The Neoconservative Republican Party is holding up the financial reform bill. It is even holding up amendments by Republican Senators, the same Senators who are holding up the Senate from voting on their amendments.
Like Senator Olympia Snowe, the apparently super-duper-hypocritical Senator from Maine. She says she wants to protect her constituents from the evils of Wall Street. Yet she votes with her Party to prohibit a vote or even debate on a financial reform bill. And why would the good Senator who voted against health care for many of her constituents also vote against reforming Wall Street? Well, remember, Senator Snowe thinks that she is invincible in Maine…cannot lose. She’s very cocky. She thinks that it is a Republican state, a Republican year, and really believes that the tea party people, sponsored by the Right Wing, oil-industry Koch Family will bail her out when the time comes.
Let’s first of all understand what Senator Reid is trying to do. He is trying to get the Republicans, who already told the big financial institutions, in return…we can only assume…for large amounts of campaign contributions that they will not allow financial regulation to pass. Now, it is true that they said the same thing to CEOs of the health insurance industry and did not succeed. But they were not totally defeated, either. They were able to force a very watered-down version of health care reform to go into effect.
Remember what happened in the financial industry. Huge numbers of financial institutions were in deep trouble. They had recklessly speculated with people’s money and lost. And now they were broke and the people whose money they used were broke. And it was all a fraud, a huge fraud. One bank, IndyMac, lost more money than the all the money that it cost for the Reagan era Savings and Loan bailout.
Bad mortgage loans were made and groups sold as good (AAA securities) and then sold again and pretty soon the fraudulent securities were everywhere, having been called good by rating agencies, even though those same agencies, the financials institutions and the banks…everyone knew they were worthless and therefore…fraudulent.
What Harry Reid is trying to prevent, as the market right now climbs again, without regulation, is more of the same. The market was at 6500 last year in April. It is heading towards 12,000 without regulation….no transparency…securities…derivatives being sold and no one can be sure that they are not fraudulent again. Has the economy improved 100% since last year? Have we gotten all those 8 million jobs back that we lost, let alone the 7 million before that? Then why has the market almost doubled?
We need to get some regulation before the market spins out of control again. But Republicans like Senator Olympia Snowe won’t allow a vote, because they know the Democrats will win the vote and the Republicans will lose their current excuse to virtually extort money from Wall Street…which Wall Street seems all too happy to have happen.
The Republican Senators have averaged $2.1 million from Wall Street since 2004. And more recently.
Sooner or later, Republican and Independent voters must decide that they will show GOP Senators that there are constituents of theirs who care whether or not they are cheated by Wall Street. They may decide to prove to everyone that they, the Republican voters and the Independent voters, are not too dumb or too lazy or too affluent to care that they are being cheated and thrown into one serious recession after another, while all Street gets rich.
