Republic Gone Bananas

It wasn’t the sight of members of Congress fleeing the Capitol building last week after the debt ceiling debacle that startled me. It was the policeman armed with an M16 combat rifle outside the House of Representatives, guarding them.

 

The New York Times piece never mentioned the cop. Nor did the caption on the photo by Stephen Crowley. Only one of the hundreds of people who commented on the story online mentioned the unknown officer.

But that was the real story to me.

Yes, the debt ceiling got raised – that was never seriously in doubt, because the financial consequences of default would have been devastating even for the Tea Partiers…. especially for the Tea Partiers. Slightly more interesting was the question of whether the president and the Dems would negotiate their way out of the paper bag the Tea Party people had put them in. (Nope.)

It was the heavily armed Capitol policeman that summarized for me all that has happened to this country over the last decade as we slid into a stinking pool of fear, anger and greed so at odds with our heroic journey. To see that kind of weaponry at the greatest living monument to democracy seemed undeniably to question it.

Maybe some members of Congress have concluded that they need more guns to ward off a nut job like the one who opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and passers-by in Tuscon last January. But a machine gun on the steps of the Capitol building seems like way more firepower than necessary to stop a lone assassin.

It reminded me of the images we have come to expect from banana republics where the corrupt leaders treat themselves like royalty, insulated from the struggling populace by security men wielding polished pistols or machine guns.

When I lived and worked in Washington in the Seventies, the Kennedy and King assassinations were only a few years old and the wounds were still raw.

 

 

 

Shockingly, President Reagan was shot at the Hilton up on Connecticut Avenue, just after taking office in 1981. But no one – least of all Reagan, who deeply understood the power of imagery and symbolism – would have permitted the conduct of lunatics to steal our freedom and trap us in a mental state of siege.

Or is it simply that the moment has come when the rulers must protect themselves from the ruled?

Congress / Harvey Column - 08/08/2011

Debt Wish

The most perplexing question that arises out of the S&P downgrade of the U.S. debt is why we’re still worrying about what they think, after all the credit rating agencies’ previous political shenanigans.

The credit rating agencies claim they are entitled to their opinions under the First Amendment, even if they are bought and paid for by Wall Street.

But anything that the S&P offers should be taken with a huge grain of salt. As James Kwak pointed out on Baseline Scenario, the S&P’s latest insights into our financial/economic/political mess weren’t exactly earth-shattering. Apparently S&P wanted us to know that they recognized we’re suffering from political gridlock in Washington.

Thank you, S&P.

If the rating agency really wanted to offer a public service, it might have pointed out that the big banks’ bundled mortgages were nothing but trash before the economy collapsed.

But of course, as we know should all know by now, S&P and the other credit rating agencies are no more interested in peddling public service any more than they are interested in offering accurate information or thorough analysis.

S&P and the others are interested in serving the interests of Wall Street, and right now Wall Street is interested in forcing its austerity agenda on the rest of us. S&P is just trying to do its small part to batter any resistance we might offer.

Like the too big to fail banks, S&P has perfected the kind of lack of shame which allows it to dispense its financial opinions with a straight face, demanding to be taken seriously even though it missed the fraud, sloppiness and greed that led up the financial collapse.

Come to think of it, there is a more perplexing question about S&P: how come a swarm of federal investigators hasn’t taken the agency down, following up on the earlier Senate investigation?

Jane Hamsher has an interesting take on that question at firedoglake, posing the theory that S&P’s thrashing of the U.S. credit rating is an effort to pay back Republicans for keeping the authorities off S&P’s back. In the bigger picture, S&P is just trying to play its part in efforts by leaders of both parties to slash Social Security and other programs that benefit the middle class under the guise of balancing the budget.

But the S&P tipped its political hand by favoring cuts to social programs over tax loophole-closing, revenue-raising, or real defense cuts. When Wall Street and its cronies need help, the credit rating agencies will always do their part.

 

 

 

Around the Web / Congress / Martin Column - 08/07/2011

Bailout Redux

It all feels eerily similar to the atmosphere leading up to the 2008 bailout with warnings of looming government collapse and Wall Street and its cronies threatening doom.

Instead of a no-questions asked payoff of bankers, this time it’s the looting of Social Security and Medicaid, and cuts to other programs that benefit the aged, sick, vulnerable, in other words, society’s least politically potent, that’s at stake.

There’s another familiar aspect of the scenario: under the terms of the emergency, because the cuts are opposed by a majority of the people in the country, democracy has to be stifled, open argument limited. It’s more debacle than debate.

Anybody in Washington who isn’t for these cuts isn’t considered serious.

While the media portrays the debt ceiling standoff as a partisan nightmare, the quest for budget cuts is more of cooperative bipartisan effort with each faction playing its part.

The Tea Party raises holy hell about funding the government at all, so President Obama and the Democrat’s proposed draconian cuts to social programs and infrastructure look like the least bad alternative.

But make no mistake: the Democrats’ drastic cutbacks don’t represent compromise. They represent the goals of a financial and corporate elite that has been fighting for these goals relentlessly and methodically for years.

And they’re using this trumped up debt ceiling crisis as their latest gambit to achieve them.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California’s description of the first hastily put together bailout plan, could easily apply to our current predicament.

It wasn’t legislation, Sherman said at the time, it was a ransom note.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Martin Column - 07/30/2011

While Country Suffers, Politicians Rake it in

While our politicians tell us the country is broke, they themselves are doing fine.

In the midst of debt ceiling hysteria, President Obama and the Democrats bragged they’d raised an eye-popping $86 million so far for his presidential campaign.

The various Republican candidates who have reported their cash have raised about $35 million so far, but it’s early yet.

Meanwhile the Republicans oppose any revenue-raising or loophole-closing that would be favored by a majority of Americans. Republicans continue to insist that increased taxes on the wealthiest would be job-killers, even though there’s no evidence to support their position.

For his part, President Obama, in an effort to appease Republicans, offered up a variety of cuts to Social Security and Medicaid that would be opposed by a majority of Americans.

Cutting services for those that need it most is what Obama calls “shared sacrifice,” though no one who could actually afford it is actually being asked to make any sacrifices.

As to the major challenges facing the nonrich – joblessness and foreclosure – those are beyong the skill and imagination of our leaders to grapple with.

The Republican strategy seems to be standing pat in the belief that the president will eventually cave in.

The president’s strategy appears to be to tie the aged, poor and vulnerable to the train tracks and then blame the Republicans when the train runs them over.

President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, was proud that most of the $86 million was coming from small donors. I don’t doubt that a big chunk of that money comes from people who are justifiably scared stiff of turning the country back over to the Republicans, who never complained about the deficits when the previous occupant of the White House when he was running them up.

I understand the big donors. They get access and influence. But do the small donors have any influence? Do these small donors really believe that having the aged and infirm give up a chunk of their security amounts to sharing sacrifice? Can they make their voices heard along with their $5 donations? Or do they just have to go along with the president and the Democrats and whatever deal they make?

On Saturday morning we got news that the president would not appoint the stalwart consumer advocate to head the agency she dreamed up to protect financial consumers, and which she has been working to set up.

I wonder whose interests the president was thinking about when he made that decision – his Wall Street and corporate donors or those small donors his campaign manager was bragging about?

 

 

 

 

 

Congress / Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 07/16/2011

Get Off Corporate Crack

I spent last week at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis, a gathering of activists who embrace the progressive label in one way or another.

The news media was there in force, churning out stories about how these progressives are dissatisfied with President Obama’s performance. That’s especially true in his handling of the economy, where unemployment is still too high, the foreclosure crisis is still rampant, the financial sector still hasn’t been adequately reformed after its excesses and Wall Street lobbyists have tangled up in knots even the meager attempts to regulate bankers.

One refrain summed up the frustration with the president’s performance on the economy: “No one has gone to jail.”

But beyond the venting that the media focused on was another, potentially bigger story that has the possibility of leapfrogging the divide between left and right.

That was the emerging demand for a mass movement to rid our politics of the corporate funding that has been as devastating as crack cocaine was in the streets.

Our politicians are hooked on corporate crack, and they will do anything and say anything to get it. They will break any promise, without caring how foolish and hypocritical they look.

This corporate money undermines both parties: Democrats promise to protect workers and consumers but end up promoting ineffective half-measures, while Republicans express support for the free market but actually support the unfettered power of a corporate oligarchy.

I had the opportunity to point out a recent example of how this corporate crack makes fools out of politicians and even the president of the United States during a Netroots session with Jeremy Bird, national strategy adviser to the Obama campaign.

I recounted how one day after reading about a secret meeting between Obama and his Wall Street donors at the White House, I received an email from Obama asking for five bucks, promising a different kind of fundraising campaign that didn’t rely on fat cats.

“Which is it?” I asked Bird. You can read Roll Call’s account here.

Bird responded that Obama’s “multi-faceted” fundraising wouldn’t take money from political campaign committees or lobbyists,  but Wall Street contributions are welcome.

Does the president really see a distinction, or is he just hoping no one is paying attention?

If the politicians are counting on people feeling too cynical and helpless to take action, that may be changing, sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens’ United, which said that corporate campaign contributions are a form of free speech so they cannot be restricted.

During another session, John Nichols, the Nation’s crusading Washington correspondent issued a fiery call for a nationwide movement to promote a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens’ United.

He compared the potential impact of such a movement to the impact of  the movement for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Though the “right to life” movement hasn’t achieved success. Nichols said, it has changed the nature of the debate.
Back on the subject of overturning Citizens’ United, Nichols said, “I can live without the actual constitutional amendment. But I can’t live without the movement.”

We need a movement that labels corporate crack exactly what it is.  It’s not speech. It’s bribery.

 

Action / Around the Web / Congress / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 06/22/2011

Fill In the Blanks

A New Yorker story published online this morning describes yet another example of a financial debacle abetted by government corruption. As I read the first paragraph, it struck me that the basic plot is always the same – all you need to do is fill in the blanks:

In the spring of _______, as the reelection campaign of ______ was gathering momentum, a group of prominent _____ businessmen met for breakfast at the ________ to see the candidate. Among them was _____, the chief executive officer of _____, a fast and freewheeling financial institution that had brought together some of the most colorful and politically well-connected _____ in the country….

Last week’s final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission explains in intricate detail why and how the U.S. economy imploded in 2008, but isolates no single, primary cause of the crisis. The Commission says that the crisis was “avoidable” and notes that “widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets,” but this is just one Commission conclusion of many. As Joe Nocera points out, the report never gets to the bottom line.

Our report, “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America,” published in March 2009, got right to the bottom line in its title. We didn't need subpoena power or a large staff to figure out what happened, just the willingness to say what everybody in the Wall Street/Washington axis of power already knew. Between 1998 and 2008, Wall Street invested $5 billion in Washington, a combination of money for lobbying and campaign contributions that won deregulation and other policy decisions that enabled the financial industry to do as it pleased. The ensuing orgy of unbridled speculation, based on "derivatives" and other financial schemes that even the CEOs themselves didn't understand, came to a halt when the housing bubble burst and Wall Street couldn't even figure out the value of the investments it held. The financial industry panicked, threatened to shut down the system, and got the government to undertake the mother of all bailouts - trillions of dollars in loans, tax breaks and other goodies.

In short: the power of money poisoned our policies and our politics, with dire consequences for all of us who don't enjoy the special favors that only vast quantities of money can buy.

The Commission, created and appointed by Congress and composed of members of the political elite, could not possibly issue that indictment. Which is why the discussion of the bailout – the most obvious example of the special status of the privileged in our country – is a measly five pages out of 410.

The American public deserves better. In other man-made national disasters, like the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle 25 years ago, experts in the field – astrophysicists, geologists, academics – were asked to undertake an independent investigation. Their reports secured the confidence of the public, and led to remedial actions. NASA was not allowed to investigate itself, and lo and behold, it turned out that the culture at NASA was ultimately responsible for a design defect in the rocket.

Because it retreats from the fundamental truths, the Commission's report does nothing to help us come to grips with the root cause of the financial crisis: the corruption of our democracy by special interest money.  I know from more than thirty years of fighting for consumer rights – particularly in the insurance marketplace – that industry lobbyists and unlimited money to politicians almost inevitably kill  legislation that would help average people. Even the feeble, loophole-ridden campaign laws that limited how much big corporations could spend in elections are in jeopardy, thanks to the United States Supreme Court’s decision last year in the Citizens United case, which decreed that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as human beings. Here in California, the voters have the ability to go around a paralyzed legislature and put matters on the ballot for a direct vote of the people, but even this populist process is increasingly abused by special interests that want to block consumers from having their day in court, or by a single company like Mercury Insurance, who thought it could fool the voters into permitting auto insurance overcharging.

Naming a thing for what it is aids understanding, which leads to action and ultimately recovery. Absent the cleansing force of honesty, we remain rooted in fear for our kids, for America’s future. Indeed, there is something deeply foreboding about the country’s degraded democracy and disabled economy. Some of the old clichés are becoming a sickening reality. We used to idly wonder, are we Rome, a corrupt empire in the process of collapse? A thoughtful, almost poetic book by that name, written by Cullen Murphy, suggests we are.

The term “third world” was once a sneer, connoting abject poverty, corruption, gross disparities between rich and poor, the absence of government services, a state controlled by a cabal of self-perpetuating leaders. Now consider the statistics on post-collapse America, which Arianna Huffington marshals in her latest book, "Third World America."

This would be a good point to fill in the blanks in the piece I excerpted above from the New Yorker story. The missing words are: 2009, President Hamid Karzai, Afghan, presidential palace, Khalil Ferozi, Kabul Bank, Afghans. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that fraud and mismanagement at the largest bank in Afghanistan has resulted in $900 million in losses, potentially triggering a financial debacle. Kabul Bank is “too big to fail,” according to Western diplomats quoted by the Times. It's the same story everywhere, and thus it would hardly come as a surprise if U.S. taxpayers ended up funding the bailout of Kabul Bank.

Congress / Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Harvey Column / Too Big To Fail - 01/31/2011

Night on Fantasy Island

As a snapshot of the wildly dysfunctional state of our political union, last night’s festivities were a smashing success. All sides were serving up plenty of mom, apple pie and platitudes while ignoring what’s actually left on plates of millions of Americans –nothing.

I did find at least something to agree with in what each of the speakers said. Who can quarrel with President Obama when he calls on us to “win the future?” And I want my government as lean and mean as Paul Ryan and the Republicans do, without any wasteful subsidies that boost corporate tycoons and their overseas expansion rather than creating decent-paying jobs here at home.

It’s true that the tea party’s spokeswoman, Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota, looked like aliens had captured her brain and were speaking through her. Maybe we would have been better off if the aliens had captured Obama and Ryan too. At least Bachman briefly took note of the high unemployment rate before she went off to into her own rhetorical fantasyland.

That’s more than you can say for President Obama, who was pitching us his hallucination that his new pals from the Chamber of Commerce are going to beat their corporate profits into ploughshares in partnership with government, in an effort to foster new technologies and growth that we all share. Forgive me if I can’t get too worked up about this. Didn’t we try this government-corporate partnership recently? Wasn’t that what the bailout was?

Back here on Planet Earth, that didn’t work out so well for a lot of us, though it does seem to have worked well for the president’s friends at General Electric and JPMorgan Chase.

Both Ryan and Bachman aren’t interested in any partnerships; they want to dismantle government altogether so that GE, JPMorgan and the rest of the corporatariat can run the show without any interference at all. The only difference is that Bachman would like to do it faster, with less nice talk, than Ryan.

Neither the president, Ryan, or Bachman could focus on reality long enough to mention the long, steep decline of the middle class or the on-going foreclosure crisis, or offer any specific ideas on addressing those very real issues.

Back here on Planet Earth, we’re going to have to harness all of our ingenuity, strength and diversity just to wrestle our political system back from these leaders and their corporate backers before they plunder what’s left of it.

Congress / Financial Crisis / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 01/26/2011

Rearranging the Deck Chairs Tonight

U.S. Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, thinks Republican and Democratic members of Congress should sit with each other, rather than separately by party, when President Obama makes his State of the Union speech tonight in the Capitol. In a letter to the leadership of the House and the Senate that has gotten a lot of attention in D.C., Udall said that “partisan seating arrangements at State of the Union addresses serve to symbolize division instead of the common challenges we face in securing a strong future for the United States…. The choreographed standing and clapping of one side of the room – while the other side sits – is unbecoming of a serious institution.  And the message that it sends is that even on a night when the President is addressing the entire nation, we in Congress cannot sit as one, but must be divided as two.”

Udall is right about the symbolism of the tradition, which dates back two centuries, but his proposal is just more symbolism.

This isn’t one of those dinner parties where the hosts break up the married couples to inspire more lively conversation. Sitting next to each other isn’t going to stop the Democrats from applauding, or the Republicans from sitting on their hands or worse, like when a congressman from South Carolina screamed “you lie” during a health care speech by Obama to a joint session of Congress in 2009, or when at last year's State of the Union, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito visibly disagreed when the President criticized one of the Roberts court’s more extreme examples of judicial activism. With differences so deep, putting congresspeople within reach of each other may not be a good idea at all.

So what exactly is the attraction of Udall’s proposal? As in every mass tragedy in recent years – from JFK’s assassination to 9/11 to the carnage in Arizona – there is a brief period in which people want to reach out, beyond politics, for reassurance that we are all, or at least most of us, still human beings. We’re still within that gauzy penumbra. Speaking in Tucson, Professor Obama got high marks from the opinionators and the public for pointing out that incivility cannot explain insanity – and thus smothering the debate over the name-calling and extreme partisan politics of our era. But is that really the problem in America today?

True, the majority of Americans probably are uncomfortable with the current decibel level. We remember wistfully an America when things were better all around – or perhaps merely seemed so. But there is, without any question, plenty of reason to be angry right now. Not since the Depression have so many people suffered while so few prosper. Our American spirit has been shaken, maybe shattered. We have been betrayed by those we entrusted to protect us.

I don’t agree with many of the loudest, angriest people, but I don’t blame them for being loud or angry.

Sometimes that’s the only way you get things done.

Addressing another exercise in symbolism – a new non-profit political organization called “No Labels” dedicated to “bipartisanship” – New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently made the point: “The notion that civility and nominal bipartisanship would accomplish any of the heavy lifting required to rebuild America is childish magical thinking, and, worse, a mindless distraction from the real work before the nation.”

When you look at what has happened to this country, the dire conditions at home and the dangers we face abroad, and what we have to do to make sure our kids have some measure of the security and prosperity we enjoyed, talking about where members of Congress sit is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Congress / Harvey Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 01/25/2011

Death by a Thousand "Buts"

After two years in office, President Obama has decided it's time to fix one of the colossal mistakes of his predecessor: too much federal regulation.

I don't remember George W. Bush as a consumer advocate who, in his zeal to regulate corporations, got carried away. But last week President Obama announced a new priority for his administration. Federal regulations “sometimes have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs,” the President explained, implying that it was in fact the government that crippled our economy, just like pro-corporate conservatives have been saying.

Faced with this threat to our national security, there was only one thing to do, and Obama stepped up. He commanded the entire federal government to review every regulation on the books and get rid of “outdated” rules and “unnecessary paperwork.” In a rousing call to arms, the President concluded: “This is the lesson of our history: Our economy is not a zero-sum game. Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary.”

Obama didn’t invent the cost/benefit approach to regulation. That was concocted by big business-funded think tanks and adopted by President Ronald Reagan, who issued Executive Order 12291 immediately after taking office in 1981. Its preface is eerily similar to Obama’s, proposing “to reduce the burdens of existing and future regulations, increase accountability for regulatory actions, provide for presidential oversight of the regulatory process, minimize duplication and conflict of regulations…”

Reagan demanded that any regulation that imposed costs on businesses that exceeded its "benefits" be eliminated. The problem is that cost/benefit analysis doesn’t always take into account certain intangible considerations or values that are difficult to quantify in dollars, such as the benefits of unpolluted water or the worth of a human being. In an infamous internal memo (PDF) uncovered in litigation over the now extinct Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, company executives compared the cost of fixing the vehicles ($137 million) versus what it would have to pay for expected deaths and injuries ($49.5 million) and decided that the cost of repairing each car - $11 dollars – exceeded the benefits.

Government is supposed to protect us against such reasoning, not use it as a guiding principle.

I was working at Public Citizen Congress Watch in Washington, D.C. at the time, and Reagan’s disdain for government regulation  became the centerpiece of his Administration agenda. James Watt, Reagan’s controversial appointee to the Interior Department, sacked the agency, turning it into a mouthpiece for oil, mining and other industries supposedly regulated by the agency. The Reagan Administration’s deregulation of savings banks led to reckless investments, fraud and corruption, necessitating a bailout – sound familiar? – that ultimately cost taxpayers about $124 billion.

Is history repeating itself? In a nod to those who supported him as a candidate because of his forceful speeches against special interests and corporate abuses, President Obama was careful to acknowledge the importance of “child labor laws,” “the Clean Air Act” and federal rules against “hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies.” In a nod to the elephant in a pink dress sitting on the divan in our living rooms, the President noted that “a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.” “Where necessary, we won't shy away from addressing obvious gaps” in federal rules, Obama insisted.

It's painfully obvious that the President hoped his foray into Reagan-style anti-regulation rhetoric would curry favor with Wall Street, its wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their toadies in Congress. They’ve been very, very mad at the President ever since he had the temerity to sign a toothless financial reform bill that left the financial industry free to revert to its pre-bailout speculative ways, not to mention the hopelessly compromised health care law that requires every American to buy health insurance from private insurance companies starting in 2014, but does not effectively regulate how much we have to pay them.

Obama went so far as to announce his new regulatory policy in a guest column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, where at least one attack on Obama is on the menu every day.

This latest gesture of appeasement didn’t work out as the President hoped, though. "Yes, but" was the nearly universal response from the intended recipients of the President’s largesse, as Associated Press reporter Tom Raum reported. For your convenience, I’ve highlighted the “but factor”:

“Obama’s action is ‘a positive first step,’ said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s biggest business organization. But, Donohue added, ‘a robust and globally competitive economy requires fundamental reform of our broken regulatory system.’ He called on Congress to 'reclaim some of the authority it has delegated to agencies.’"

“The National Association of Manufacturers said it ‘appreciated’ Obama’s call for a regulatory review, but called for Obama to demonstrate results by ‘delaying poorly thought-out proposals that are costing jobs,’ listing the EPA’s proposals to regulate greenhouse gases as a prime example."

A “spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, called Obama’s review a welcome acknowledgment that government regulations have economic consequences. But he said the president should take bolder steps immediately.”

"David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general, said in an interview that it was ‘fully appropriate to engage in a baseline review of existing federal regulations.’ But Walker, head of a balanced-budget advocacy group called Comeback America Initiative, questioned having the agencies themselves hunt for harmful regulations. ‘We need to have an independent review process that has transparency,” he said. Walker said many of today’s regulations date back to the 1950s and need to be revamped.”

For a little conjunctional variety, here's the response of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor:

“Obama’s executive order ‘shows that he heard the same message I did in the last election - that Americans are sick and tired of Washington’s excessive overreach and overspending.’ ‘While I applaud his efforts, we must go further,’ Kantor added. He proposed more aggressive steps to strike down ‘needless and burdensome’ regulations that plague businesses and stifle job growth.”

President Obama still doesn’t understand that his political opponents will never voluntarily support anything he does, short of a complete capitulation (and perhaps not even then). This is not just a matter of interest to the political class. If the White House spends the next two years trying to placate the implacable, the rules, regulations and legislation needed to restore the economy and protect the public health and safety are never going to see daylight.

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Congress / Financial Crisis / Financial Reform Legislation / Harvey Column / President Barack Obama - 01/24/2011