Senator Professor Warren Is Tired Of Reasoning With You People

[phantom power]

This deal does a lot of things, many of them horrible. It is a veritable compost heap of Republican goodies. The IRS gets defunded, so that phony "social-welfare" political front groups no longer will be inconvenienced in their paperwork. The EPA takes a huge whack, so that conservative bundlers and the oligarchs whom they bundle no longer will be inconvenienced by people who wish to breathe, and who believe their water should be neither yellow nor flammable. But the real Saturday end of it is a provision that guts a key provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill that was passed so that it would be a little harder in the future for people to wreck most of the economy and then steal what's left. Specifically, Congress is preparing to open the casino again.

At issue is the "swaps push-out" rule, which requires banks to move derivatives trading out of taxpayer-backed subsidiaries. Derivatives are risky financial instruments that contributed to the 2008 crash. Allowing banks to conduct those trades on the assumption that taxpayers would bail them out if the deals went sour was not only bad for taxpayers; it also raised the value of the trades and thus effectively acted as a subsidy for the banks. Financial institutions, obviously, weren't thrilled with the new rule. In 2013, lobbyists for Citigroup gave lawmakers a proposal to exempt a wide array of derivatives, and it subsequently appeared in a bill approved by a House committee that year.

Derivatives are what nearly sank the whole thing the last time around. And now, the Congress has decided, in the same kind of "bipartisan" way that brought us the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Trading Act during the Clinton Administration, to let these guys gamble with taxpayer money again. This is such a spectacularly bad idea that it's hard to believe that its supporters didn't sneak it into the bill the way they did just as a goof, to see what they could get away with, those scamps.

"Hey, Bob. Let's see if we can get them to pass the Free Smack Subsidy next! Somebody call Luntz and have him think up a name for it. The Opiate Liberation And Personal Freedom Liberty Act Of 2014, or something."

The arrangement is the result of a "bipartisan compromise" engineered by Mikulski by which Wall Street gets to oil up the roulette wheel again in exchange for increased funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to oversee things like derivatives training, and which the incoming, and more radical, Republican congressional majority surely will chloroform entirely the first chance it gets. Meanwhile, things are being arranged to put us all on the hook again for Wall Street's gambling jones. And Senator Professor Warren, who can see a church by daylight, is having none of it. She rose yesterday to excoriate the covert sellout and, by extension, the people in both parties who connived to bring it about. You want bipartisanship? This is bipartisanship.

"I come to the floor today to ask a fundamental question -- who does Congress work for? Does it work for the millionaires, the billionaires, the giant companies with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers? Or does it work for all of us?"

I'm not entirely sure that she has the votes to stop this abomination. People want to go home for Christmas. Everybody's drunk deeply of the egg nog in the rancid punchbowl of "compromise" for its own sake. Right now, she's counting on the House to strip it from the bill, but a large portion of the House majority is crazy, and a large portion of the House minority is hiding behind the drapes, so I'm not optimistic. (Nancy Pelosi has gotten ferocious on the issue, though, so we'll see.) It will be interesting to see if she exercises her right to talk the provision to death against what will be a well-organized counterattack by the Very Serious People who will sing in one voice the praises of "bipartisan" governance against this noisy obstructionist. Nothing in her career so far is as serious a gut check as this one is. The inserted provision strikes at the very heart of everything that made her a senator in the first place. It will be interesting to see if how many people have her back.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Senator_Professor_Warren_Meets_Her_Moment

[RiverLover]

1. They better have her back, because its our back too.

She's fighting this for all of us, to help protect us from another crash.

[yeoman6987]

2. If she is frustrated with a Democratic Majority,

Just wait until January. I feel for her. I hope she is taking care of herself. The stress she must have must be a lot. Keep fighting for us and thank you!

[Scuba]

3. The two parties are different but it's issues like this that make me want them to be more different.