Wall Street just got shocked



As  Two financial giants told Congress not to kill a reform won by progressives and opposed by Wall Street lobbyists.

Can you join as a citizen-signer of their letter to Congress?

Wall Street

media reports have noted, a big policy victory resulted from our primary challenge to Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

When progressives attacked her for being a tool of big corporations, she offered a last-minute Wall Street reform proposal that the AP calls the “toughest” to pass the Senate. It restores Glass-Steagall-style rules that protect your bank deposits from being gambled away.

Conventional wisdom said Wall Street would kill this reform after the primary was over. But some big news just shocked the banks.

Two regional Presidents of the Federal Reserve — widely considered financial titans — wrote a letter calling on Congress to keep this proposal in the final bill.

Can you add your name as a citizen signer of this game-changing new letter? Click here to read and sign it.

We will deliver thousands of signatures to the key members of Congress who are negotiating the final Wall Street reform bill this week.

Plus, if thousands of us sign, we can generate a fresh round of media coverage around this letter — influencing the national debate and increasing the pressure on Congress to pass this big reform.

Our first goal is 10,000 signatures — can you help us reach it by signing today? Click here.

Thanks for being a bold progressive,

— Aaron Swartz, Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Shaunna Thomas, and the PCCC team

P.S. The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent writes, “The Halter challenge was a show of force by the left. Period. If you don’t belive that, ask yourself why Lincoln suddenly found herself backing a tough-on-derivatives proposal in the Senate.” Progressives empowered these financial titans to speak out. Now, let’s elevate their voices by joining as citizen signers.

What we saw tonight


Send to 5 people you know …
Tonight, in his very first speech from the Oval Office, President Obama addressed the nation on the BP oil spill and the crisis in the Gulf Coast.

Millions of Americans heard him lay out the path forward: Tens of thousands will continue to work around the clock to stop the oil spill and prevent further damage. The Obama administration will ensure that BP is held accountable, covering the costs of the clean-up and paying its debts to the people whose lives have been upended by the disaster.

The Gulf Coast will be repaired and restored for the people who call it home and whose livelihoods depend on it.

But, as the President said tonight, this is just the beginning — we need to ensure that a disaster like this never happens again.

The President presented a vision of a future where we as a nation are not held hostage by our dependence on fossil fuels — and a plan for an economy that invests in energy generated right here and creates jobs for millions of Americans in the process. Under his leadership, some of this is beginning to take shape — clean energy is starting to put people back to work across the country, building more efficient cars and trucks, repurposing old factories to manufacture wind turbines, and investing in research that will discover new energy technologies.

Critics will say that a real transition to clean energy is a challenge that can’t be met. But the President made it clear tonight that he will not back down — even if the path forward is not easy. And, as this movement has shown time and again, neither will we.

You are one of hundreds of thousands who have already stood with President Obama for a clean-energy future. Washington has put this off for far too long — America must act. We need your help today to show strong support for the President’s vision for a clean-energy future. Please pass on this email to five friends today — and ask them to join you in standing with the President:

http://my.barackobama.com/CleanEnergyFuture

Thank you,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Obama’s big speech tonight


Clicking here will add your name:

“President Obama: We need a real plan reduce our dependence on oil, not more offshore drilling and taxpayer handouts to oil companies.”

Sign the petition

Tonight, President Obama will address the nation in prime time about the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. According to White House aides, he’ll call for clean energy legislation to end America’s addiction to oil.1

The problem is, the proposals currently in Congress are packed with more offshore drilling and taxpayer handouts to Big Oil—exactly the opposite of what we need.2

This speech is President Obama’s best chance to demand a real plan to cut our dependence on oil.

That’s why we’re launching this petition now—which we’ll deliver tonight before the speech—to call on President Obama to clearly reject any legislation that expands offshore drilling or gives taxpayer handouts to oil companies. You can add your name by clicking the link below:

http://pol.moveon.org/obamaoilspeech/o.pl?id=21126-9640874-hugNf5x&t=5

The petition says: “President Obama: We need a real plan reduce our dependence on oil, not more offshore drilling and taxpayer handouts to oil companies.”

President Obama is expected to talk about his plan to hold BP accountable, help the Gulf Coast recover, and end our addiction to oil. Those are the right goals. But we’ve learned that Congress won’t stand up to Big Oil unless President Obama leads the way.

For instance, one of the most prominent energy proposals would roll back the Clean Air Act and give incentives for new offshore drilling, essentially bribing states to allow new drilling in areas that are currently protected.3 The bill would also give valuable pollution permits for free to the biggest polluters.4

This moment is a major test of Obama’s presidency—and for America. We can’t let the Big Oil lobbyists turn the oil spill legislation into another DC insider giveaway.

Can you sign our petition calling on President Obama to demand a real plan to reduce our dependence on oil and reject any legislation larded up with taxpayer handouts to Big Oil or offshore drilling? Add your name by clicking the link below:

Backing down on BP


Washington  Post: Pressure on Boehner Pays Off?

We did it. Over 50,000 of you answered our call to action and held Republican Leader John “Big Oil” Boehner’s feet to the fire over his outrageous statement that American taxpayers should foot the bill to clean up BP’s unprecedented environmental disaster in the Gulf. After relentless pressure from activists like you, Big Oil Boehner backed down.

But our work is not done. Check out this Washington Post report on Boehner’s retraction:

Last week, after taking good deal of criticism, Boehner’s office finally made it clear that he supports holding BP responsible for the costs of not just the cleanup, but damages, too. But his office wouldn’t endorse any particular legislative means to make this happen.

Did you catch that? While Democrats in the House continue to fight tooth and nail to lift the outrageous “liability cap” that limits how much of the cleanup cost BP will is responsible for, Republicans continue to defend their fat cat Big Oil friends who line their campaign coffers.

Thank you for signing our petition last week calling on Republicans to hold BP 100% accountable. Help us send an overwhelming grassroots response and forward this email to five of your friends right now and encourage them to sign at BoehnerBPBailout.com. Then, share the petition on Facebook and Twitter!

Thanks for all you do,

Jon  Vogel
Jon Vogel
DCCC Executive Director


Sign the Petition

ThinkProgress.org


UNDER THE RADAR

BUSINESS — BP CALL CENTERS ARE JUST A ‘DIVERSION’: Having caused the greatest environmental disaster in American history, BP is now scrambling to defend its public image by running expensive TV ads, buying space on Google search results, and hiring former Bush and Cheney aides as public relations officials. While BP has boasted of its call centers in an attempt to demonstrate that it’s responsibly taking care of the oil spill and listening to public complaints, this effort’s credibility is now seriously questioned. One of BP’s contracted phone operators just came forward to KHOU in Houston, revealing how she and the other 100 operators at her site are merely PR props. Although they are supposed to be collecting and passing along ideas for clean-up and requests for spill-related aid, she says BP is not interested in doing anything with the information the operators receive. “We take all your information and then we have nothing to give them, nothing to give them,” she says. The calls are “non-stop,” but the contracted operators are just “a diversion to stop [calls] from really getting to the corporate office, to the big people.” Some operators “don’t bother” taking notes during their calls. The anonymous tipster laments how “it’s so frustrating when these people live right there and nothing is being done to help them.” BP officials acknowledge that this call center has received over 200,000 phone messages, yet they “can’t say just what percentage of calls is returned.” The Center for American Progress’ (CAP) Senior Fellow Tom Kenworthy and the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson have argued in a recent report that “[f]ederal agencies, not BP, should handle spill response hotlines for volunteers, technology ideas, affected wildlife, and others. Full call records need to be logged with incident reports and technology ideas presented publicly on dynamic websites.”