Congressional Republicans declared war on President Barack Obama‘s financial overhaul as soon as it it became law last year and they are using every tool at their disposal to weaken the reforms and restore the ability of financial institutions to screw their customers.
And they could be winning the war — bit by bit — over a White House distracted by multiple wars and battles over the debt ceiling.
Writes Alan Fram of The Associated Press:
Wary of trying to repeal the entire statute and being portrayed as Wall Street’s protectors — banks rank among the country’s least popular institutions — GOP lawmakers are trying to nibble away at the behemoth measure. It’s a crusade they’ve waged all year, despite lacking the White House and Senate control they need to prevail.
Days ago, one Republican-run House committee approved bills diluting parts of the law requiring reports on corporate salaries and exempting some investment advisers from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another House panel voted to slice $200 million from Obama’s $1.4 billion budget request for the SEC, which has a major enforcement role.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are continuing a procedural blockade that has helped prevent Obama from putting Elizabeth Warren or anyone else in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens its doors in two weeks.
Republicans claim the law hurts “the formation of capital, the cost of capital and access to capital.” Democrats, thinking they still have the votes to stop the GOP efforts, say the whole thing is just a political ploy to raise campaign funds from the rich financial sector.
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10 thoughts on “GOP undermines financial reform”
Financial reform? All they do is spend, have almost no accountability, buy votes via questionable spending, a CBO that varies its “projections” almost daily, a bottomless pit of “revenue” thanks to questionable tax policies, a relationship with financial interests that put most of use behind the proverbial eight ball, a monetary policy that I have no understanding of and The Fed doesn’t seem much better and just on and on and on.
I just wonder if any common sense exists in D.C.? If I ran my own personal finances like this I’d be in the begging bail-out line.
How about just making illegal again every thing that used to be? What the banksters pulled off was begun under Clinton and a Republican Congress and took nearly a decade to unfold. Very simple…make it illegal, not make new toothless laws that will be selectively enforced – if at all, and offer even more loopholes under the guise of regulating the “bad” guys..
Moreover, since our government is so often agreeable to giving retroactive immunity to certain pals when writing new laws, how about this time we give retroactive prosecutory powers?
Solid thoughts griff concerning our sorry state of affairs. Welcome back to CHB too. : )
Carl Nemo **==
And, income taxes aside, just exactly why would the salary of anyone be something the govt should be interested in?
Because it sounds real good to the medicated masses.
None Almandine unless it’s discovered that executive compensation as well as their corporate bottomline is being bolstered by outright fraudulent business practices. Such practices were discovered concerning AIG and banking within both domestic and foreign houses that were bundling mortgages to create a saleabe ‘product’, then once sold doing the same thing over and over again without adequate insurance reserves on the part of AIG and any other insurers engaged in the same mortgage securities scam. In other words they were running a ‘boiler room’ op relative to a financial instrument; I.E., home mortgages that in times past were a vanilla safe, relatively boring, ‘go to sleep’ proposition.
The Republicans want a continuation of the ‘blue sky’ , deregulated to unregulated pirate capitalism that emerged upon the American financial scene with the Reagan/ H.W. Bush era and beyond. The rest is history albeit a sorry one thirty years later.
Carl Nemo **==
So put the crooks in jail, Carl… the rest is merely totalitarian wishful thinking.
Agreed Almandine, but the root cause is ‘compromised’ federal level legislators that continually pass laws that enable this quasi to outright criminal activity that’s incrementally destroyed this nation during the past thirty years.
The repeal of the Glass Steagal Act being replaced by “The Financial Modernizaton Services Act of 1999” aka as Gramm-Leach Bliley along with “The Commodites Futures Modernization Act of 2000” are representative of two major sea changing laws that are directly linked to facilitation of high crimes on Wall Street and the large center banking sector during the past decade. Many of the restrictions and oversight that originally existed in terms of regulating commodities trading was cast aside along with the creation of ICE (International Commodities Exchange); I.E., a much wilder an woolier place to speculate within the realm of commodities trading, many of them dear to everyday life and linked directly to the cost of living. These acts along with an environment of easy money for the banks courtesy of the Federal Reserve~U.S. Treasury Axis of financial evil and we find ourselves where were at today; I.E., a stones throw away from the USS America having a terminal encounter with an ‘iceberg’ of unpayable debt directly linked to the housing market debacle. The housing market crash along with the cost of pitching huge sums down offshore ratholes via waging zero sum wars has in effect almost finished off this nation.
Carl Nemo **==
p.s. Both of these aforementioned acts were passed on Clinton’s watch seemingly to facilitate eight years of pirating on the behalf of the Bushistas, a family with a long history of war-profiteering and freebooting at taxpayer expense… / : |
As far as Republicans are concerned…fiscal conservatives they are not!
I’m providing a link that exposes them for what they are. It shows Obama as having increased the public debt by 9%, but during the tenure of Reagan/H.W. Bush (two terms), H.W. Bush/Quayle (single term) and two terms of G.W. Bush/Cheney the public debt was increased a whopping 60% plus. When Reagan took office the public debt was about 880 billion dollars. Thirty years later we’re saddled with 14.7 trillion debt. The greater bulk of this debt is a function of money conveniently poured down MIC sponsored ratholes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
One can link these modern post WWII, engineered, wars without achieving victory to the Republicans. These guys are nothing but running dogs for the MIC with the Bush clan being a premier example of transgenerational war profiteers looting the U.S. Treasury. Believe it…!
My commentary is not a free pass for President Obama. The way he’s conducting his tenure as president indicates he and his administration have contracted a bad case of the ‘republican spendthrift disease’ . / : |
Carl Nemo **==
It was my intention to post this commentary to the “Debt-limit Chicken” article rather than this one.
My apologies.
I had a ‘senior moment’… : (
Carl Nemo **==
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