In March of 2008, Senator Sanders began collecting stories of the crisis middle class families faced every day.  Yet, official Washington and corporate Wall Street did not focus on the dire economic situation until after it came to roost in Manhattan.

On September 15, 2008, the Wall Street investment banking behemoth Lehman Brothers collapsed.  Other institutions threatened to follow suit.  The Bush administration began infusing billions of taxpayer dollars into these Wall Street giants.  “Some institutions really are too big to fail, and that’s the way it is,” Douglas W. Elmendorf, a former Treasury and Federal Reserve Board economist, said according to The New York Times.   Uncle Sam came to the rescue in the form of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout approved by Congress.

Senator Sanders voted against the Wall Street bailout.  He pointed out that if a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.  He noted that the massive bill did not restrict executive compensation at the bailed-out firms; it did not curtail bonuses to the Masters of the Universe who led the financial services industry into this financial crisis; the bailout did not re-regulate the industry which had drastically and methodically been deregulated.  You can watch the senator’s speech here.  You can hear some of the letters people wrote to the senator regarding the bailout here.

We cannot ignore the major economic crises we still face: growing unemployment, low wages, and the need to create millions of decent-paying jobs rebuilding our infrastructure.  But the Wall Street bailout was not the answer.  To stay up to date on the economic and fiscal crises, scroll down for the latest developments.

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FROM THE PRESS:

Obama now promises an accelerated pace of federal spending over the next few months to boost the economy and produce jobs. "We have a long way to go on our road to recovery but we are going the right way," Obama said in a written statement prepared for his public announcement of the additional summer stimulus activity. "Our measure of progress is the progress the American people see in their own lives. And until that progress is steady and solid, we're going to keep moving forward. We will not grow complacent or rest. Surely and steadily, we will turn this economy around," the statement said. READ MORE

As the financial crisis entered one of its darkest phases in October, a handful of the nation's largest banks began holding daily telephone sessions. Murmurs were already emanating from Washington about the need for a wide-ranging regulatory overhaul, and Wall Street executives girded for a fight. Atop the agenda during their calls: how to counter an expected attempt to rein in credit-default swaps and other derivatives — the sophisticated and profitable financial instruments that were intended to limit risk but instead had helped take the economy to the brink of disaster. The nine biggest participants in the derivatives market — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America — created a lobbying organization, the CDS Dealers Consortium, on Nov. 13, a month after five of its members accepted federal bailout money. READ MORE

For the past year, banks have raised credit card rates to levels that sparked consumer outcry, regulatory scrutiny and congressional action. A law President Obama signed last week aims to stop the most egregious practices. But even as outrage was building over credit cards, banks seized upon another way to squeeze profits out of struggling consumers: higher checking account fees. These fees can add up to hundreds of dollars before consumers know there's a problem. READ MORE

Vermont is still wallowing in recession and will not return to "normal" growth rates until 2011 or 2012, according to an economic forecast that will be presented today in Boston. The pace of the recovery is projected to be "halting and insecure." "By the time the recession in Vermont is over, it will have been the harshest economic downturn in the state since the Great Depression," according to the report written by Jeff Carr, president of Economic & Policy Resources Inc. and economic adviser to the governor, and economist Zachary Sears. READ MORE

First-term Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who spent 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, is taking advantage of rising populist anger at the government's bailouts of financial companies to push legislation that would reveal the identity of all Federal Reserve borrowers and restrict recipients of emergency Fed loans from hiring foreign workers. "This is his moment," said Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed monetary-affairs chief who is now resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "The American people want to extract retribution. They want to punish somebody. Who better a vehicle to design that punishment than somebody who's been thinking about it his entire career?" READ MORE

By Paul Krugman

Hooray! The banking crisis is over! Let's party! O.K., maybe not. In the end, the actual release of the much-hyped bank stress tests on Thursday came as an anticlimax. Everyone knew more or less what the results would say: some big players need to raise more capital, but over all, the kids, I mean the banks, are all right. Even before the results were announced, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, told us they would be "reassuring." But whether you actually should feel reassured depends on who you are: a banker, or someone trying to make a living in another profession. READ MORE

"Please don't let the credit card companies abuse us anymore. I work hard for my money and I am one of the people that pays their bills and is never late with any of my bills. I cannot afford to have my hard earned money wasted on increased interest rates. Please stop them now ..." That was just one of the 900 e-mails the office of Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., received over the weekend after he asked Vermonters to relate their recent experiences with credit card companies. READ MORE

On July 15, 2007, The New York Times published an article with the headline "The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age." The most prominently featured of the "new titans" was Sanford Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup, who insisted that he and his peers in the financial sector had earned their immense wealth through their contributions to society. READ MORE

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