6 From House Demand Wall Street Pay Up
All of America is now familiar with the way that Wall Street finance companies took billions upon billions of government money to save them from the consequences of their own risky investments, then used some of that bailout money to provide immense bonuses to the very executives who had led their companies into disaster in the first place.
What Congress has done to respond to this abuse of government assistance: Not much. Now, at the beginning of 2008, a small group of Representatives is finally making a stand against the ongoing arrogance of Wall Street executives.
Yesterday, in one of the first pieces of legislation introduced in 2010, Dennis Kucinich seeks to respond to Wall Street abuse of the public trust with H.R. 4414. The bill, with the short title of the Responsible Bankers Act, would create a 75 percent tax on excessive executive bonuses at Wall Street firms.
On the floor of the House, Kucinich said of his motivation in writing this bill, “We cannot let banks crush businesses. We cannot let banks challenge this government with our own tax dollars. We need broad reform in our financial system, and I will be addressing that at another time. But one element of that reform must be to impose some fiscal discipline onto these banks that think that they can get away with giving themselves mega-bonuses while the rest of America is suffering and starved for capital.”
Five other members of the House of Representatives have joined Congressman Kucinich as co-sponsors of the Responsible Bankers Act. They are:
William Lacy Clay
Keith Ellison
Phil Hare
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C., non-voting member)
Diane Watson
[...] Representative and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has come up with another plan: Create a 75 percent tax on excessive Wall Street bonuses for executives, while leaving the financial institutions as a whole [...]
[...] strong Wall Street reform bill coming from Representative Dennis Kucinich. H.R. 4414, the Responsible Banking Act, would establish a 75 percent tax on excessive bonuses paid by a wide range of finance companies. [...]