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10 August 2010
Wall Street's Big Win: finance reform won't stop the high-risk gambling that wrecked the economy - and Republicans aren't the only ones to blame.
This financial reform mess has totally eroded any small amount of confidence I had in Congress.
And it's not even really that Congress is letting Wall Street off easily. Most of the initial proposals (not so much the Volcker rule, but especially the Lincoln amendment) didn't make sense in the first place. But then the reasons those measures were killed and/or watered down made even less sense.
I still remember the first time I heard the name "Bill Clinton". It was a brief radio news report in 1984 about his Democratic Leadership Coucil setting out to "make the Democratic Party more Business-Friendly" and jumped to three conclusions: (1) the guy's more crooked than your average politician, (2) he'll go far, maybe even be the next Democratic President and (3) if the Democratic Party follows him, we're all doomed. I was right on all three counts. (By comparison, the first time I ever heard of Barack Obama, in a radio news report many years later, I thought "seems like a very good guy; too bad he can't EVER be elected President"... wrong and wrong)
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