The financial services industry is spending more than $1 million a day fighting reforms in Congress, using a revolving door of former lawmakers, congressional aides and government officials. We name names and pull their activities out of the shadows.
Read our investigative report »
Now that the Senate is beginning floor debate on a financial reform bill, the push is on to make the bill stronger, identify the obstructionists and rebut the arguments against robust reform. We are tracking the Senate debate with reporting, commentary and research from our blog team and other progressive media sources.
» FACT SHEET: Essentials for Real Financial Reform... read more »
Forty-one senators blocked debate on a financial reform bill April 26. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson joined 40 Republicans in voting to obstruct forward movement on changes that would prevent a recurrence of the conditions that led to the current recession and an unprecedented Wall Street bailout. We are identifying those who are standing in the way of reform and debunking their arguments.... read more »
Throughout the financial reform debate, the finance industry has waged an unprecedented assault on the democratic process, spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence Congress and hiring 70 members of Congress and 940 former federal employees to lobby on their behalf. Many of the current big-bank lobbyists were architects of the too-big-to-fail banking regime while they were employed in Congress or elsewhere in the federal government. They are now drawing lucrative salaries from the banking behemoths they helped create and are scoring victories that assure the continued existence of Wall Street’s casinos, despite the threat they pose to the American economy.read more »
I wish President Obama would draw the obvious connection between Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase. That way his so-called “attack” on private equity is neither a personal attack on Mitt Romney nor a generalized attack on American business. It’s an attack on a particular kind of capitalism that Romney and JPMorgan both practice: Using other peoples’ money to make big bets which, if they go wrong, can wreak havoc on the economy. It’s the substitution of casino capitalism for real capitalism, the dominance of the betting parlor over the real business of America, financial innovation rather than product innovation. It’s been terrible for the American economy and for our democracy. It’s also why Obama has to come out swinging about JPMorgan.read more »
What to do with Jamie Dimon? The CEO and Chair of JPMorgan Chase has tried so hard in the past several years to seem the “good banker.” He is so charming and gracious, yet all the while lobbying, cajoling, pushing, and wheedling to eviscerate any semblance of real reform on Wall Street. He shrugged off the cataclysm of 2008 as just something that happened, like the weather — no need for any structural reform. Now the chickens have come home to roost—at least 2 billion of them — and it is clear that Chase is like every other big financial institution with distorted incentives. But it isn’t so much money, they cry! True, in the context of Chase’s balance sheet.. But it shows once again the impossibility of trusting the banks in the absence of structural reform and regulation to control their willingness to take almost unmitigated risk.
read more »
This strange political season gets stranger by the day. The things I'm hearing and seeing from Newt Gingrich and Cory Booker today reminded me of a song from one of the last (and, in my opinion, underrated) albums by Culture Club; my favorite band from my 80's youth. The lyric that comes to mind is from the band's 1984 single, "Mistake No. 3," when Boy George sings of people getting "dragged into a conversation they can't hold."
It's been 28 years, and I still can't figure out what that song's about. But, it's not hard to figure out that, despite coming at Mitt Romney's Bain Capital history from opposite sides, Newt Gingrich and Booker let themselves get dragged into conversations they can't hold.
The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to Sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results. When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can't win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That's because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday, Newark Mayor and Obama bundler Cory Booker said he was “uncomfortable” with the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s career with Bain Capital.
“It’s a distraction from the real issues,” Booker said, of both attacks on Bain and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “It’s either gonna be a small campaign about this crap, or it’s gonna be a big campaign about the issues the American public cares about.”
“I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” Booker added. “If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses — to grow businesses. And this to me, I’m very uncomfortable.”
No, attacks on Bain are not the equivalent of attacks on Jeremiah Wright and no, it is not a distraction from the campaign, it is the campaign. Or it should be. read more »
When Jamie Dimon revealed that JPMorgan Chase had lost billions through risky and legally questionable trading, he said the losses would be about $2 billion and maybe more. Apparently it is more - a lot more. People in a position to know are saying the real figure is probably in the $5-7 billion range. read more »
I mentioned the annual Pete Peterson Poor People Ritual Sacrifice confab earlier, but this piece about the man's material devotion to his cause by Ryan Grim is a must-read:
According to a review of tax documents from 2007 through 2011, Peterson has personally contributed at least $458 million to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to cast Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government spending as in a state of crisis, in desperate need of dramatic cuts. Peterson's millions have done next to nothing to change public opinion: In survey after survey, Americans reject the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare. A recent national tour organized by AmericaSpeaks and largely funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation was met by audiences who rebuffed his proposals.
But Peterson has been able to drive a major shift in elite consensus about government spending, with talk of "grand bargains" that would slash entitlements, cut corporate tax rates and end personal tax breaks, such as the mortgage deduction, that benefit the middle class.
To put Peterson's spending in context, all corporations and unions combined spent less than $4 billion on lobbying in 2011.
This shows, once again, just how dangerous it is to have this .001% that is richer than God deciding they'd like to buy themselves a government. They can, literally, afford it. Just as we are seeing obscenely wealthy people write checks for millions to Super PACs without blinking an eye, ideologues like Peterson are willing to put up even more over time to completely change the basic structure of government for their own gain.
JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion bad bet has made it crystal clear: The Wall Street banksters are still recklessly gambling with government-guaranteed money. And the too-big-to-fail banks are still too big. read more »
Today a bunch of rich white guys held a "Fiscal Summit" and agreed that:
1. Despite the fact that unemployment is causing untold suffering for millions of people, it's not very important.
2. Despite the fact that wage stagnation is destroying the middle class, that's not important either. read more »
Everybody knows that Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a sometimes combative columnist and a liberal lion. But in a conversation which aired this weekend we learned more about his personal response to an ongoing crisis he describes as "really nasty," "very, very severe," and "gratuitious," and which he says "will not go away quickly or necessary at all" unless we do something. read more »
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