So we’re in a financial crisis. Financial analysts on TV are giving their insight and assumptions. Americans are fed up and scared. But what can be done about it? Well the first thing is to write to your senator or congressman. Instead of just blogging, instead of just complaining, take action and 10 minutes and write your representatives.
Email Your Representative:
Contact Your Elected Officials:
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
This site will link you to the various contact pages for Fed and State representatives. It’s ok if you don’t know the names of your representatives, the contact pages will help you find them.
Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee:
http://baucus.senate.gov/contact/emailForm.cfm?subj=issue
Contact House Financial Services Committee:
http://financialservices.house.gov/contact.html
I’ll even help and make it easier for you and give you an example. This is what I sent to my Senators Warner & Web, my Congressman Cantor and to both the Senate and House Finance Committees:
………………………………..
Honorable Senator / Congressman
I worked at Freddie Mac from 1991 to 2006, watching the company lobby congress to deregulate the market. I watched Freddie set the standard by which a credit rating for Americans was established.
I wondered then, as I do now, why someone who is in debt, has 2 or more credit cards that are maxed out; but the minimums are paid on time, has a better credit rating than someone with no credit cards and lives on a budget within their financial means.
In 2001 I was left with the debt from a failed marriage. I paid off all the credit cards and closed them. I choose a house that wasn’t going to make me mortgage poor and was within my means. Even though it was 2 hours traffic time away from work. I took money from my 401k to put $20k down on this house, insisted on a fixed rate and have made my monthly payments on schedule for the 7 years I’ve lived here. I paid off my car loan, 3 months early. Have no outstanding medical debts. Yet my credit rating is considered medium to high risk because I have no credit cards.
This entire financial crisis is the result of turning common sense finance upside down in order for big corporations to make money and pay greedy executives.
I don’t like the bailout plan. I don’t think the government should be saving corporations that made bad decisions. But some of those corporations were able to do this because Congress revoked so many regulations that allowed them offer risky ventures that they other wise might not have been able to do. Now AIG who is embedded in almost every corporation in America has to be bailed out, or more corporations will go under.
Ok, so now I’m being asked to suffer as a result of individuals who over extended and lost their house. My credit rating suffers because of people who live on credit cards, instead of within their means. Making it harder for me to get a loan, or credit line. What’s left in my retirement has suffered because of the crash on Wall Street. And now you’re asking me to blindly turn over billions of tax dollars to the Treasury Secretary and those same Wall Street corporations without any consequence for their bad and risky business decisions. Hell NO!
As my Virginia representative in congress, I urge you to fight for Congressional oversight of the bail out, fight for penalties and caps on salaries and bonuses of those corporate CEOs and CFOs that are bailed out, and fight for some type of assistance for the average American suffering in this financial crisis.
Enough is enough! The middle class in America can’t take anymore. One more straw on our backs and we’ll break! And our Congressional leaders have to stop working for the special interests and they lobbies of these corrupt corporations and start remembering whom they’re supposed to be representing! Take America back for We The People! Please!
With Best Regards,
Spring, D.D.