Financial reform has just passed both houses, but now it goes into reconciliation. This is worse than the health care bill, but it’s similar. Neither one is going to solve the problem, but the consequences for not solving the financial time bomb are worse than for not dealing adequately with health care. This bill was supposed to do two things, at a minimum:
- Make sure this doesn’t happen again.
- Restore Glass-Steagall, the bill repealed in 1998 by both parties and signed by Bill Clinton. Phil Graham and his wife Wendy Graham are the principal authors of the decades long assault on the Depression-era bill. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall, perhaps more than anything else, caused this latest crash.
There are a number of good things in the bill, but if you don’t do those two things above, it didn’t solve the problem. Worse, just as with health care, Obama will now say we dealt with it and let’s move on and not go back to that again.
The bill is in conference right now. The Republicans want the anti-derivatives language in the bill to be stripped. Barack Obama, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke all support the Republicans in this. Unbelievable.
If this makes anything clear, it’s that the Tea Partiers’ accusations of Obama being a socialist carry no weight at all. No socialist or even social democrat work his salt would ever do something like that. It’s also clear that Obama is still backing his bankster buddies who helped put him in office with those record campaign contributions from Wall Street.
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Robert Reich’s latest posts on the subject, I believe, agree with yours. Check his blog.
Also http://www.attempter.wordpress.com. Today Russ
takes on corporate lackey Obama on the oil spill.
This blogger seems to be consistently in-depth in his analyses.