Wall Street’s Big Win

[Arraya]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/188551

Cue the credits: the era of financial thuggery is officially over. Three hellish years of panic, all done and gone – the mass bankruptcies, midnight bailouts, shotgun mergers of dying megabanks, high-stakes SEC investigations, all capped by a legislative orgy in which industry lobbyists hurled more than $600 million at Congress. It all supposedly came to an end one Wednesday morning a few weeks back, when President Obama, flanked by hundreds of party flacks and congressional bigwigs, stepped up to the lectern at an extravagant ceremony to sign into law his sweeping new bill to clean up Wall Street.

Obama’s speech introducing the massive law brimmed with celebratory finality. He threw around lofty phrases like “never again” and “no more.” He proclaimed the end of unfair credit-card-rate hikes and issued a fatwa on abusive mortgage practices and the shady loans that helped fuel the debt bubble. The message was clear: The sheriff was padlocking the Wall Street casino, and the government was taking decisive steps to unfuck our hopelessly broken economy.

But is the nightmare really over, or is this just another Inception-style trick ending? It’s hard to figure, given all the absurd rhetoric emanating from the leadership of both parties. Obama and the Democrats boasted that the bill is the “toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression” – a claim that would maybe be more impressive if Congress had passed any financial reforms since the Great Depression, or at least any that didn’t specifically involve radically undoing the Depression-era laws.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were predictably hysterical. They described the new law – officially known as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – as something not far from a full-blown Marxist seizure of the means of production. House Minority Leader John Boehner shrieked that it was like “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon,” apparently forgetting that the ant crisis in question wiped out about 40 percent of the world’s wealth in a little over a year, making its smallness highly debatable.

But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.

[SK in CV]

I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.

[SK in CV]

I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.

[SK in CV]

I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.

[SK in CV]

I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.

[SK in CV]

I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.

[UCGal]

[quote=SK in CV]I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.[/quote]

I’ll take it one further than this. The Dems pretended to negotiate to save face when they caved to their own bankster interests. Both parties are bought and paid for by Wall Street. It was never going to have teeth.

[UCGal]

[quote=SK in CV]I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.[/quote]

I’ll take it one further than this. The Dems pretended to negotiate to save face when they caved to their own bankster interests. Both parties are bought and paid for by Wall Street. It was never going to have teeth.

[UCGal]

[quote=SK in CV]I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.[/quote]

I’ll take it one further than this. The Dems pretended to negotiate to save face when they caved to their own bankster interests. Both parties are bought and paid for by Wall Street. It was never going to have teeth.

[UCGal]

[quote=SK in CV]I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.[/quote]

I’ll take it one further than this. The Dems pretended to negotiate to save face when they caved to their own bankster interests. Both parties are bought and paid for by Wall Street. It was never going to have teeth.

[UCGal]

[quote=SK in CV]I agree with your conclusion.

Politically, the Dems spent a year negotiating with an opposition that wouldn’t have supported this bill no matter what it said, but now can point at it and say they did something, while really doing almost nothing, And the Republicans have something to assail. As a practical matter, it’s almost a yawner. But political fuel all around.[/quote]

I’ll take it one further than this. The Dems pretended to negotiate to save face when they caved to their own bankster interests. Both parties are bought and paid for by Wall Street. It was never going to have teeth.

[SD Realtor]

I agree UC, It is laughable that people actually believe one party is less controlled and lobbied by Wall St then the other. They are both so controlled it is a joke. Look at the guys that authored the legislation. They were the ones who always told us how strong the GSEs were.

[SD Realtor]

I agree UC, It is laughable that people actually believe one party is less controlled and lobbied by Wall St then the other. They are both so controlled it is a joke. Look at the guys that authored the legislation. They were the ones who always told us how strong the GSEs were.

[SD Realtor]

I agree UC, It is laughable that people actually believe one party is less controlled and lobbied by Wall St then the other. They are both so controlled it is a joke. Look at the guys that authored the legislation. They were the ones who always told us how strong the GSEs were.

[SD Realtor]

I agree UC, It is laughable that people actually believe one party is less controlled and lobbied by Wall St then the other. They are both so controlled it is a joke. Look at the guys that authored the legislation. They were the ones who always told us how strong the GSEs were.

[Author]

Posts