HR-4173 ?

About: lawmakers guide dodd-frank bill for wall street reform into homestretch

Drudge Headlines:
NEARLY 2,000 PAGES: The legislation would redraw how money flows through economy...

 Is HR-4173 it?
Final Conference Committee Marathon.
I knew that eventually a suitable cartoon would show up & here it is!
A great analysis is provided here by the WSJ via the Weekly Standard Blog.
source: ...

It's as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling. 

The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability to dictate the allocation of credit.

The Treasury, which bailed out institutions willy-nilly without consistent rules, will now lead the Financial Stability Oversight Council that will have the arbitrary power to define which financial companies pose a "systemic risk" and which can be shut down without recourse to bankruptcy. Willy-nilly will now be the law.

And the SEC, which created the credit-ratings oligopoly and missed Bernie Madoff, will get new powers to decide how easy it should be for union pension funds to get their candidates on corporate proxy ballots.

Oh, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They aren't touched at all, even as they continue to lose billions of taxpayer dollars each quarter.

In other words, our Washington rulers have taken 2,000 or so pages to double and triple down on the old system that failed.

...ETC.
 

Tags

  1. financial overhaul

Comments

Mark de LA says
'Deem' Faux $1.1 Trillion Budget 'as Passed'... - i.e. Congress is not even pretending to budget anymore. No accountability.

Push for new Internet sales taxes; Would draw $23B... - those with Internet businesses who voted for Obama enjoy your hope for spare change.

Mark de LA says
Here is a case in point for the last post - $1.3 Billion dollars in taxpayer money missing(somewhere inside Planned Parenthood.)  I know in the days when government expenses went from millions to billions & now trillions that a couple of billion looks small, but that is 24,000 $50K/yr jobs.   By comparison that $787 billion stimulus package during a period where unemployment went up could have paid for 15,740,000 $50K/yr jobs.  (did they all go to government bureaucrats?).  BTW, that's over half of the ~ 22 million unemployed. That amount would have paid unemployment benefits of ~ $1000/month for ~ 65.6 million people for a year or about 3 yrs of unemployment benefits for all the unemployed.  So, WTF?

Mark de LA says

Mark de LA says
M 2010-07-03 08:11:58 13993
     There is no hope of financial reform until Congress & the Executive branch get their own houses in order. The public must be able to drill down from a pie chart or some other graphical representation of the budget, expenditures & balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury & in non-accounting, real world names & descriptions know where the money went & what for.
Bills must be passed in a way that they are fully explicit in their financial impacts. Bills must be single purpose not bundles of slush funds to get politicians elected. 
     The latter points to one of the most egregious practices of government.  The purpose of representative government is to handle the most pressing matters of the people which require collective action & investment.  Such must not be purposed for politician job security. Just because you can get a bill passed only because you give everyone in the room part of a slush fund & ensure their reelection, another ends justifies the means argument, does not mean that you have done anything good for the people & in most cases you have just wasted more taxpayer money. Compromise & negotiation must always have the people's interests & America's as its highest purpose. Governments can't build bridges nor drill oil wells - they can only hire private enterprise to do such tasks. Taxes buy such tasks with weakened money which has been devalued by the cost of the overhead of governments. Those who falsify the unemployment statistics by saying that some people have given up looking for jobs & therefore not part of the unemployed should join the ranks of the unemployed!
 
I am adding the following idea to the mix.  I believe that the primary reason that the politicians are not connecting with the people is that they are isolated and removed from the people & taxpayers they serve.  Literally, they do not KNOW everyone they represent.  Some simple math follows:
  • The population of the US is < 400,000,000
  • a tree of people each of whom knew 12 other people & those people knew 12 other people etc on down the line would only have to grow to a depth less than 8 to cover the entire population.  i.e. 12 to the 8th power is 429,981,696. Other numbers can be calculated.  Trees of only 6 people would have to rise to a depth of less than 12.
  • Another way to say that is that your political power could be 8 degrees of separation from the elected representatives. 
  • While you may feel isolated now, you could be more connected & have your representatives more responsive.