Banking

Last week’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) action against Goldman Sachs landed like a bombshell on Wall Street. To the titans of Wall Street it must have seemed like the nice little kitty they had been stroking and cuddling over the years, viciously sank in teeth and claws.

The SEC has faced intense criticism from the public and media regarding the way it loosened leveraging rules, a key cause of the implosion of major investment banks and the meltdown as a whole. The SEC also took a pounding over its handling of the Bernie Madoff fiasco. SEC officials chose to ignore explicit warnings from whistleblowers that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC also mishandled its first major case related to the crisis, being roundly scolded by a federal judge for not being tough enough on Bank of America’s secret bonus and salary deal with Merrill Lynch.

Foreclosure filings were at historic highs in March -- 367,056 -- an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, and the highest monthly total since 2005, according to RealtyTrac. Almost two years after the onset of the financial crisis with unemployment at historic highs, nothing is being done to put a stop to this on-going tragedy.

Today, the Real Economy Project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released an update of our Wall Street Bailout accounting that, unlike other bailout assessments, includes Federal Reserve loans. CMD finds that the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) combined have disbursed a total of $4.7 trillion on the bailout, of which $2 trillion is still outstanding.

If you, like me, are scrambling to complete your taxes, and feeling a bit disgruntled about being taxed more than the big boys on Wall Street, Jobs with Justice has a great plan on how to work out your angst.

Jobs with Justice, the feisty union representing workers in 25 states, is calling for a Tax Wall Street Day of Action on April 15th.

”Big banks helped plunge the nation into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. They lobbied for deregulation and corporate tax breaks, then went on a reckless gambling spree, creating complicated, risky mechanisms to make profits off of destabilizing the economy. They have tightened lending for consumers and small business, and they have refused to modify home mortgages. Millions of Americans have lost their homes, their jobs and their retirement savings,” says a Jobs with Justice flyer.

After an exhausting week, I was sticking to my usual routine of collapsing on the couch and tuning in to Bill Moyers Journal on PBS last Friday night. I was excited that one of the guests was www.eji.org Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, who has long been a hero of mine for his uncompromising, long-term battle against the death penalty.

The show was terrific, a wide-ranging discussion about the struggle for economic justice from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama for "those folks at the bottom of the well," with Stevenson and civil rights lawyer and author of "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander. But deep into the show, well, to tell the shameful truth, I fell asleep. So I missed Moyer's great concluding essay and the big moment when he mentioned the Center for Media and Democracy and our Wall Street Bailout tally. The tally was the product of three months of hard work by our researcher, Conor Kenney, with contributions from half a dozen other staff.