Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
"It's not a war of ideas, it's a war of resources"
But this is the key to understanding how financial lobbyists succeed in getting what it wants on the regulatory front: They never stop. It's not a war of ideas, it's a war of resources. You march up the Hill with some crazy idea about overturning a bill prohibiting bailouts of companies that engage in risky derivative trades, you get knocked down, and you march up again, then you march up again, and again . . .
With each successive attempt, you peel off a few more Committee members in the House, slowly but surely weakening resolve. And while you're attacking on the legislative front, you also file a series of lawsuits that tie up the process by targeting reforms in court, and then you also send armies of lobbyists to sit in the laps of regulators during the rule-making process, so that key new laws (like the Volcker rule, designed to separate risky trading from federally-insured depository banking) are either written in reams of industry-friendly language, or delayed altogether.
No matter how bad your ideas are, and how unpopular they are (or, rather, would be, if anyone in the general public understood them and/or cared enough about them to complain to their congressional reps), you can still score huge wins just by continually attacking and chipping away.
Which brings us to this month: A little while back, I got a call from someone in the House. "You wouldn't believe the shit they just pushed through the Financial Services Committee,” he groaned. This person read off a list of bills, suggested I look them up, then specifically told me to look at how many Democrats voted "yea" on them.
"A lot of bad D votes on this one," was the editorial comment here.
Almost all of these bills turned out to be aimed directly at Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, i.e. the derivatives portion.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/deja-vu-on-the-hill-wall-street-lobbyists-roll-back-finance-reform-again-20130521
With each successive attempt, you peel off a few more Committee members in the House, slowly but surely weakening resolve. And while you're attacking on the legislative front, you also file a series of lawsuits that tie up the process by targeting reforms in court, and then you also send armies of lobbyists to sit in the laps of regulators during the rule-making process, so that key new laws (like the Volcker rule, designed to separate risky trading from federally-insured depository banking) are either written in reams of industry-friendly language, or delayed altogether.
No matter how bad your ideas are, and how unpopular they are (or, rather, would be, if anyone in the general public understood them and/or cared enough about them to complain to their congressional reps), you can still score huge wins just by continually attacking and chipping away.
Which brings us to this month: A little while back, I got a call from someone in the House. "You wouldn't believe the shit they just pushed through the Financial Services Committee,” he groaned. This person read off a list of bills, suggested I look them up, then specifically told me to look at how many Democrats voted "yea" on them.
"A lot of bad D votes on this one," was the editorial comment here.
Almost all of these bills turned out to be aimed directly at Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, i.e. the derivatives portion.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/deja-vu-on-the-hill-wall-street-lobbyists-roll-back-finance-reform-again-20130521
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
