aggressive on antitrust issues, they buy into the basic framework of interpreting antitrust law as was put into place by Reagan. Before 1981, law ensured competition for the sake competition -- to protect the market system and to prevent the consolidation of control. Since 1981, they switch it to this consumer welfare test, which was defined basically as price. If the merger will bring a lower price, it’s approved. The Clinton people and now the Obama people -- who are largely the Clinton people -- accept the same framework. The idea to go after something like Wal-Mart in the near term is unlikely. We’re not likely to see a lot of action there because the framework they believe in doesn’t allow them to.

But as I was saying, the Department of Agriculture has not really been indoctrinated by the consumer welfare framework. The concentration of power over such activities as farming pigs or chickens, or growing corn, is so extreme it amounts to debt peonage. So extreme it’s hard to ignore. Some interesting work appears to be on the move there.

Generally though, this administration appears to be willing to accept any merger that will deliver a lower price to the consumer.

Q: You alluded to this, but what is the price of the mad rush for “lowest prices guaranteed?” In other words, what is the price of cheap?

BL: One price of cheap is that you end up with less safe products. If you get to cheap through real competition and an open market system, in which you have a bunch of different independent companies competing to find a better way to do something, and you have regulation that doesn’t allow you to cut quality in order to cut prices, then you’ll end up with both increasing quality and safety and lower cost over time. That was the old system.

What we have now is lower prices delivered by brute power forced downwards onto producers. A company like Wal-Mart exercises authoritiarian power. “Last year,” they tell producers, “we paid you $100 for that grill, this year we’re only going to pay $90 and it’s up to you to figure out what you cut.” So over time that grill is going to be less and less sturdy. The food will become more and more adulterated. T-shirts will become thinner and thinner and made by children somewhere.

The price that we pay for lower cost is less safe, cheaper quality products that end up wearing out sooner -- at best. At worst, even death. You saw the concentration in the spinach or peanut industries where people died.

The thing with [such power] being concentrated is you can give the monopoly a fine but you can’t shut them down because then you don’t have spinach anymore. The only way you can really have safety and higher quality is true competition.

Q: Could you address how monopolization plays into health care politics and the chances for reform?

BL: Congress seems to have unfortunately gone through this whole process without really focusing on the fact that they’re engineering competition. They have just bought this Wal-Mart idea that you concentrate power so you can manipulate the doctors, the nurses, and the aides top-down. They’re so fixated on lowering the price and extending protections as swiftly as possible that they have essentially rejected the public option. They’ve gone for something even worse which is private directorship of the system.

What we’re moving to is a government option of sorts -- but it’s a private government option. People have a really hard time understanding that a corporation is an institution we have licensed to govern a particularly economic activity. You create these institutions so you can govern a particular industry. In this sense, Wal-Mart is a goverment that is approaching the magnitude of the Soviet state in that it wields top-down authority. It tells every employee at each company under its sway what to do. That includes every company that delivers food, consumer products, media products. Wal-Mart is the Soviet system growing up right in the middle of the American system. It is top-down, authoritarian, non-democratic. It leads to the stripping out of all the systems, and it’s rationalization without thought, purpose, or understanding.

Q: Wal-Mart is aware of its historically bad name in the liberal sphere. It seems like they're trying to change that, aren't they?

BL: Oh, Wal-Mart has done an incredible job of buying off really well-intentioned people by advertising their power. For example, they’ve bought off enviros [by saying], “We’re going to green the world together.” What do they actually do? Let me give an example.

Wal-Mart decreed compact fluorescent bulbs in every home in the U.S. They decreed to all lightbulb makers, “This is how many you’re going to make, at which price, and by this date.” Their decree was simply too much for these manufacturers so they shipped lots and lots of junk. The practical effect is Americans who’ve never seen these kinds of bulbs is they used them for the first time, but they were junk and died out after a few months. So now people don’t want to use them anymore. This created the exact opposite effect of what [Wal-Mart] was selling to the enviros.

Now it’s true that if you get Wal-Mart to get Procter & Gamble to use smaller cardboard boxes [for their products], that’s good for our environment but we have a better way to do this. We can use our local and federal governments. When you create a law it’s law, with Wal-Mart it’s just Wal-Mart’s whim. They can change their mind any time and they don’t even need to tell anyone if they start sourcing unsustainable fish or lightbulbs from China -- it just happens. Their only purpose is to make cash and they’re very honest about that. Managers of corporations are legally obliged to lie if it helps their shareholders. So they’ll tell enviromentalists anything they want to hear.

Q: You argue that free-market fundamentalists paved the way for the monopolization of the U.S. economy, and as a result, the current economic recession. Does the recession mark the end of such fundamentalism or are they reframing?

BL: This recession hasn’t ended this fundamentalism. What’s behind it is private governance of the political economy and eventually the politically system. That’s what free-market fundamentalism aims at. As a belief system, it was put out to trick people to allow this [bankers’] coup to take place, this privatization of governance and control. Among the elites especially, there are all of these beliefs in these different mechanistic forces people see out there. Some think of the free-market as a mechanical apparatus that yields certain outcomes and we can’t do much about what the market decides. Others see globalization as a natural force that leads us to an interconnected world where we will be increasingly tied to China or India.

None of these forces actually exist. What you actually see are people using human-created institutions to manipulate others. We need wake up to the fact that Tom Friedman’s view of globalization is a lie, that Milton Friedman’s vision of the free-market as a mechanical apparatus is a lie, that Robert Reich saying that technology will lead us to a land of milk and honey is a lie. They really patronize the little folks, it’s just disgusting.

The first step to emancipating ourselves is to emancipate ourselves from those metaphysical lies -- these ideas that outside forces are controlling us. Haven’t seen much of a move in that direction in our country, unfortunately.

The indoctrination is that we live in a market economy that determines globalization and everything else. I don’t know why this generation of Americans was more gullible. I can’t understand that. But it’s just a fact and we need to wake up.

Q: Or else...

BL: Or else!

http://www.alternet.org/politics/144787/monopoly_capitalism_is_the_root_of_all_of_america's_problems?page=entire

It's the capitalism, stupid.

Alcoa a steel monopoly? What did I miss?

Didn't you take your happy pill this morning BP? Here is the latest AP Poll - sure to cheer you up! ;)

AP-GfK Poll: Americans seek silver lining in 2010

WASHINGTON – The bank account is thin, but the future looks pretty good.

That, oddly enough, is the view of many Americans who predict 2010 will be a better year than this one, even if they fear that the U.S. economy and their own financial circumstances won't improve.

A whopping 82 percent are optimistic about what the new year will bring for their families, according to the latest AP-GfK poll. That sunny outlook seems at odds with other findings.

Nearly two-thirds think their family finances will worsen or stay about the same next year. And fewer than half think the nation's economy will improve in 2010, even though Americans rated 2009 as a huge downer.

Mari Flanigan of South Milwaukee, Wis., is one of those who feel fairly optimistic that things will go better at a personal level in 2010 even though her financial situation might grow worse.

Flanigan, 36, is unemployed after selling a family business that faced increasing competition.

"Financially, I'm scared," she said in an interview.

Rather than seek new work, however, she is thinking of returning to school to become a social worker. "I'd rather make less money and do something I love," Flanigan said, noting that happiness and optimism are not strictly tied to finances.

The poll found that nearly three-fourths of Americans think 2009 was a bad year for the country, which was rocked by job losses, home foreclosures and economic sickness. Forty-two percent rated it "very bad."

That's clearly worse than in 2006, the last time a similar poll was taken. The survey that year found that 58 percent of Americans felt the nation had suffered a bad year, and 39 percent considered it a good year.

Fewer than half as many people, 16 percent, said their family had a "very good year" in 2009 as said that in 2006.

Behind the gloominess, however, are more hopeful views that seem to reflect Americans' traditional optimism or, perhaps, wishful thinking.

Three in five Americans said their own family had a good year in 2009.

Some 72 percent of Americans said they're optimistic about what 2010 will bring for the country. Even more are hopeful about what the year will bring for their families.

But in 2009, every corner of the country saw steep job losses, and the national unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Millions of Americans saw their savings or retirement accounts shrink, and many are rethinking how long they will have to work, and where they might find income...

AP-GfK Poll: Americans seek silver lining in 2010

Right, we just gotta knock this guy off the board and all will be peaches & cream:

http://www.amnesta.net/other/monopoly/MonopolyMan.jpg

It's the fuckin' game.....

I have been noticing this over the last few months. In the past, people's pessimism or optimism was tied to their financial expectations. If they thought that employment and wages looked good in the coming year for them, they were optimisitic, if not they weren't. The two rose and fell together. Now the two are moving apart.

"You saw the concentration in the spinach or peanut industries where people died. The thing with being concentrated is you can give the monopoly a fine but you can’t shut them down because then you don’t have spinach anymore. The only way you can really have safety and higher quality is true competition."

So competition is the solution to the danger of E. Coli or Salmonella??? The only way you can have safety and quality is through competition? So those selling clean produce would beat those selling contaminated produce, because consumers would choose to buy from the safe producers? WTF?

Stress induced irrational behavior. Come spring, when they see that the light in the tunnel is a train coming at them, this will dissipate.

How the people react, how the government tries to manage that reaction is the question. I expect a mix of soma, the stick, and fear(terra!).

going to be a crash (or what BP said).

it's like they know it doesn't matter what they spew - they just string words together and "concerned" folks will say, "Yes! More competition is the answer, because we cannot think outside the capitalist box! Bad capitalism is just bad and we can fix it by making it good and stopping the bad! Capitalism is the only way to fix capitalism!" It makes me glad that the detention camps are already built...

Not sure. It may be something else. No faith in "the economy" any more, but more faith in themselves and each other. Things have crossed some threshold and people don't have any hope of good times coming back, or being able to get ahead or any of that crap. "Oh I get it now. We are fucked no matter what we do." Strange thing - people are more optimistic now that they have lost hope.

I would say that those who are still doing fairly well and still have hope (and tons of anxiety about losing what they do have) are whistling past the graveyard. At least here in Michigan there are not very many people in that category any more. Most are already in the social "graveyard" and they know it.

or kind of like the final step, "acceptance", in regards to being told you have a terminal disease?

It's monopoly Capitalism that is the problem! It is shock Capitalism! It is finance Capitalism that is the problem! It is corrupt Capitalism! It is greedy Capitalism!It is unregulated Capitalism! It is socially irresponsible Capitalism! It is corporate Capitalism!

At least they are using the word "Capitalism" in connection with the word "problem."

I've talked to somebody from Michigan, Detroit, Grand Rapids, at the shop every day this week. And they come here.....looking for work...unemployment of 12.3%(official). Perceived options are getting thin...

If you had told me 30 years ago that people would be leaving Michigan to look for work in South Carolina...

It doesn't seem possible.

This article is a train wreck...

"Monopoly Capitalism", "Corporate Capitalism", "Crony Capitalism", "Disaster Capitalism", "Unbridled Capitalism", "Green Capitalism" and on and on and on...

Just more talk from the liberal fetish cult of a kinder-gentler form of capitalism which always exists just around the corner and nowadays ya' gotta have a Prius to get there.

Sorry folks but the bodies are piled a mile high from the real Beast, CAPITALISM, and all the the above imagined "variants" are nothing more than the standard operating principles of this Beast.

You'll have better luck trying to reform sharks into vegans.

Here's some advice from a friend:

"Everything has to be overturned. There aren't any half-measures that are going to accomplish anything. Those are being thrown out there by people so they can avoid the truth and distract others from the truth. There is not going to be any health care reform, global warming is not going to be stopped, jobs are not coming back, wages are not going to improve. There is no way to reform the system, there is no way to make it work, there is no way to fix things.

The degree to which critical commentary on any issue leads people to see that it all must come down, it is constructive and powerful to that degree. The degree to which it leads people to think that we are or could be "doing something" to "solve" that particular problem in isolation, without challenging the entire system, is the degree to which it is destructive and reactionary.

There are not some good things about the system that we need to worry about saving, with some bad things that need to be "regulated" or overcome through "doing something" or making personal changes. The self-censorship (or denial) that so many are indulging in, supposedly in order to persuade people without "offending" them, to avoid "alienating potential friends and allies," and the whole idiotic "winning friends and influencing people" approach must end.

It all has to come down, and there is no reason to hesitate or be cautious in our critical commentary, no reason to entertain the "on the other hand" stuff that people put out there to mitigate our criticism - actually to oppose our critical view in a covert and deceptive way. Attack every aspect of it everyday everywhere with everyone. Capitalism has distorted, corrupted, and perverted all of our social relations and arrangements, everywhere. Nothing is free from its clutch. Nothing positive can exist within it. It all has to come down, it all must be overturned.

All of the "OK I see what you are saying, and agree with you, but what is your plan?" responses are also covert opposition and are reactionary. Here is the plan - it all must come down. Would we tell people to not treat pneumonia until and unless they have a plan for the rest of their lives, or a guarantee that the disease will be eliminated once and for all by their plan and that everything will then be perfect? The society is ill, the disease is Capitalism, and it has spread to all parts and is destroying everything.

"But can't we just keep a few slaves, and ban whipping and shackles?" No. It all must come down."

that their prinicipal complaint is that capitalism has been particularly rapacious recently. And their "solution" is to grovel and beg their masters to relent a little.

It is not really merely the ugliest features of Capitalism they are worried about, the symptoms, it is their feelings about those symptoms they are worried about. So if Obama tells them everything is OK, then magically it is OK and they feel better, even though the symptoms have not changed, let alone the disease.

A couple of years ago I remember Nance Greggs and FrenchieCat, to name but two examples, posting about all the horrible things Bush was doing and how upset they were about those things, and mocking and ridiculing the Bush supporters - "no matter what he does, they still support him! How stupid can they be?" You know the rest of that story.

First:

This is one of the oldest friendly criticisms of capitalism that there is. It reaches back to the democratic revolutions, to the enlightenment, to Proudhon, and to the original American "reform" era well before the emergence of Theodore Roosevelt. It's statement of the obvious also stamps its class origin as the lament of the small entrepreneur, either real or potential. If only the storm tossed high seas of Capitalism could be replaced by a tranquil pond... well, then, opening a boutique in Taos, or becoming a one-man renovation contractor in Houston, might remain a practical option. 401Ks would grow, class divides would be eroded by the constant renewal of "the rich", and a certain amount of "stability" and leverage might be brought to the salary negotiation... all based on "competition".

It is remarkable how broadly this particular "criticism" is adopted. On the right, it is the ever rejuvenated basis of right populism and the only program of "left-fascism". On the left, it ranges from Lynn's mere figures of speech, to an actual intermingling of such ideas with naive socialism. It is probably the most long-lived of the reform fantasies. No matter how radical sounding it becomes, it remains a very conservative analysis. Certainly, dressing it up in "New Left" clothing during the 1960s didn't give it any new accuracy:

http://img.flipkart.com/bk_imgs/733/9780853450733.jpg

It is indisputable that there is a strong tendency towards monopoly in Capitalism, but there are also anti-monopoly tendencies, perhaps more accurately stated as tendencies to constantly "reorganize" monopoly. In our own times, the unblinking willingness of finance capital to dismantle moribund monopoly capital has been on constant display. No more than one or two of the poster children of "monopoly" in the 1950s remain today, let alone many of the "trusts" of 1900. Still, no calm has come to the pond for long. Quite the contrary, World War One and World War Two can be considered to be "anti-monopoly" tendencies, at another level.

The current narrative, above, seems to conflate a "deep" criticism of free enterprise with a "distrust of government" borrowed from the Libertarians. That makes it, not only a really old lament, but self-negating. The rap doesn't even begin to counter Mike's excellent rant on the subject... obviously true on the face of it.

These "new ideas" people don't have a clue (Lynn is yet another New America Foundation clown). They are going to have to reach much farther back into history. Maybe it's worth reading Henry James again, to prepare for the next "new" angle on what is wrong with "our system".

Second:

Chlamor, it is amazing how much of this incredibly lame but, until recently, obscure bullshit got picked up on the old PopIndy, particularly in the Gallery of Assholes. That extends from the fresh-faced deer-in-headlights New Imperialism of Samantha Power:

http://www.munkdebates.com/images/imgDebatesPowerProfile.jpg

to the "radical centrist" crappola of Mark Satin (of which Lynn is a part):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/66/Listening.jpg/180px-Listening.jpg

Perhaps you and I should start a new Think Tank: The non-Progressive fuck-Policy there-ain't-no-Institute not-really-New more-than-America anti-Foundation?

I bet we could attract a ton of not-Money...

These characters come out of the woodwork to amend a broader popular criticism of "Capitalism".

"It ain't 'Capitalism', it's 'choose-your-adjective-Capitalism'". As you say, the point is clearly to defend the rest of capitalism... that other-kinda-capitalism.

"Hey, bring me that bar of aluminium."

"WTF? I couldn't pick that up with a forklift."

"Oh, maybe it's steel..."

Alcoa is the prime example of how far they reach. It is one of the "original" trusts (1888). It's "monopoly" was one of the most offbeat of them all. By 1903, Alcoa had bought up all the patents for aluminum and became the only legal smelter. It only took the government until 1938 to file suit, alleging that Patent Law was never really intended to cover entire components of the Periodic Table. The suit was not promoted by "reform pressure" but by other capitalists.

It made them "nervous"...

"If only the storm tossed high seas of Capitalism could be replaced by a tranquil pond... well, then, opening a boutique in Taos, or becoming a one-man renovation contractor in Houston, might remain a practical option."

There is no tranquil pond anywhere, there cannot be a tranquil pond. The storm tossed seas reach everywhere and destroy everything.

Here are the stories of some of those "boutiques in Taos" - people who "built a better mousetrap," showed "initiative and drive," had the "right values," made the system work for achieving progressive social outcomes, blah, blah.

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=220&topic_id=1596

"The current narrative, above, seems to conflate a 'deep' criticism of free enterprise with a 'distrust of government' borrowed from the Libertarians. That makes it, not only a really old lament, but self-negating."

That describes all of the "progressive" thinking on food and farming issues. Liberatrian think tanks are actually and literally writing the script these days for the organic movement, and laughing their asses off about how easy it is to steer liberals. "The gubmint is going to take away your goats and organic veggies!!!" is the cry and the reason for joining industry and the libertarians in opposing safety and health regulations and food inspections.

Take Your Money Out of the Hands of the Banking Oligarchs

By Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson, Move Your Money. Posted December 30, 2009.

How? For starters, you could move your money to a small bank.

Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?

Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.

Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.

It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. (Watch it in the video player on the top right hand side of the screen).

Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks. ...

Find a Bank

Not all community banks are risk free. Some of them got involved in the same risky behavior that took down some of the biggest banks. Thanks to the volunteer services of a group called Institutional Risk Analytics (IRA), you can get a listing of the most sound community banks near you. IRA lists only banks that, according to its rating system, which is based on government data, get a grade of “B” or better.

Credit Unions: Many folks have written us suggesting that people should examine credit unions. Like the FDIC for banks and thrifts, the National Credit Union Administration insures the deposits of credit unions and is a good resource for financial data on specific institutions. Credit unions do not disclose financial data in the same way as FDIC-insured banks. As a result, credit unions are not presently included in the IRA ratings database, which covers over 8,000 federally insured banks and thrifts. IRA is developing a method to rate credit unions in a way that is comparable to the IRA bank stress ratings. We’ll be updating users of “Move Your Money” on this issue early in 2010.

Enter your zip code below to find the community banks near you.

http://www.alternet.org/action/144882?page=2

Gotta quit doin' this to myself. I'm the only one left in the family with hair and I might lose it all at once readin' this stuff.

http://theworkorganizer.biz/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/woman-tearing-hair-out.jpg

individuals; eating the finest foods and drinking wine that cost a car payment! Wow! and to be able to discuss solutions to peoples' problems (not ours, of course, but "theirs"), oh man...and be wearing a vest, of course...

straight men don't wear vests

And whether they are knit...

No, he wasn't straight

:banana: