Reforms Needed for Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs has spent large amounts of money lobbying for financial reforms that benefit banks.  They have also spent money supporting certain political candidates in an effort to persuade them of certain other benefits the banks wish to have or maintain.

Reforms in finance are moving as slow as molasses in February!

Haze Henderson on CSRwire has some ideas about financial reform:

Ethical Markets:  Transforming Finance Still Top Priority
By Hazel Henderson - CSRwire

Despite incremental reforms, the Dodd-Frank Act in the USA, Basel III and the 0.1% financial transaction tax now approved by EU finance ministers, the global financial casino is still playing.
Financial lobbying still seeks to block or weaken reforms and floods of money distorting democratic politics, loosed by the Supreme Courts’ 2010 Citizens United decision, are still flowing unchecked.  Billions still secretly fund attacks on climate science, social safety nets, teachers and other public employees and their pensions. All these efforts to repeal FDR’s New Deal and a fairer economy continue unabated.
. . . .
 
Our ethical, ESG, triple bottom line industry has led the way in directing resources toward solutions-based socio-economies. Yet, social inequality and environmental degradation have reached unsustainable levels in economies still unsustainable, unfair, unstable and undemocratic. The Statement calls on our colleagues to support cross-sector efforts to transform our failing political economic system and support for key system changes:

1. Restoring trust and integrity to currencies and monetary systems.

2. Transforming the global financial services industry from extraction to creating community health by:

• Supporting a financial transaction tax, being implemented in many countries.
• Protecting the commons and public infrastructure from privatization.

3. Building a new financial system that includes:

• Restoring a public banking system.
• Directing investments to undercapitalized communities through Community Development Financial Institutions and microfinance.
• Creating the enabling conditions to support local living economies.
• Investing democratically through crowdfunding.
• Continuing to involve mainstream financial institutions that demonstrably share our goals, values and ethics.

4. Restoring democracy and our collective capacity to regulate, tax and invest in public priorities by limiting money in politics, amending “corporate personhood” and the “money is speech” doctrines, and promoting public financing of elections.

Read the entire article here