THE BANKS ALL BUT DESTROYED THE AMERICAN ECONOMY, AND DID
DESTROY THE LIFE SAVINGS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WHOSE WEALTH WAS TIED UP IN
THEIR HOME… THANKS TO THE BANKSTER-OWNED PRESIDENT, THEIR PROFITS AND CRIMES
ARE SOARING.
CONGRESS – HOUSE OF WHORES FOR BANKSTERS!
dems…
party for illegals and criminal banksters! but then, isn’t what the GOP is
also?
But most of the Democrats on the committee, along with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s defense, including the seven freshmen Democrats — most of whom have started to receive donations this year from political action committees of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other financial institutions, records show.
But most of the Democrats on the committee, along with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s defense, including the seven freshmen Democrats — most of whom have started to receive donations this year from political action committees of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other financial institutions, records show.
May 23,
2013, 9:44 pm
Banks’
Lobbyists Help in Drafting Financial Bills
By ERIC LIPTON and BEN PROTESS
WASHINGTON
— Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that
softens financial
regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.
One
bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month
— over the objections of the
Treasury Department — was
essentially Citigroup’s, according
to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes
of trades from new regulation.
In a
sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s
recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s
85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with
other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed
two words to make them plural.)
The
lobbying campaign shows how, three years after Congress passed the most
comprehensive overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall Street is
finding Washington a friendlier place.
The
cordial relations now include a growing number of Democrats in both the House
and the Senate, whose support the banks need if they want to roll back parts of
the 2010 financial overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank.
This
legislative push is a second front, with Wall Street’s other battle being waged
against regulators who are drafting detailed rules allowing them to enforce the
law.
And as
its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already
considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported
the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions
from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to
an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit
group.
In
recent weeks, Wall Street groups also held fund-raisers for
lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one dinner Wednesday night,
corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a private room
of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with Representative Sean
Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor of the bill championed by
Citigroup.
Industry
officials acknowledged that they played a role in drafting the legislation, but
argued that the practice was common in Washington. Some of the changes, they
say, have gained wide support, including from Ben
S. Bernanke, the Federal
Reserve chairman. The changes, they added, were in an effort to reach a
compromise over the bills, not to undermine Dodd-Frank.
“We
will provide input if we see a bill and it is something we have interest in,”
said Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., a former lawmaker turned Wall Street lobbyist, who
now serves as president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets
Association, or Sifma.
The close ties hardly surprise Wall Street
critics, who have long warned that the banks — whose small armies of lobbyists
include dozens of former Capitol Hill aides — possess outsize influence in
Washington.
“The
huge machinery of Wall Street information and analysis skews the thinking of
Congress,” said Jeff Connaughton, who has been both a lobbyist and
Congressional staff member.
Lawmakers
who supported the industry-backed bills said they did so because the effort was
in the public interest. Yet some agreed that the relationship with corporate
groups was at times uncomfortable.
“I won’t dispute for one
second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by
its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of
Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the
party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services
Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top
recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s
wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption.
It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”
The
passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which took aim at culprits of the financial
crisis like lax mortgage lending and the $700 trillion derivatives market,
ushered in a new phase of Wall Street lobbying. Over the last three years, bank
lobbyists have blitzed the regulatory agencies writing rules under Dodd-Frank,
chipping away at some regulations.
But the
industry lobbyists also realized that Congress can play a critical role in the
campaign to mute Dodd-Frank.
The
House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not only is it
controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but freshmen lawmakers
are often appointed to the unusually large committee because it is seen as a
helpful base from which they can raise campaign funds.
For
Wall Street, the committee is a place to push back against Dodd-Frank. When
banks and other corporations, for example, feared that regulators would demand
new scrutiny of derivatives trades, they appealed to the committee. At the
time, regulators were completing Dodd-Frank’s overhaul of derivatives,
contracts that allow companies to either speculate in the markets or protect
against risk. Derivatives had pushed the insurance giant American
International Group to the brink of collapse in 2008. The question was
whether regulators would exempt certain in-house derivatives trades between
affiliates of big banks.
As the
House committee was drafting
a bill that would force regulators to exempt many such trades, corporate
lawyers like Michael Bopp weighed in with their suggested changes, according to
e-mails reviewed by The Times. At one point, when a House aide sent a potential
compromise to Mr. Bopp, he replied with additional tweaks.
In an
interview, Mr. Bopp explained that he drafted the proposal at the request of
Congressional aides, who expressed broad support for the change. The proposal,
he explained, was a “compromise” that was actually designed to “limit the
scope” of the exemption.
“Everyone
on the Hill wanted this bill, but they wanted to make sure it wasn’t subject to
abuse,” said Mr. Bopp, a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn who was
representing a coalition of nonfinancial corporations that use derivatives to
hedge their risk.
Ultimately,
the committee inserted every word of Mr. Bopp’s suggestion into a 2012 version
of the bill that passed the House, save for a slight change in phrasing. A
later iteration of the bill, passed by the House committee earlier this
month, also included some of the same wording.
And
when federal regulators in April
released a rule governing such trades, it was significantly less demanding than
the industry had feared, a decision that the industry partly attributed to
pressure stemming from Capitol Hill.
Citigroup
and other major banks used a similar approach on another derivatives bill.
Under Dodd-Frank, banks must push some derivatives trading into separate units
that are not backed by the government’s insurance fund. The goal was to isolate
this risky trading.
The
provision exempted many derivatives from the requirement, but some Republicans
proposed striking the so-called push out provision altogether. After objections
were raised about the Republican plan, Citigroup lobbyists sent around the
bank’s own compromise proposal that simply exempted a wider array of
derivatives. That recommendation, put forth in late 2011, was largely part of
the bill approved by the House committee on May 7 and is now pending before
both the Senate and the House.
Citigroup
executives said the change they advocated was good for the financial system,
not just the bank.
“This
view is shared not just by the industry but from leaders such as Federal
Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke,” said Molly Millerwise Meiners, a Citigroup
spokeswoman.
Industry
executives said that the changes — which were drafted in consultation with
other major industry banks — will make the financial system more secure, as the
derivatives trading that takes place inside the bank is subject to much greater
scrutiny.
Representative
Maxine
Waters, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, was among
the few Democrats opposing the change, echoing the concerns of consumer groups.
“The
bill restores the public subsidy to exotic Wall Street activities,” said Marcus
Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit
group.
But most of the Democrats on the committee, along
with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s defense, including the seven
freshmen Democrats — most of whom have started to receive donations this year
from political action committees of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other financial institutions,
records show.
Six
days after the vote, several freshmen Democrats were in
New York to meet with bank executives, a tour organized by Representative
Joe Crowley, who helps lead the House Democrats’ fund-raising committee. The
trip was planned before the votes, and was not a fund-raiser, but it gave the
lawmakers a chance to meet with Wall Street’s elite.
In addition to a tour of Goldman’s Lower
Manhattan headquarters, and a meeting with Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief
executive, the lawmakers went to JPMorgan’s Park Avenue office. There, they
chatted with Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief, about
Dodd-Frank and immigration reform.
The
bank chief also delivered something of a pep talk.
“America
has the widest, deepest and most transparent capital markets in the world,” he
said. “Washington has been dealt a good hand.”
Eric
Lipton reported from Washington, and Ben Protess from New York.
Assault on America – THE OBAMA – JP MORGAN LOOTING of a nation
DID OBAMA PUNKED
US OR IS HE SIMPLY A FAILED PRESIDENCY?
OBAMA, THE MAN THAT NEVER VOTED DURING THE BRIEF PERIOD HE
WAS IN THE SENATE, OWNED AND OPERATED BY BIG BANKSTERS, IS NOTHING BUT A CON
JOB CALLED “CHANGE”… OR DICTATOR IN THE MAKING.
EITHER WAY HE IS THE MOST FAILED PRESIDENCY IN MODERN
AMERICAN HISTORY.
Government of, by, and
for the banks
25 May 2013
Five years since the 2008 financial meltdown,
the speculation and fraud that caused the crash are back in full force in the
United States. Flush with the $85 billion in cash printed up and handed to the
banks every month by the Federal Reserve, business at the Wall Street casino is
booming. Stock values are at record levels and so are bank profits, amidst
declining wages and mass poverty.
Big Banks Get Break in Rules to Limit Risks
OBAMA-STYLE CRONY CAPITALISM…
business as usual for Obama’s banksters!
OBAMA
AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS… THE LOOTING GOES ON, AND AS PER OBAMA’S
PROMISE…NONE HAVE GONE TO PRISON!
“The changes to the rule, which will be
announced on Thursday, could effectively empower a few big banks to continue
controlling the derivatives market, a main culprit in the financial crisis.”
OBAMANOMICS: BANK
PROFITS and CRIMES SOAR UNDER OBAMA… so do foreclosures!
FORECLOSED ON AMERICA: HOW BARACK OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS
LOOTED A NATION AND THEN PROFITEERED OFF THEIR CRIMES
Sen. Feinstein's Husband Cashes In on
Crisis Ethical? Ethnics never enter into a deal Feinstein is pushing in
Congress! FEINSTEIN IS A MAJOR OBAMA DONOR. SHE MAKES SIGNIFICATN
"CONTRIBUTIONS" TO DEMS ALL OVER THE NATION SO THEY KEEP THEIR MOUTH
SHUT ABOUT HER LOOTING OFF ELECTED OFFICE.
On the day the new Congress convened this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms, the Washington Times reported on Tuesday.
Mrs. Feinstein's intervention on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unusual: the California Democrat isn't a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs with jurisdiction over FDIC; and the agency is supposed to operate from money it raises from bank-paid insurance payments - not direct federal dollars.
unfortunately this is only one of the many “DEALS” Feinstein and her husband, Richard C. Blum have looted off of.
TWO OF
FEINSTEIN’S BIGGEST DONORS ARE CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO and BANK of
AMERICA. SHE FRONTS FOR THESE BANKS IN THE SENATE LIKE SHE DOES RED CHINA! BOTH
BANKS ARE AT THE TOP OF THE LIST FOR THE FORECLOSURE DEBACLE THEY ARE NOW
PROFITEERING FROM.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/21/sen-feinsteins-husband-cashes-crisis/#ixzz28BwHuQMm
*
Three reasons Congress is broken
By
Robert G. Kaiser, Published: May 23
Robert G. Kaiser is
an associate editor of The Washington Post and the author of “Act of Congress:
How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t,” published this
month.
Why is Congress so
helpless and so hopeless? We’ve heard all the fashionable explanations:
partisan gridlock; special interests and the impact of their campaign
contributions; gerrymandered House districts; an excessively partisan
president; a benighted Republican Party dominated by tea party know-nothings.
But the real cause is
deeper: Congress is a human institution with a distinct culture, and the modern
version of that culture is hostile to creative problem-solving. If we have a
mediocre Congress — even when it manages to accomplish something — it is
because of the people in it and the culture they have created.
The men and women who
now run for Congress have special features. Most of them are much wealthier
than their constituents. Surprisingly few have strong policy interests or
experience. Most are willing to spend a day or two or three each week asking
strangers for money on the telephone, a demeaning but obligatory exercise. Most
have internalized an ethical code that allows them to solicit campaign
contributions from people directly affected by legislation they vote on. This
is not rare or even unusual — it’s standard.
I’ve witnessed the
transformation of congressional culture over the past decades from a variety of
perches at The Washington Post, including two tours of duty as a reporter on
Capitol Hill. I’ve long been intrigued, and often baffled, by our legislative
branch. Then in 2009, I got lucky. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Chris
Dodd (D-Conn.) agreed to let me watch them produce what became the Dodd-Frank bill, which reordered the regulation of America’s
financial sector. They allowed their staffs to talk to me regularly, on the
record, over 19 months. I was able to gather a reporter’s favorite commodity:
the inside skinny. And I saw the culture of the modern Congress at work.
The events I witnessed
were not exactly typical, because they produced a consequential result. This
was due to special circumstances: the large Democratic majorities in the 111th
Congress (2009-2011), elected in the midst of the worst financial crisis since
the Great Depression, and the effective leadership of two experienced
legislators who held key chairmanships: Dodd at the Senate Banking Committee
and Frank at the House Financial Services Committee.
Nevertheless, I saw
how Congress actively undermines the best of legislative practices. Consider
three aspects of that congressional culture that affected the course of
Dodd-Frank — and are even more influential today, when Congress appears
deadlocked on virtually all fronts.
Politics trumps
policy
The crash of 2008
posed an obvious policy question: How could regulation of the financial sector
be improved to prevent similar catastrophes? Most of the answers that
eventually made their way into the Dodd-Frank bill were provided not by
Congress but by the Obama administration.
Frank immediately
accepted the bill the administration wrote as the appropriate framework for
reform. It changed somewhat as it moved through the House, but not much. Dodd
did offer some new ideas: for example, unifying the four existing bank
regulators into a single new agency. But no other senator embraced Dodd’s plan,
so he soon abandoned it and accepted the administration’s approach. Overall,
the big policy questions were mostly settled by the administration.
Why? Because large,
bipartisan majorities in both chambers never understood the arcane financial
issues at the heart of regulatory reform, nor tried to master the subject.
Theoretically, the lawmakers had an opportunity to wield enormous power and
transform the biggest sector of the American economy. But very few were
interested. “This notion that members of Congress are power-hungry — absolutely
the opposite,” Frank observed at one point. “Most members like to duck tough
issues.”
The politics of
reform, by contrast, was a congressional preoccupation from the outset.
Beginning in early 2009, Frank was talking about political implications with
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who
both thought a strong bill would help Democrats. Emanuel repeatedly told Frank
that White House polls showed strong public support for reform. When pressure
from hometown bankers and financial industry lobbyists weakened some Democrats’
resolve in the summer of 2009, Frank warned them to hang tough. “If you kill
this bill now, you’ll get creamed,” he told the Democrats on his committee.
“You’ll get primary opponents. It will be ‘the people against the banks,’ and
‘the Democrats caved in again.’ ”
Politics mattered for
Dodd, too, but in a different way. He believed that a big bill of this kind was
unlikely to be enacted without strong bipartisan support, which he pursued for
months. He discouraged Democrats who wanted to make regulatory reform a
partisan issue. But he also refused to vitiate the bill to satisfy Republicans
who wanted a lot less regulation than he did. Ultimately, he got a smidgen of
bipartisanship — just enough to get the bill through the Senate. Three
Republican senators voted for cloture, to cut off debate and allow a final
vote; four Republicans voted for the final bill.
Politics — and
ideology — dominated GOP attitudes toward reform. In the House, Republicans
ruled out any cooperation with Frank and the administration from the outset.
House Republicans produced an alternative plan to demonstrate that they could
agree on some response to the crash, but their proposal had no teeth and was
never seen as anything more than a public relations exercise. Senate
Republicans, meanwhile, never offered an alternative of their own.
Republican leaders in
both houses used financial reform as a fundraising tool. Mitch McConnell (Ky.),
the Senate Republican leader, and John Cornyn (Tex.), chairman of the National
Republican Senatorial Committee, traveled to Wall Street to persuade — with
considerable success — financiers to give more to Republicans. John Boehner
(Ohio), the Republican leader of the House, similarly sought to attract Wall
Street money by opposing the administration’s regulatory proposals.
Republicans, including McConnell, repeatedly attacked the Dodd-Frank bill for
provisions it did not contain and kept doing so when their errors were pointed
out.
Staffers do most of
the work
Ted Kennedy said as
much in his 2009 memoir. “Ninety-five percent of the nitty-gritty work of
drafting [bills] and even negotiating [their final form] is now done by staff,”
he wrote, marking “an enormous shift of responsibility over the past forty or
fifty years.”
In the case of
Dodd-Frank, 95 percent might understate staff members’ share of the work. After
Dodd and Frank themselves, the two most influential people in shaping the
legislation were unknown to most Washington cognescenti: Amy Friend, chief
counsel of the Senate Banking Committee, and Jeanne Roslanowick, staff director
of House Financial Services Committee. They and their staffs were responsible for
every aspect of producing the final legislation: writing provisions (most based
on Obama administration drafts), vetting the contents with interest groups of
all kinds, looking for glitches or omissions, and hearing out the
recommendations and complaints of hundreds of experts, lobbyists and affected
parties.
Very few lawmakers
left fingerprints on the legislation. Most of them voted for or against
Dodd-Frank — nearly all along party lines — without remotely understanding its
provisions.
Staffers can’t vote,
but lawmakers can’t legislate without the work done by staff. In some
circumstances this feature of the modern Congress can help rather than hinder
the House and Senate, because staff members tend to believe in compromise when
elected officials often do not. But a compromise reached by staff won’t work on
its own; lawmakers have to vote for it.
Issues, even the big
ones,
are no longer really debated
are no longer really debated
In the “world’s
greatest deliberative body,” there is little deliberation. The Senate Banking
Committee never held a proper markup of the Dodd-Frank legislation, and did not
debate its provisions or consider their impact. The House markup was
ritualistic and formalized; it did little to alter the bill, with one
interesting exception — an amendment exempting auto dealers from the purview of
the new consumer financial protection agency.
The final law has a
number of radical provisions that were not debated in either body. One example:
It created a Financial Stability Oversight Council consisting of the heads of
many regulatory agencies and chaired by the Treasury secretary. It can instruct
regulators to force firms to abandon practices it considers too risky and can
even shut down a firm it deems a threat to the stability of the financial
system. If, one fine day, the council uses that unprecedented power, the
consequences could be dramatic. But this was never really debated during the
legislative process that produced the bill.
Floor debates in both
houses consisted primarily of political posturing. Lawmakers did not engage in
a serious philosophical discussion about the proper role of regulation in the
financial sector or in a practical discussion of how regulation might make the
system safer. Instead, the two parties swapped slogans and catchwords. During
the floor debates on final passage in the House, the galleries were never full
and often empty.
Frank and Dodd were
both remarkable leaders, nurturing support, solving tactical problems and, in
Dodd’s case, finding just enough Republican allies to bring home a bill. They
were old-school legislators who loved the process and knew how to make it work.
Both have now retired
from Congress. Those filling their roles have neither their brainpower nor
their political skill. Too few senior lawmakers in Congress have comparable
talents. Bright, serious people who understand policy still do run for and
serve in the House and the Senate, but they are a small minority. Service in
Congress is losing its allure.
It is difficult to
imagine that the House and Senate giants of the recent past would run for those
jobs today. Would Everett McKinley Dirksen enjoy begging for money? Would
Howard Baker have put up with it? Or Philip Hart or Paul Douglas? Peter Rodino
or Lee Hamilton? Would any of them enjoy the life of a modern member of
Congress, working three- or four-day weeks in Washington and flying home every
weekend, flitting from subject to subject and mastering none? I doubt it.
The culture of
Congress is the problem. It took more than three decades for this culture to
evolve, and it is now deeply entrenched. That is why the current Congress is
unable to function. It is revealing that the only issue now offering any hope
for compromise is immigration — because many Republicans fear the political
consequences of failing to act. Once again, politics trumps policy.
This dysfunctional
culture won’t be altered in an election cycle or two. Because of it, our
Congress is broken.
kaiserr@washpost.com
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