Lighting Money on Fire and Romney's Idea of 'Over-Regulation'

It was one of the dumber things the Romney campaign said this week and it's getting almost no coverage. On NBC's Today show, campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said that the JPMorgan trading debacle was no reason to go and start regulating Wall Street banks. "The leadership of that company will be held accountable for this trading loss, but we don't want to punish companies," he said. "There was no taxpayer money at risk. All of the losses went to investors, which is how it works in a public market."

Fehrnstrom apparently has no earthly idea "how it works in a public market." Plenty of people who weren't investors in JPMorgan are harmed by this -- most notably you.

First, let's let NPR's Planet Money explain what happened:

The trade came to light earlier this year, when reports surfaced of a "London Whale" — a trader at JPMorgan who had accumulated a position so big it was affecting the whole market.

The trade involved an index of corporate credit default swaps. These are essentially insurance policies that pay off if a company can't make payments on its debts. (Credit default swaps became a household name during the financial crisis, when they were central to the blowup of AIG, a giant insurance company.)

JPMorgan took the big hit when it tried to back off from the trade and had to sell at a loss.

Here's what I want to make extremely clear here: JPMorgan didn't get screwed on some deal by someone who outsmarted them. No one out there is $2 billion dollars richer because of this. The bank might as well have stacked up $2 billion in American wealth -- that's two and nine zeros -- and put a match to it. It's just gone. $2 billion taken out of the US economy and nothing to show for it.

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Keeping the Focus on Wall Street

By now, you've probably heard that New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg ordered police to clear Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters in what can only be described as a raid in the middle of the night.

New York Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Tuesday defended his decision to clear the park in Lower Manhattan that was the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, saying “health and safety conditions became intolerable” in the park where the protesters had camped out for nearly two months.

[...]

The mayor’s comments at a City Hall news conference came about seven hours after hundreds of police officers moved in to clear the park after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest. The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, initially resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!”

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said that nearly 200 people had been arrested, 142 in the park at 50 to 60 in the streets nearby. Most were held on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, among them City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a Democrat who represents northern Manhattan. He was with a group near the intersection of Broadway and Vesey Street that was attempting to link up with the protesters in the park. The group tried to push through a line of officers trying to prevent people from reaching the park.

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So BofA Dropped Their Debit Card Fee -- You're Still Being Screwed

When Bank of America announced they were dropping plans to institute a $5 monthly debit card fee, that was a win for consumers. The fee was an end run around new banking regulations that limited the amount banks could charge merchants for processing debit card purchases. In other words, the banks took a "stop screwing people" law and applied it as a "screw different people" law. It didn't go over real well.

The move was a PR disaster and other banks that had been planning similar fees backed off as well. For now, the debit card fee is all but dead. But that doesn't mean that a "stop screwing people" law has to be taken as a "stop screwing people" law. Meet the stealth screw.

New York Times:

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees.

...Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to all sorts of fees that fly under the radar. Everything, it seems, has a price.

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Poll: 99-Percenters' Argument Gains Traction

The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.

The block of text above was not lifted from an Occupy Wall Street protester's overly verbose sign, as much as it expresses common sentiment among the occupiers. No, that text was taken from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last night. Respondents were asked if they "strongly agree, mildly agree, feel neutral about, mildly disagree, or strongly disagree" with the statement and the majority agreed -- overwhelmingly. 76% said they agreed with the statement, with 60% agreeing strongly.

In the same poll, respondents were asked if they agreed with a more tea-flavored statement; "The national debt must be cut significantly by reducing spending and the size of government,including eliminating some federal agencies and programs. Regulations on business by the federal government should be reduced and instead, the private sector and individuals should have greater control. The government should not raise taxes on anyone."

53% agreed, with 33% agreeing strongly. Obviously, there's some overlap here of those who want to be able to have their cake and eat it too. After all, you can't "reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency," while saying that "regulations on business by the federal government should be reduced and instead, the private sector and individuals should have greater control." It really has to be one or the other.

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The More People Know About the Occupy Movement, the More They Agree with It

You may not have heard, but Occupy Oakland and their supporters staged a general strike in that city yesterday. The fact that you may not have heard about it points to a new trend I'm detecting -- the media brownout, as opposed to a blackout. If you're not familiar with the term, a media blackout is a form of censorship where corporate media refuses to cover a story. What I'm calling a media brownout happens when corporate media refuses to cover a story well. Sure, there are mentions of it on a media outlet's website, but on-air or in-print coverage is brief and uninformative. As crappy as it is, most people get their news from TV, because that's all they really have time for. So, regardless of how thorough their web coverage is, an on-air snub keeps the story out of the public spotlight, for the most part.

And there's a reason why the Occupy Oakland strike didn't get a lot of coverage. While companies like Men's Warehouse support the Occupy movement (see photo above), there's no shortage of companies that oppose it -- income inequality may not be good for retail, but it works out well for banks and other companies. These corporations are advertisers, news organizations are ad-supported enterprises, and... you get the idea. Corporations like Lockheed-Martin don't buy ad time on CNN because it sells a lot of jets, they buy ad time for the same reason they contribute to political candidates.

So it's a little ironic that CNN would put out a poll that both shows they've failed to cover the Occupy movement well enough and betrays the reason for that failure.

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Newest Smear: 99-Percenters are Secretly Rich

When you're running a smear campaign, you're not going to want to let things like facts or logic or math get in the way. You're just going to make stuff up. But the trick is to make things up that are as close to the truth as possible. That way, you can throw out numbers and statistics that -- while being either meaningless or actually undercutting your argument -- can be made to seem to support your smear.

And consistency isn't very important here -- especially if your target audience has the attention span of the common house fly. One criticism that contradicts a previous criticism is A-OK, just so long as the criticism sticks. If there's one thing a smearer can count on, it's cognitive dissonance among a significant portion of their audience.

So it should be no surprise that the latest smear against Occupy Wall Street contradicts the previous smear that they're all uncouth rabble (i.e., "smelly hippies"), made poor by their own bad choices in life, clamoring for a government handout.

Daily Caller:

Many "Occupy Wall Street" protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

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Fox News to GOP Candidates: 'No More Anti-Bailout Talk'

This video of Rick Perry being interviewed by Fox News' Neil Cavuto has been making the rounds, generally as evidence of how unprepared Perry is for anything in the neighborhood of a tough question. In the clip, Perry's regurgitating the typical GOP mumbo-jumbo about certainty and "investor confidence" being the most important thing for economic and job growth, while completely ignoring the indisputable fact that no one's going to invest in a business that has no customers. Supply and demand is set on its head, as always.

But of course the interesting part is when Perry starts ripping on the bailouts -- previously a fairly typical Republican line. And, until just a few weeks ago, a perfectly acceptable and politically correct one. But after the Occupy movement, it's apparently now verboten.



Yes, Perry's tiny little brain was incapable of processing what had just happened, so he just sat there silent, waiting for the interview to move on. I can't help but fill that silence with the sound of imaginary crickets chirping while rusty gears grind to a halt when I watch it.

But check that video again. Cavuto's crew had that clip loaded and ready to fire. It had previously been a matter of teabagger faith that the bailouts were bad, now it's practically the act of a Communist sympathizer to make that same argument. Cavuto's comment and the clip of Occupy Wall Street was a warning shot across Perry's bow. Perry's not likely to criticize the bailouts on Fox News again -- he obviously has no idea how to deal with the consequence.

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The GOP's 'Punish Everything and Everyone' Mentality

I was tempted to write that an LA Times headline -- "Medical help for illegal immigrants could haunt Mitt Romney" -- demonstrates everything that's wrong with today's Republican Party. It hits a lot of the bullet-points; a lack of compassion or mercy, a complete absence of anything approximating common sense, and the belief that every problem can be solved by punishing someone.

The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.

Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.

The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas.

So undocumented immigrants, including children, should be sick and uneducated. Because a sick and uneducated segment of the populace is just so damned good for a society.

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Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

If you want one clear message coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99-percenters, you can boil all they're saying down into one argument; Reaganomics has failed and should die. After decades of bending over backwards to make sure that helped the wealthy become as wealthy as humanly possible, we see no real positive results. "Trickle down" economics is really the economics of scavenging -- if the wealthy have a big feast, they'll leave a lot of crumbs. And, as we shift the role of government away from helping people to helping business, even the holes left by cutting spending benefit corporations. Remember that after Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the only real positive impact the reforms had were for the financial industry. A whole new market opened up and payday loan outfits sprouted up all over the nation like mushrooms, charging usurious rates to people with nowhere else to go. And of course, poverty is at an all-time high.

If this is a successful economic model, I think I'd prefer the old "failures" of New Deal liberals, thanks.

Still, all that wealth is sitting up there, just waiting to trickle down. We've sent pots and pots of money up the economic ladder all these years with pretty much nothing to show for it -- except this:


Chart courtesy of Mother Jones

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The Argument that 99-Percenters Offer No Solutions is a Really Stupid Argument

Imagine you're driving along and you hear a sound somewhere under your car. "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung..." You're going to take that to a mechanic, right?

Now imagine that the mechanic asks you what you want to do about the sound. "I want you to fix it," you tell him.

"Sorry," he's says. "That's not specific enough. I need you to tell me exactly what needs to be done. What component I need to replace. What tools I need to do it. I need step-by-step instructions on exactly what repairs you want done."

"I'm not the mechanic," you answer, "you are! I just want you to fix the noise. I don't know how to do it."

"Come back when you have real solutions," the mechanic says.

That's the problem facing the American people and, specifically, the protesters in the streets of New York and other cities right now. The problem is obvious -- unemployment, a tax structure that's way to lopsided toward those at the top, corporate crime and runaway greed, out-of-control higher education costs, etc. Our entire economic system is going "Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung." Yet, when the protesters point out there's obviously something wrong here, they're dismissed by politicians and the media for having no solutions.

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Police Violence at Occupy Wall Street Protest was the Result of Police Incompetence

We're going to start right off with the ugly, just to get it out of the way. This was the scene last night in New York City, as the Occupy Wall Street protest once again turned into a police near-riot.

Fox 5, New York:

While covering the Occupy Wall Street protests on Wednesday night, Fox 5 photographer Roy Isen was hit in the eyes by pepper spray from a police officer and Fox 5 reporter Dick Brennan was hit by an officer's baton.

The protests on Wall Street continued to grow all day. The rallies and their participants are showing no signs of slowing down.

In the evening, crowds surged past barriers and NYPD officers moved in to contain the protesters. By many accounts, mayhem broke out.

Officers, many wearing white shirts indicating supervisor rank, swatted protesters with batons and sprayed them with mace, video from the scene showed.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

GOP Candidates to Struggling Americans: 'Let Them Eat Cake'

Hey, want to get really, really angry? Here you go:

I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these [Occupy Wall Street] demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.

That's GOP rising star Herman Cain, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, making what in any sane world would be a "major campaign trail gaffe." We don't live in any sane world. Forget the insane conspiracy theory of a White House "orchestrating" protests that lay a lot of blame at the White House's door. Instead, concentrate on the "let them eat cake" part that blames unemployment on the unemployed, financial problems on the struggling, and implies that anyone who isn't rich is a failure.

ThinkProgress:

...Cain’s claim about the unemployed is especially heartless and uninformed. There are simply not enough jobs to go around, with 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country. So even someone looking hard for a job will have a difficult time finding one. Moreover, Cain fails to understand the astronomical income inequality in the U.S. and the negative effect it has on economic growth.

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Real Populism vs. Corporate PR

There is one not so obvious or immediately noticeable difference between the Occupy Wall Street protests and your average Tea Party protest. Sure, the crowds seem to be younger, signs featuring Obama as Hitler are entirely absent, and there aren't many people who are dressed like Uncle Sam sneezed stars and stripes all over them. There are no guns or demands to see the president's birth certificate. But the less obvious difference is in buses. While the Tea Party protests always feature big buses covered with flags and eagles, buses at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are used to haul the protesters to jail.

I bring this up because teapartiers like to pretend they're running their own show. That their protests are grassroots and their organizations are of their own construction. But those buses carting them around from protest to protest didn't just appear out of nowhere. Someone paid for them, someone gave them their ultra-patriotic paint jobs, someone's buying all the gas. All that takes funding and, as much as the 'baggers like to pretend they're an independent movement, they're all bought and paid for -- and then moved from square to square like pawns on a chessboard.

On the other hand, Greg Sargent has this to say about the Wall Street protests:

...If there's one thing that's growing clearer by the hour, it's that this is an entirely organic effort, one that's about nobody but the protestors themselves. In this sense, we're seeing a replay of the Wisconsin protests. Those ended up falling just short of what activists had hoped to achieve, but their months-long showing was still important -- it demonstrated that left wing populism is still alive and well and sent an important message about the mood of the country. The key was that it grew organically with little to no involvement from Beltway Dems and the White House.

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The Economy as an Issue is Now 90% Republican-Owned

Last night, Robert Reich made a decent point. Writing about the debt limit deal and yesterday's market sell-off, Reich wonders if Republicans are ready to take ownership of the problem.

John Boehner said Tuesday the Republicans got "90 percent of what we wanted" from the budget deal. So presumably he and his colleagues are willing to take responsibility for some 450 points of today's mammoth 513-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I'm being a bit facetious -- but only a bit. It's always dangerous to read too much into one day's move in the stock market.

Of course, there are a lot of factors that figure into the ongoing dive -- economic uncertainty in Europe, for example -- that have nothing to do with the US. But jitters about jobs and the threat of a double-dip recession are driving a lot of it. If Republicans got 90% of what they wanted from the debt limit deal, then Republicans now own 90% of responsibility for the economy.

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Press Largely Ignores John Boehner's Gibberish

What if the Speaker of the House gave a speech that was just all wrong? And what if the Speaker gave that speech to a bunch of people who knew it was all wrong? Throwing out crazy statement after crazy statement, to the bewilderment of his audience, lecturing those who make their living, in part, by knowing better? Would that be a scandal?

Apparently not. John Boehner did just that, giving a speech filled with economic mumbo-jumbo to a group of Wall Street executives. Relying on GOP talking points, Boehner spoke to Economic Club of New York Monday, and received "a cool reception," according to The Hill.

"The Speaker's stand drew little reaction from the banquet hall of Wall Street executives," the paper reported, "who offered polite applause at the end of Boehner's speech but sat in silence through his demands on the debt limit."

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Raising Taxes on the Poor to Float the Rich

If there's one thing that can be said about Republicans, it's that they love to cut taxes. Cut, cut, cut. Love, love, love. After all, it's your money, right? You worked for it and along comes Uncle Sam, who snatches it out of your pocket and gives it to some lazy slob with a sob story.

"Oh, boo-hoo-hoo!" said slob whines. "My bank almost went under because I was giving loans to people without jobs or income!" Get a real job, welfare queen!

Except, that's not the way the argument usually works, is it? Still, the economy crashed because moron bankers and Wall Street types were making seriously dimwitted decisions in a get-rich(er)-quick scheme, mixing in toxic assets with good investments, shaking the whole brew up, and serving it to everyone -- so, of course, those moron bankers and Wall Street types are the victims in all this. Really, are we to punish those who, through no fault of their own, were born brainless and greedy? I think not. No, we have to punish the people we always punish -- the poor, for the crime of not being rich.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

At This Point, Supply-Side Economics Could Hardly be a Bigger Failure

Cut taxes and you create jobs. Cut taxes and you create jobs. Cut taxes and you create jobs...

Say it over and over and it becomes true. Never mind that supply-side reasoning sets basic economics on its head and argues that it's not demand that drives employment, it's low taxation. Cut taxes, create jobs, end of story. It helps that the argument behind supply-side economics almost seems logical; if taxes are lower, businesses can afford to hire more. I say "almost logical" because that's the problem -- it fails to consider history and the facts, considering instead the world the way supply-siders wish it was. It isn't rational.

Demand drives job growth, because employers hire people they need. More demand, more need for workers. A bakery that can't keep up with demand for its bread hires more bakers. It will not hire more bakers than it needs. And if taxes are so low that the bakery is flush despite weak demand, they still won't hire more bakers if they don't need them. Who's going to hire employees to sit around and do nothing, simply because you can afford to? You take that extra money and you put it where it belongs -- in your pocket. You're a business, not a jobs program or a charity.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Will Republicans Self-Destruct Over Wall Street Reform?

The ad pretty much writes itself. It opens with news headlines, while bass and cellos saw a low, dark note; "U.S. charges Goldman with subprime fraud," "Goldman Sachs fraud case stunning in its indictment of Wall Street culture," "Goldman Cited 'Serious' Profit on Mortgages," and the kicker; "Goldman Sachs Bonuses: Bank Paying Staff Over $5 Billion For Just Three Months Work."

"We could've reformed Wall Street," that voice-over guy who does all the political ads says. "We could've reined in corruption. We could've ended huge bailouts and said, 'Too big to fail is too big to exist.' We could've regulated or outlawed risky and exotic investments schemes that have turned our economy into a failing casino. We wanted to do it. You wanted to do it. We could've done it. But Republicans wouldn't even allow the debate.

"All we needed was one vote."

At this point, you show a black and white image of the Republican incumbent. "One vote," the narrator continues. "One independent-minded Republican. One Senator willing to put the good of the nation above petty partisan politics. One politician who knows that fighting Wall Street corruption is more important than their party. Just one Republican with courage.

"One vote... We didn't get it." Flash the opponent's name and McCain/Feingold disclaimer; "I'm _____ and I so approve this message."





This ad has a chance of playing in states across the country, as Democrats bring Wall Street reform to a vote today. As of this moment, Republicans are standing together, threatening to filibuster the bill. While it's hard to believe that Democrats aren't willing to give up something to get this through, the signals they're sending are that they're not willing to give up much. The New York Times reported yesterday that Democrats "had bridged internal party differences and coalesced around a plan to tighten regulation of derivatives" and had "raised the pressure on Senate Republicans" to drop the filibuster threat.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Robert Kuttner reports that the White House has rejected the idea of a bipartisan compromise.

Although Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd and his sometime Republican ally Richard Shelby continued to make noises on the Sunday talk shows about a possible bipartisan deal, both President Obama and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank have personally urged Dodd not to cut a deal with Republicans. I asked Frank point blank why Dodd would want such a deal, and he said--on the record--"I have no idea, but both President Obama and I have urged him not to."

For those of us who remember the healthcare non-debate, this can't be taken as anything other than good news. Republicans have murdered bipartisanship as a public lynch mob. Even those Republicans who'd engaged in negotiations used it as a delaying tactic, with no intention of ever voting for any bill. After months of bipartisan negotiations, the bill passed the Senate without a single GOP vote. The moral of this story: negotiating with Republicans is a waste of time -- by GOP design.

What we have now is a stand-off. And it's one that Republicans can't possibly win -- not in a political sense, anyway. That's not to say that we won't get some sort of deal after the initial procedural vote fails. But Democrats should go ahead and cut that ad now, then email it to incumbent Republicans running for reelection. You want to run on how much you hate healthcare reform? Knock yourself out -- we're going to run on this.

Someone's going to blink here and, unless they're bent on self-destruction, Republicans will blink first.

-Wisco


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It's Springtime for Goldman Sachs

This whole Goldman Sachs derivatives fraud thing is complicated. So complicated that the news media has been struggling to explain it. Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart went looking for some good explanation from the media and found instead clumsy metaphors and inapt analogies.

I think I found a clip that explains the whole thing pretty well. Here's Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel explaining Goldman Sachs' scheme:

So the short version of Goldman Sachs' fraud; they were selling Springtime for Hitler to unwitting investors. The details are a little different, but that's the broader idea.





See Goldman set up something they called ABACUS 2007-AC1, which was basically a big pile of sub-prime loans. They sold shares in Abacus, with the idea that investors would get paid back (with interest) when the mortgages were paid off.

Except that wasn't the idea. It's just what told these investors.

The real idea was that Abacus was crap. Goldman told investors that Abacus had been chosen as a good investment by ACA Management LLC. In reality, it was a bomb. Here's where things get ugly.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission says this is where Goldman lied," reports Arthur Delaney for the Huffington Post. "According to the [Securities and Exchange Commission's] complaint, the underlying portfolio was put together by John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who hand-picked the worst possible assets in hopes that they would default. He rightly anticipated that the housing market would soon crash, and that people put into mortgages they couldn't afford would default when they lost the ability to simply refinance based on rising home values."

So, like Springtime for Hitler, Abacus was designed to fail. And, unlike Springtime for Hitler, it served its intended purpose wonderfully. Paulson cleaned up by buying credit default swaps, which are basically insurance that pays if the mortgages default.

"[Goldman Sachs] arranged a transaction at Paulson's request in which Paulson heavily influenced the selection of the portfolio to suit its economic interests," the SEC charged, "but failed to disclose to investors, as part of the description of the portfolio selection process contained in the marketing materials used to promote the transaction, Paulson's role in the portfolio selection process or its adverse economic interests."

So basically, Paulson and Goldman created a big economic and financial fire bomb -- complete with investors -- for the sole purpose of collecting the insurance. Metaphorical arson to collect on a failing business. Paulson paid Goldman $15 million to create Abacus, for the sole purpose of watching it go down. It'd take more than a few of the marks with it and a good chunk of the global economy, but so what? This is business and it's a dog eat dog world out there. It's eat or be eaten, except these dogs were already incredibly well fed.

It's at about this time that we ought to be enjoying a little lesson in the nature of reality. Conservatives and Libertarians like to talk about the "invisible hand of the market," which is a self-correcting mechanism driven by the "enlightened self-interest" of guys like John Paulson. The moneyed elite would never screw things up this badly, because then they'd get screwed too.

But what all this pie-in-the-sky economic fantasizing overlooks is that a lot of people suck and that no one commits a crime with the intention of getting caught. People commit crimes because they think they can get away with them. Had Goldman's and Paulson's scheme gone off as planned, no one would ever be the wiser and they'd be a little bit more insanely wealthy than they already are. "Enlightened" and "self-interest" don't necessarily go hand in hand and the "invisible hand of the market" just slapped us upside the head.

Some are accusing the Security and Exchange Commission of politically motivated timing in charging Goldman Sachs with fraud. The charge is that the White House is using this as a way to drum up support for reforming Wall Street. But, like the "invisible hand of the market" idea, this argument is fatally flawed:

-Goldman and Paulson did this and they did it on their own schedule, not the SEC's or the White House's.

-If the timing is politically motivated, how badly would Wall Street need reform then? By this argument, you can just run out and find a case of massive fraud any time it's convenient for you -- it's all over the damned place. It would have to be near-constant. Critics of reform are basically arguing that things are even worse than the White House is saying and that's why we shouldn't do anything. That's not the most persuasive case in the world.

Our choices seem pretty clear here. We can either reform the way Wall Street works or we can sit through Springtime for Hitler again and again and again. Republicans and Wall Street will bring the popcorn.

-Wisco


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