By Angela Vullo April 17, 2019–The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that Americans are committed to achieving “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Somewhere along the line that commitment has been lost. As the horrific increase in deaths of despair dramatizes, a large segment of Americans today are, frankly, […]
April 10, 2019—The following press release was issued by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) yesterday. It puts back on the Congressional agenda one of the urgent actions required to curb Wall Street speculation, and put the United States back on the path of the American System. The Bill number is HR […]
April 5, 2019—Rep. Thomas Jackson has introduced House Joint Resolution 60 to the Alabama House of Representatives, in pursuit of “urging Congress to support efforts to reinstate the separation of commercial and investment banking functions and to return to national banking policies.” The Resolution was sent to the Alabama State […]
April 2, 2019–The end-of-year reporting by the Wall Street mega-banks on their exposure to risk should be setting off alarms on Capitol Hill and beyond. Of particular concern are the figures on speculation in derivatives contained in the annual reports which the banks (among other publicly traded companies) have to […]
March 7, 2019—Rep. Shelly Willingham (D-Martin) introduced a “joint resolution urging Congress to enact without delay an “American Economic Recovery Program” into the North Carolina State Legislature on Feb. 17. House Joint Resolution 190 has five cosponsors and has been referred to the Banking Committee as the first step. The […]
Feb. 15, 2019—The issue of Glass-Steagall-style separation of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks is once again before the Australian Parliament. On February 12, One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson introduced the Banking System Reform (Separation of Banks) Bill 2019 into the Australian Senate. Her motion was as follows: “That the following bill be […]
By Nancy Spannaus Feb. 13, 2019–The U.S. Congress lost one of its most honorable members on February 10, when Congressman Walter B. Jones, who represented Eastern North Carolina in Congress for 34 years, died in Greenville. While elected as a Republican, Jones was well-known as an independent voice, who was […]
Feb. 5, 2019—On Feb. 4, a group of Arizona legislators, led by State Senator Juan Mendez, joined the national movement to get Congress to reimpose Glass-Steagall and establish a Hamiltonian National Infrastructure Bank. SM1001, a “Memorial urging Congress to reinstate portions of the Glass-Steagall Act and to support national banking […]
Jan. 28, 2019—On Jan 22 the South Carolina House of Representatives became the first state legislature in 2019 to pass a resolution calling for Congress to establish a National Infrastructure Bank. The proposed Bank, modelled on the successful national banking systems of Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and […]
By Nancy Spannaus May 20, 2019–George Washington’s “Grand Idea” of uniting the country through developing the Potomac River as the gateway to the West, was the subject of a lively book talk last night. Author Joel Achenbach spoke to a group of approximately 30 people about his book The Grand […]
By Nancy Spannaus May 15, 2019—On May 8, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, under Chairman Peter DeFazio, took a baby step toward increasing Federal spending on vital national infrastructure. It passed out of Committee HR 2440, a bill which would allow the Army Corps of Engineers to utilize the […]
Fixing Responsibility for the 2008 Collapse
A review by Nancy Spannaus Market Rules: Bankers, Presidents, and the Origins of the Great Recession Mark H. Rose University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA., 2019, 258 pp. April 17, 2019—Call me a populist if you will, but I cannot discuss the financial blowout of 2008 without holding responsible those […]