Letter to the Editor - Why I am running against Jon Tester

Money is the lifeblood of our economy, but our financial system is a train-wreck in slow motion.

After the banking system collapsed in 2008, only ruinous borrowing has even allowed us to pretend that our economy is recovering. If you borrow credit card money, has your income gone up? No. If you subtract all the borrowing, our economy has actually been shrinking. We face an economic catastrophe when the bill comes due. Our banking system has been giving us a false recovery and transferring wealth from the poor to the rich in the process. The people of Montana are drowning in debt. I am running because we must solve the debt problem before the next financial crisis hits, or we are all in big trouble.

To fix our economy, we must stop the banking system from sucking our economy dry. The banking system truly is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

We won’t get help from Jon Tester. Goldman Sachs is Jon Tester’s third largest campaign contributor, and 10 of his top 20 contributors are financial institutions whose practices I plan on reforming from top to bottom. It doesn’t help matters that Jon Tester sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which is supposed to police the big banks.

Congress’ feeble attempt at reforming the financial system, the Dodd-Frank bill, only pretended to fix things. Dodd-Frank took the wind out of the sails of all the folks who worked so hard to bring change to Wall Street. Passing a pretend bill was worse than passing no bill at all.

I have a plan to reform the banking system, and I will get the job done in short order. I will bring a new financial system and a new framework to help everyone, including those without college educations, start a business and get the money they need without borrowing. We should not be forced to accept loans from banks to start businesses.

We need a brand new social safety net to ensure that no one falls through the cracks. Let’s not kid ourselves — the kind of social safety net we want is generous and expensive. We have to solve finance so that we can help people help each other.

Sarah Dean

Candidate for US Senate