On Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:35:27 -0800, Hawke
wrote:

F. George McDuffee wrote:

There seems to be very little actual teeth in the bill in the
form of jail time, fines, asset forfeiture, or revocation of
corporate charter. The only place I could find imprisonment
mentioned was page 1198 and that only for SIPC membership
representation.

Half a loaf is better than none, but still no Glass-Steagall.


Unka George (George McDuffee)
..............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

It just goes to show you how bad off we are. When we had the crash of
1929 and the following depression the Democrats running the country
weren't kidding around. They put in regulations that had teeth in them
and really put the financial sector under governmental control and
scrutiny. Not these days. The country is so bound to the free market
Utopian ideology that you can't even get the Democrats to do what is
necessary to keep the financial sector properly regulated let alone the
republicans.

As I said in another post, the republican leadership is meeting with 100
lobbyists to try to find ways to prevent any new regulation of finance.
You have the anti regulation republicans and the Democrats who are tepid
on regulation. So you see what that gets us. New regulation of the
industry, but so it's so weak it doesn't mean anything. Chalk up another
win for the corporations. Looks like it's a good week for them. First
the financial industry is able to water down regulation so much it is
non existent and the health insurance industry destroys the government
run health care reform. No changes, status quo protected once again.
What a country!

Hawke
==============
This just showed up on the WSJ site detailing how Goldman-Sachs
played the financial system like a Moog Synthesizer in the run-up
to the credit spasm, and hauled taxpayer dollars away from AIG in
semi-trailers.
see
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...p_mostpop_read

An article on Bloomberg details how G/S continues to "game the
system" using taxpayer funding with comments by Paul Volker.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...xuVk7g3U&pos=1
snip
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which took $10
billion in U.S. bailout funds last year, shouldn’t get taxpayer
support if the firm focuses on trading over banking, according to
former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

The “safety net” provided by the U.S. government “should not be
extended beyond the core commercial-banking business,” Volcker,
82, said in an interview yesterday at Deutsche Bank AG’s Berlin
office, where he was attending a conference. “They can do trading
and do anything they want, but then they shouldn’t have access to
the safety net.”
snip

Who said bipartisanship is dead?


Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).