Will Congress hold the big banks responsible for the economic crisis?

By Harold Meyerson
WashPost
Saturday, April 24, 2010

Finally, there's a Tea Party for the rest of us.

Starting Tuesday, large numbers of irate Americans will channel their ire at the parties that are actually responsible for our economic crisis: the big banks. On that day, a coalition of union, clergy and community groups are set to demonstrate in San Francisco outside Wells Fargo's annual shareholder meeting. The next day, a similar demonstration is slated to unfold at Bank of America's shareholder meeting in Charlotte. And the day after that, the AFL-CIO plans to lead the largest such demonstration into the belly of the beast -- Wall Street. Further protests are planned for Wall Street's lobbyist row -- Washington's K Street -- in May.

"We're trying to create a which-side-are-you-on moment for Congress," George Goehl, executive director of National People's Action, a group that has long labored to rein in predatory lending, told me a week ago, just hours before the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Goldman Sachs -- the moment when it became exquisitely awkward for members of Congress to come down on the banks' side.

The Goldman scandal is clearly something of a tipping point. In the wake of allegations of fraudulent misrepresentation from Wall Street's foremost investment bank, all the Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee, joined by Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, voted Wednesday to send a bill from Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln to the full Senate. Lincoln's is the first bill to get this far that would really clamp down on Wall Street's casino. It would require almost every derivative deal to be traded publicly on an exchange, as stocks are traded. It would mandate that the participants have some skin in the game -- putting up funds to cover the deals should they go south (as AIG, which we all bailed out to the tune of $180 billion, did not).

(More here.)

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