Thanks to Wikicommons.
Question: Do you remember that recent financial crisis that was going to (play scary music) DESTROY THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!?! (in case you don’t… crawl out from under your rock and check out US Democrazy’s past coverage).
Fortunately for us, politicians everywhere agreed to do everything possible to ensure that such a crisis did not happen again.
Unfortunately, these politicians cannot seem to agree on… what exactly “everything possible” means…
Like everything in Washington these days, reform of the financial and banking industry (which helped create the almighty mess we are stuck in) is in a partisan deadlock.
There was some progress made in 2009 when the House of Representatives passed a financial reform bill last December.
Since then, that bill has languished in the clutches of the US Senate (an organization about as fast as molasses up hill in January).
But HARK! (play triumphant music) all that is about to change! A Senate version of the bill may be emerging!
The Wall Street Journal reports that a potential Senate bill, among other things, would place the Federal Reserve in charge of consumer protection in the financial markets.
(You can view the consumer protection part of the plan, spearheaded by Senator Chris Dodd, here…brought to you by Mother Jones).
Reform should be bringing out cheers, right? Well, some don’t seem to think this bill contains much reform at all.
The blog Calculated Risk snidely remarks on the proposal that
wasn’t the Fed already responsible for consumer financial protection?
Don’t think Calculated Risk are the only one who picked up on this.
Heather Booth, Executive Director of the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), an alliance of organizations promoting changes in the way Wall Street us regulated, issued this statement on the Senate proposal:
The revised proposal does not provide what is needed to protect American families or the financial system as a whole: a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency
Yesterday, Paul Krugman, Noble winning economist, wrote in a similar vein that this bill
eliminates a key plank of the Obama administration’s proposals, the creation of a strong, independent agency protecting consumers.
Not only that but Mr. Krugman goes so far as to say that
it’s time to draw a line in the sand
and that no reform bill is better than
such a watered-down reform.
Now the question may be forming in your head (at least it did in ours), how could a reform bill, such as that passed by the House of Representatives, with support from the White House and many Americans become watered down?
Arianna Huffington, namesake of the Huffington Post, conjectures that the weakening of the bill was due to the banking lobby .
A couple of hundred million dollars later, and we’re left with this punch-to-the-gut of reform, from the top-line summary of Dodd’s plan: “the independent agency proposal would be dropped.”
Representative Barney Frank, a key player in the House of Representative’s reform, states the weak Senate bill is because
Procedurally, the Senate Republicans are killing this or watering it down,
We’ve taken a look at what the experts have said on this issue… perhaps it’s best we hear from those who will be most affected by this so-called reform. That would be YOU.
That’s right, we want you to go to the top right of this article, where it says “leave a comment”, click that spot and write your thoughts. Otherwise we may just have to write them for you.
