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Showing videos filed under: Banks
Tamra Davis, The Heretics, and Small Steps on the Economy
July 23, 2010In the 80s, before she directed Hollywood comedies like Half Baked and Billy Madison, Tamra Davis shot hours of footage of her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. The young artist went on to international stardom before dying of a heroin overdose at age 27, and Davis went on to Hollywood. Our Got Docs? this week is "The Heretics" created by Joan Braderman of Women Make Movies. Braderman followed the now geographically dispersed New York feminist art collective from Venice, Italy to New Mexico, asking them what it was like to come together and challenge gender and power structures within the art world and how it shaped them as women and artists. Lastly, Danny Schechter comments on how small steps on economic recovery are not enough to remedy an economic meltdown.Danny Schechter: Small Steps on Economy Not Enough
July 23, 2010When the extension of unemployment benefits squeaked through the Senate, there was a sigh of relief among those in need, and cheers from Democrats who have not been able to move the unemployment needle or restore confidence in the economy. Putting money in the hands of wannabe consumers will create some bounce, but it doesn’t deal with the deep structural and systemic problems that worry economists and governments worldwide.William K. Black: Elizabeth Warren & Consumer Protection
July 21, 2010Former regulator, savings & loan investigator, and current Braintruster at the Roosevelt Institute William K. Black says that if Elizabeth Warren isn't appointed to head the consumer protection agency passed as part of the financial reform bill, it will be a clear sign that the agency isn't going to protect consumers at all. While Warren has done the research in the field for 20 years, he notes, other candidates preferred by Treasury Secretary Geithner have fallen more into the Rubin/Summers camp of deregulators.William K. Black, Real Peace Process, and Top Secret America
July 20, 2010Former regulator, savings & loan investigator, and current Braintruster at the Roosevelt Institute William K. Black says that if Elizabeth Warren isn't appointed to head the consumer protection agency passed as part of the financial reform bill, it will be a clear sign that the agency isn't going to protect consumers at all. While Warren has done the research in the field for 20 years, he notes, other candidates preferred by Treasury Secretary Geithner have fallen more into the Rubin/Summers camp of deregulators.Jeff Biggers, Rebecca Traister & Hendrik Hertzberg, and Hoarders
July 15, 2010Yet another coal miner was killed on the job this week, and journalist and author Jeff Biggers says that the situation has reached crisis level--that it's a war on miners. He also notes that abuse of the land and abuse of the people who work on it has always gone hand in hand, so as pressure for mountaintop removal and new coal mines mounts, so do safety violations--the latest being a story broken by NPR, that a methane gas monitor at the Little Big Branch mine, where 29 workers died in an explosion in April, had been deliberately shut down.The F Word: Great Hoarding Causing Great Hurt
July 15, 2010Congress is hemming and hawing over financial reform, no doubt weighing up the cost of too little reform vs. too many lost campaign contributions. Meanwhile, while the best jobless workers can hope for is an extension of benefits for the long-term unemployed, it's not just the jobless who are slipping under the bus -- it's all workers. As Robert Reich pointed out this week, real wages are falling - even as hours and “productivity” are rising. And the White House keeps on hoping that the private sector will do the right thing about all of this.Financial Reform: Throwing Junk in the Attic
July 2, 2010Nomi Prins, former Wall Street trader and author of It Takes a Pillage, says that the current financial reform legislation is like throwing your extra junk in the attic and pretending that your house is clean. She says that it allows banks to keep all sorts of securities off their balance sheets--that it does nothing to prevent, in short, the kind of shady dealings that helped land us in this financial mess to begin with.Bernie Sanders: Obstruction and Steps Forward
July 2, 2010"Republicans are playing the strongest obstructionist role we have ever seen," Senator Bernie Sanders notes. Sanders and his Senate colleagues have been trying to pass a financial reform bill that now hangs in doubt, with some Republicans changing their minds and with the death of Robert Byrd this week. As for immigration reform, or energy legislation? Don't bet on it, with the Party of No filibustering nearly every piece of legislation that comes their way.Bernie Sanders, Financial Reform, and the End of Men
July 1, 2010"Republicans are playing the strongest obstructionist role we have ever seen," Senator Bernie Sanders notes. Sanders and his Senate colleagues have been trying to pass a financial reform bill that now hangs in doubt, with some Republicans changing their minds and with the death of Robert Byrd this week. As for immigration reform, or energy legislation? Don't bet on it, with the Party of No filibustering nearly every piece of legislation that comes their way.David Corn, Social Media, and the New Depression
June 30, 2010What’s in a constitutional interpretation? As Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “the principle is that the earth belongs to the living, and not the dead.” Over the centuries, many Supreme Court Justices have either upheld or lost track of this, on one hand interpreting the Constitution towards a more perfect union, on the other passively, calling the “balls and strikes” in accordance with the extant Constitution.