Banks are the Taxpayer’s Best Friend

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The award for worst lobbying effort of the day comes from a banking industry flack who’s opposed to Barack Obama’s plan to levy a tax of some kind on the financial sector:

Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president of the American Bankers Association, said in a telephone interview that an industry-specific fee would create a “real fairness issue,” forcing banks to pay for parts of the bailout that “didn’t work.” In addition, Abernathy said, banks are paying an “excellent” return to the Treasury.

That’s right: out of the trillions of dollars of help provided to the industry, there was probably a billion here or there that didn’t have any effect. And that whole economic collapse thing is really turning out to be a windfall for taxpayers anyway! It would be really unfair to hold bankers accountable for any of this.

More PR like this, please. We’ll have pitchforks and torches in the streets yet.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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