HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!
It all worked perfectly!
Distract us by annihilating the Gulf of Mexico, smothering it in a blanket of oil and deadly chemicals and while we’re focused on that debacle go behind our backs to pretend to reform the hubris and greed of Wall Street – while in reality setting us up for even more catastrophe!
I love it when a plan comes together! MUAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!
The big news of the day will be, “Congress agrees on financial reform; the most significant financial reform since the 1930s.”
And that may be true – but this 
reform is nothing like the reform following the excesses that led to the Great Depression. No one on Wall Street is out. The big banks will continue to suck money directly from taxpayers and good, decent ‘Murkins. The rich will continue to get richer and the poor (the remaining 90 percent of us) can just suck it…oh, and get poorer.
And not only that, the “reform” will do nothing – nothing, I tell ya – to prevent exactly what happened in 2008 to bring us to the brink of another Great Depression.
Is this a great country or what?
Oh sure, sure; the bank reforms pretend to make corrections to the way megabanks take our loans, bundled them into packages, break them apart again and sell them while insuring them and making huge dollars at both ends of the deal gone wrong.
The reforms will require the big firms and banks to put their derivatives trade into smaller, so-called “outside” companies. But this is merely window-dressing, a shell game to give the appearance of magic.
What the reforms did not do is to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented for nearly 50 years the financial games that brought us to the brink of ruin in 2008. Nope, neither Congress nor the Obama Administration was going to allow that – too much money and influence on the table from the big banks.
What the reforms also failed to do is to throttle back the megabanks. Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, tried to do that. The Brown-Kaufman Amendment to the financial reform package would have required the six biggest banks to be broken up into smaller institutions.
“To big to fail” would have relegated to the history books. But, oh no, we couldn’t let THAT happen. We need Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to be HUGE so they next time – and some say soon – they blow up like balloons they can bring down the rest of us with them!
Like they nearly did in 2008.
So as you struggle to make your next mortgage payment or put food on your table or wonder how you will afford school next year for your kids remember this day when all of Washington was jubilant over financial reforms. We should remind them of the question asked by the great philosopher Janet “You can call me Miss” Jackson:
“What have you done for me, lately?”
UGH!I did a really long reply to your post but my internet cut out and I lost it all! Oh well, just wanted to say that it was a great article! Nicely done!