Is Congress Likely To Save Us From Their Wall Street Campaign Donors?

Last Thursday two dozen corporate Democrats joined virtually all the Republicans to defeat Sherrod Brown's legislation that sought to impose leverage and liability limits on bank holding companies and financial companies-- the "too bill to fail" amendment. Wall Street had all their well-paid little shills out slow dancing for them-- from John McCain (R-Wall Street- $33,474,029), John Kerry (D-Wall Street- $18,112,577), Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street- $15,918,336) and Joe Lieberman (I-Wall Street- $10,084,996) to less expensive whores like Miss McConnell (R-Wall Street- $5,247,103), Lamar Alexander (R-Wall Street- $4,940,775), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Wall Street- $4,694,038) and greasy, broken down, two-bit hooker Richard Burr (R-Wall Street- $2,988,952). A catastrophe that we will pay dearly for in the future, while these shills get richer and richer. My daily quote from Thom Hartmann's Threshold:

[M]ost of the commentators on radio and TV, and the most famous columnists in our newspapers, are either millionaires or, like the NY Times' Thomas Friedman or TV gadfly commentator Mort Zuckerman, billionaires.

The same is true of members of the United States Senate, who are almost all at least multimillionaires... And our TV stars, movie stars, and even many of the people who program and produce our daily entertainment and infotainment fare are usually among the wealthy to the very wealthy in America.

So American workers are treated daily to a steady diet of the concerns of the very wealthy, with almost never a mention of the concerns of average workers.

Should we just throw our hands up, give up, hang our heads and accept our fate? Nah... there's plenty more to do; and I'm not even talking about forming progressive militias and going down fighting. Yesterday Zach Carter did a piece for HuffPo about what there is to still be salvaged from Wall Street reform. He's got 5 items he's excited about-- one of which, Bernie Sanders' Audit the Fed Amendment passed unanimously after his post went up. Wingnuts were going bonkers because David Vitter's more destructive amendment failed by a wide margin, 11 Republicans voting against it-- including GOP leaders like McConnell, Kyl, and Corker, not to mention a newly freed-up Robert Bennett (R-UT). Bennett no longer has to dance with the proto-fascists he's been trying, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to please all year. He just gave up his hard-earned ProgressivePunch zero for 2009-2010!

Proving they are a petulant bunch, the Senate Rep-ublicans today threw up their collective middle finger at conservative activists.

David Vitter’s amendment to the Financial Deform package would have required an actual audit of the Federal Reserve. The amendment was heavily lobbied for by conservative activists across the country.

in fact, so popular was Vitter’s amendment that even Senator Bob Benentt declared on Saturday in Utah that he too would support auditing the Federal Reserve.

Vitter’s amendment died. Bob Bennett voted against it. Senate Republican Leader and Bennett best friend forever Mitch McConnell also voted against it. Jon Kyl of Arizona did too.

There is your Senate Republican leadership. As petulant as ever.

Let's hope they're not so petulant that they'll block the other items we need to pass to make this Wall Street "reform" effort worthwhile. Back to Zach Carter, he's pumping for a bill that would force Wall Street predators who deal derivatives-- essentially their gambling operations-- to spin off those operations into separate companies. (Judd Gregg is leading the charge to kill this.) Next in importance is Jeff Merkley's amendment to institute the Volcker Rule, which "would ban banks who receive Federal Reserve loans from conducting risky securities trades for their own accounts. Gambling with taxpayer money doesn't help the economy in any way, it just produces short-term profits for banks while subjecting our tax dollars to long-term bailout risk."

Then there's the independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), already watered down to near meaninglessness. The good news here is that Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) "has an excellent amendment that would restore Obama's original CFPA language, and provide real protection for consumers." And the final piece of this puzzle is capping leverage. Carter explains it like this:

Banks amplify their bets by borrowing loads of money, a phenomenon called leverage. As the crisis unfolded in 2008, some banks found themselves with $40 or even $60 in borrowed money for every $1 of their own cash. That meant big profits while markets were moving up, but epic losses when markets started falling. The Senate must impose a hard cap on leverage to complement the 12-to-1 cap included in the Wall Street reform bill that cleared the House last year. The Brown-Kaufman amendment would have limited bank borrowing to $16.67 for every $1 of their own money. Brown-Kaufman also would have broken up the six largest U.S. banks, and was rejected in the Senate last week. The Senate should vote on the leverage cap as a stand-alone amendment.