Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell federal regulators to release information about the implementation and enforcement of the Volcker Rule. The Volcker Rule, named for former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, aims to prevent banks from trading in securities with their depositors' funds; ideally, it would function much like the "wall" between banking and speculation that existed under the Glass-Steagall regime. You may remember, however, that Volcker Rule provisions in Dodd-Frank have more than a few exceptions -- including the one for private equity funds and hedge funds inserted to get the vote of Former United States Real American President Scott Brown (R-MA) -- and you may also recall that the various federal agencies in charge of overseeing the Volcker Rule dragged their feet for years on the final rules, and then issued waivers to banksters giving them another few years to comply with them. With all those shenanigans going on, don't we deserve a little more sunlight, so the banksters don't crash the economy again?
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the FCC to reject the proposed Time-Warner/Charter merger, then Presente still helps you do that. You no doubt know the many good business reasons to reject it -- that mergers destroy jobs, not create them; that mergers saddle corporations with extreme debt; that mergers give customers in large swaths of the country little or no choice in cable providers; and that mergers drive prices upward and customer satisfaction downward -- but Presente reminds us that the bigger cable behemoths get, the less ethnically diverse their ownership will be. And while we know that media consolidation smothers diversity of viewpoints generally, we also know that minority would-be station owners generally start further behind in life than their white counterparts, so letting smaller stations flourish wherever we can also promotes ownership diversity. Of course, to a "free" market ideologue, any result of letting corporations do whatever their CEOs like is a positive result. But they don't get all the say around here. Not in my America, at least.
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