Must Read from Harold Meyerson: Hope Rises for Real Financial Reform

[flpoljunkie]

Emphasis mine.

Hope rises for real financial reform
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 21, 2010;

The Goldman Sachs scandal has done the unthinkable: It's made it possible that legislation reining in Wall Street's casino may actually be enacted.

The odds against real reform are still steep. Wall Street remains the most deep-pocketed lobby in the land. And the problem isn't just Republican opposition. "A lot of our members up here just want a bill passed," says one Democratic legislator. "They don't think that people are watching that closely. But this matters immensely to people. This is a which-side-are-you-on moment."

The clearest way for senators to demonstrate that they're not on Wall Street's side would be to support the bill that Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln plans to bring before the Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday. Going well beyond the bill that the House passed and the legislation that came out of Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd's Senate Banking Committee, Lincoln's bill aims squarely at the big banks' most highly leveraged, profitable and risky-to-the-rest-of-us business: their trade in derivatives. (The Ag committee has jurisdiction because derivatives historically were used to trade commodities.)

Time was when government regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission could limit the speculation on (and market manipulation of) the basics of life, but the commission lifted limits on oil speculation during the George W. Bush administration. The Dodd legislation would enable the CFTC to impose such limits on currently deregulated markets. The commission's ability to limit speculators from dominating markets, says Chairman Gary Gensler, has gone "from holding up a 'stop' sign to a 'yield' sign to a 'wave when you go by' sign." Lincoln's bill would restore that stop sign.

While White House political operatives now welcome a fight with the banks, it's not clear that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner feels the same way. Unable, perhaps, to envision an American economy with a Wall Street shrunken to more manageable dimensions, he has not embraced Lincoln's bill, and some senators fear he will craft a bill with Republican assistance that doesn't truly regulate derivatives. I have heard similar misgivings about Obama economic adviser Larry Summers, who as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration blocked attempts to regulate derivatives. "We could be looking at the same damn Larry Summers move 10 years later," one Democratic legislator frets. The Lincoln bill is a clear test of the Democrats' ability to learn from their mistakes -- and it will make clear which side they are on.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042005061.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[ShortnFiery]

1. I feel like Charlie Brown ...

and Lucy has just volunteered to hold the football for me to kick through the goal posts.

I have no hope for our Democratic "leaders" after the last horrific mess.

It's not worth hoping when when *corporate loving/people screwing* legislation is finally passed. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

When push comes to shove, we need NEW BLOOD in our CONGRESS.