Blogs: Curbing Wall Street

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OK. Maybe just a Barnum world — P.T. Barnum, that is. This legendary promoter of famous hoaxes comes to mind once again as I watch the various congressional hearings related to the financial crisis, or read of the testimony from those hearings. Why? Because the most famous thing he probably never said — "There's a sucker born ever minute" — could be, and perhaps is, the unofficial motto of Wall Streets banksters and the conservatives (plus some Democrats who should have known better) that aided and abetted them.

And, no, it hardly matters that Barnum is said to have denied uttering the famous words. The phrase was coined in connection to Barnum's role in the Cardiff Giant hoax, an amusing bit of history about a battle between hoaxers and hucksters who didn't much care if their customers knew what what they were paying for or got what they were paying for — so long as the scam paid off, and the scammers got paid in the end.

I couldn't help hearing some hauntingly Barnumeque echoes in Sen. Carl Levin's grilling of Goldman Sachs CFO, David Viniar.

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Today is the big day: thousands of people will march on Wall Street this afternoon to protest big bank abuses. more »

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What we've been witnessing in Washington isn't just political positioning by one party looking to deny the other a victory, although it's certainly that. We're also seeing the death struggle of a dying ideology. This ideology provided intellectual cover to business and political elites for decades, but events have proved conclusively that it doesn't work. What's more, people are beginning to see that it's inconsistent with the country's traditional values of competition and free enterprise. more »

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Senate Republicans have perfected the art of saying no. But in blocking a debate on financial reform, they have begun to imitate Goldman Sachs traders, selling positions that they are betting against.

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6:05

This hearing has now been going for more than eight hours, and for better or for worse, I need to head over to do an interview with Al Jazeera English. It goes on at 7:00. I'll be talking about financial reform, in addition to the Goldman fraud case.

***************

6:00 more »

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Last night, Senate Republicans proved beyond any doubt that when it comes to the economy, they stand with Wall Street and against everybody else. Joined by lone Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Republicans successfully filibustered the procedural technicality of opening debate on Wall Street reform. It's an unmistakable ploy to kill the bill and collect campaign cash from bigwig bankers. The coming weeks won't be pretty.

Republicans are going to be battered by this filibuster. Financial reform is popular, and nobody on Capitol Hill wants to be seen as the agents of Wall Street in Washington come November. Republicans are hoping to rhetorically counter Obama's proposals, negotiate a fatally weakened reform package, and then vote with Democrats for reform-in-name-only before the elections. But the U.S. financial system is broken and voters know it needs strong medicine. more »

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This may be the single biggest lie in modern American history: "Most Republicans want a bill," said Sen. Richard Shelby, "but they want a substantive bill." We've criticized the Democrats plenty of times on the issue of financial reform, and the Dodd bill isn't perfect. But this wasn't a yea-or-nay vote about a bill. It was a vote to decide whether Senators would even be permitted to debate the bill. That difference means everything. more »

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This may be the single biggest lie in modern American history: "Most Republicans want a bill," said Sen. Richard Shelby, "but they want a substantive bill." We've criticized the Democrats plenty of times on the issue of financial reform, and the Dodd bill isn't perfect. But this wasn't a yea-or-nay vote about a bill. It was a vote to decide whether Senators would even be permitted to debate the bill. That difference means everything. more »

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Last week, Larry Summers, the top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, gave a startlingly dishonest interview with PBS Newshour's Jeffrey Brown. more »

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