Eideard

Which bobblehead will the Tea Party nominate for president?

The Senate on Thursday rejected a Republican attempt to defang consumer protections in a sweeping Wall Street reform bill, while voting to give small banks a break on deposit insurance.

Despite procedural delays, lawmakers covered some ground on a top priority of the Obama administration that would be the biggest overhaul of the financial rulebook since the 1930s…

If approved, the Wall Street reform bill would give Democrats a major legislative victory ahead of November’s elections. Republicans have worked for months to weaken and delay the measures, along with financial industry lobbyists.

Congress is undertaking a major rewrite of the rules to try to make banks and capital markets less prone to periodic crises that have become more common since a wave of deregulation in the 1980s. The future profitability, risk capacity and growth potential of financial firms hang in the balance…

From Reagan to Gingrich, you should realize deregulation and removing oversight was a creation of the same kind of politicians trying to protect Wall Street, now.

The Senate voted on Wednesday to create a new protocol for dismantling distressed financial firms and to bar use of taxpayer funds to bail out financial institutions…

Earlier in the day, lawmakers approved an amendment that would force major banks — such as Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs — to pay more for government deposit insurance and let smaller banks pay less…

In a win for Obama, Democrats turned back a Republican proposal that would have weakened consumer protections proposed in the wider reform legislation by a vote of 38 to 61.

The bill calls for setting up a consumer protection watchdog bureau in the Federal Reserve that would regulate mortgages, credit cards, payday loans and other products.

Take a good luck at the teabaggers prancing around and hollering about accountability and cleaning house. If they’re grayheads – they voted for scumbags like Reagan and Gingrich, the crooks who started the lobbyist ball rolling. They voted for Exxon-Mobil, Enron and more foreign wars for oil.

If they say they didn’t know this was coming, that’s admitting they’re foolish as well as ignorant.

Death Panels waiting to deploy – again – on behalf of the Republican Party

President Obama traveled to New York City today, where he pointedly told members of the city’s financial industry to stop fighting reasonable industry reform.

“We will not always see eye to eye,” Mr. Obama said to members of the banking industry in his speech at New York’s Cooper Union, not far from Wall Street. “We will not always agree. But that does not mean we have to choose between two extremes.”

“We do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered by even modest protections against crisis, or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation,” he continued. “That’s a false choice…”

But he also lamented that some on Wall Street “forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is family looking to buy a house, and pay for an education, open a business, save for retirement.”

“A free market, he said, “was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it…”

The president targeted Republicans, among them Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who have suggested the legislation is actually going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.

“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate. It is not true,” he said, to applause. He said the system as it stands is what led to bailouts.

“A vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts,” he said. “That’s the truth. End of story. And nobody should be fooled in this debate.”

I hope American voters take the time to examine the facts of what is proposed instead of relying on the Party of No to tell them what to believe.

Thanks, Cinaedh, for the pic

Republican plan for hidden assets

The Democrat’s Senate financial reform bill would cut the U.S. budget deficit by $21 billion over the next 10 years, according to a cost estimate by the Congressional Budget Office obtained by Reuters.

The estimated reduction in the budget deficit over the 2011-2020 period stems largely from charging the financial industry assessments for a fund to liquidate large, troubled financial firms, the office said.

The bill authored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is designed to ensure no financial firm is too big to fail and the senate may start debating it next week.

However, the idea of creating a $50 billion liquidation fund has been criticized by banks and Republicans [quelle surprise?] and is not favored by the Obama administration…

Dodd’s bill would also create a bureau to regulate consumer financial products such as mortgages, as well as new rules to regulate derivatives and hedge funds. The bill aims to rein in banks’ risky activities and revamp financial regulation in wake of the worst economic crisis in decades.

This is the bill the Republicans said contained a bailout provision – when the truth is exactly the opposite: the fund “pays for the funeral” of failures – and insures investors.

NO, NO, NO!
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided last week to portray the Democratic version of financial regulation as a Wall Street “bailout,” it seemed like a brilliant, albeit cynical, political move.

What do the voters hate even more than Wall Street? Bailouts. What’s the perfect way to combine their antagonism for big banks with their distaste for taxpayer-funded bailouts? Accuse the Democrats of bailing out the banks. Perfect.

A good political move in theory, only it didn’t work. First, the outcry was over a “bailout” that wasn’t. Granted, there is some money in the bill — $50 billion — but it’s provided by the banks, not the taxpayers. And it’s not there to bail out banks, it’s to help the sick ones die properly without creating a panic. “Paying for the funeral” is the way Treasury sources describe it…

And get this: When the GOP leadership hatched this idea, it found more than a handful of Republicans — and not just the usual moderate suspects — who actually want to vote for financial reform. In fact, the difference between Wall Street reform and, say, health care reform, is that “there truly is a group of us who will hold our side’s feet to the fire” to get a bill, one Senate Republican told me.

So when McConnell got all his Republicans to sign a measure to force more negotiations before bringing the bill to the floor, some were with him with a strong caveat: They would not threaten to filibuster a bill they think the country needs. Period.

The traditional Big Lie tactic worked well enough in watering down chances at real healthcare reform. Republicans had the aid of spineless Democrats on that one.

But financial reform is different. Voters want it done. In most cases, the supply of government exceeds the demand for it. In fact, a slew of recent polls show that only about 20 percent of the people trust the government to do the right thing. But even so, a majority of folks actually want the government to intervene to fix Wall Street’s excesses.

In other words, the banks are so out of control that even the inept government needs to step in and do something.

Republicans just may be smart enough to trade one class of opportunism – the Party of NO, after all, appeals to their teabagger trolls – for another more traditional role. Work to water down any possible sanctions that might rank the needs of American taxpayers above Wall Street profits.