WASHINGTON, December 2 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today placed a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
“The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders said. “What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”
As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is one of the best advocates for the U.S. middle classes and he's also becoming new technology communication savvy. Bernie is online!
Firstly, he wrote a column on the Huffington Post on the financial crisis.
Here are his very simple main points and he has a tendency to introduce legislation to accompany his words.
Cap interest rates to 15%
Break up too big to fail institutions
Pass the "Audit the Fed" bill
Pretty simple huh? If an institution is too big to fail then maybe it's too big to exist? Stop consumer usary by plain making loan shark interest rates illegal. If we want to know what the Federal Reserve has done with $2 trillion, let's audit them.
Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation this week to cap interest rates charged by credit card companies that now slap consumers with rates of up to 30 percent. "This is money that comes right out of their hides and it hurts," Sanders told The Burlington Free Press. His legislation would impose 15 percent interest rate ceiling. It also would limit fees. “We are going to introduce a national usury law which will prohibit any financial institution from charging these outrageous rates,” he told Thom Hartmann’s nationally-syndicated radio show. “These loan sharks wear three-piece suits, but they’re not much different than those guys who break people’s knee caps.”
Senator Bernie Sanders is introducing legislation to Stop the Bail Out of the rest of the $350 billion dollars that hasn't been given to banks.
Senator Bernie Sanders said today he will introduce legislation to stop the release of a $350-billion second round of the Wall Street bailout. Sanders, who voted against the $700-billion package Congress approved in October, said he has serious concerns about how the Bush administration and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson are spending the bailout money that was already released. He also said it was unacceptable that the oversight provisions in the bill were ignored. “I have very serious concerns as to how the Bush administration is spending the first $350 billion they were provided. The second $350 billion tranche must not be spent in the same way,” Sanders said.
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