Well, You Can't Say We Haven't Been Warned

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• By Christine Harper, Betty Liu and Erik Holm

• May 2 (Bloomberg) -- Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman Charles Munger, whose company is the largest private shareholder in Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., said banks will use their “enormous political power” to prevent changes to the industry that would benefit society.
• “It will be very hard to accomplish the kind of surgery that would be desirable for the wider civilization.”
• “We need to remove from the investment banking and the commercial banking industries a lot of the practices and prerogatives that they have so lovingly possessed,” Munger said. “If they are too big to fail, they are too big to be allowed to be as gamey and venal as they’ve been -- and as stupid as they’ve been.”
• [So far] the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the recession.
• Munger said the financial companies spent $500 million on political contributions and lobbying efforts over the last decade. They have a “vested interest” in protecting the system as it exists because of the high levels of pay they were earning.

Now we know. The question then is, what are we going to do about it?

Write/email your congress people (House & Senate); tell them to do what is right for the country. Not what is good for their re-election war-chests.

Of course, they will not listen to us, but they will know that we are watching.

And we will know whom they consider their constituents by how they approach this matter with their votes.
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