More stealing from James Fallows’ blog — he sat down with Bob Garfield of the great NPR show “On the Media” to discuss the failure of the media to clarify the lunacy of the filibuster. (If I hear one more media outlet report that the Senate Democrats lost their majority when a Republican won the Massachusetts’ Senate seat, I will bang my head against the wall. They lost only their 60-seat supermajority and still hold an 18-seat majority; 19 if you count Joe Lieberman. In the absurd system we have, that’s apparently not enough to get stuff done. Sigh.)
It’s amazing to go from here to here, but that’s life. It was a gracious exit, but hopefully we won’t be waiting long for Coco’s next adventure. Watch the final episode below.
People make mistakes. They get into trouble. And then they become a cog in a political-financial machine. Should a half-million people sit in jail because they can’t afford to pay a bondsman, who does almost nothing to earn his fee? Should taxpayers be subsidizing these crooks? Should nonviolent petty criminals have their lives ruined because they can’t afford 50 bucks to get out of jail? NPR, in a three-part series, takes a very hard look at the bail bond racket and it’s eye opening.
No, the spirit of Glass-Steagall, as in that’s what the current White House plans revive with an imminent proposal to curb the power of big banks. (WSJ via HuffPost.)
“President Barack Obama on Thursday is expected to propose new limits on the size and risk taken by the country’s biggest banks, marking the administration’s latest assault on Wall Street in what could mark a return, at least in spirit, to some of the curbs on finance put in place during the Great Depression, according to congressional sources and administration officials.”
Before it was repealed in 1999, the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act kept banks banks and investment firms investment firms. An excellent timeline by PBS’s Frontline explains that the act sought to–
“… limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. [Sound familiar?] The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage). The act also establishes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), insuring bank deposits, and strengthens the Federal Reserve’s control over credit.” [snarky comments added by me.]
The timeline adds that support for passage of the bill was drummed up by “Ferdinand Pecora, a politically ambitious former New York City prosecutor,” who hauled “bank officials in front of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee to answer for their role in the stock-market crash.”
Let’s see which ambitious politician is ready to take on the banks this time and fly with the gassy seagull spirits once again.
If you want a window into just how craptastic Wall Street’s behavior was during the housing bubble–and quite likely still is–try to pick up the full version of “The Sure Thing” in the New Yorker. While largely about entrepreneurial risk-taking, it tells the story of how one hedge-fund manager and one researcher saw the crisis clearly and made billions of dollars shorting a mortgage market they knew would eventually implode.
NPR has a great photo and stories (audio and written) about U.S. troops landing at the presidential palace in Haiti today. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to see their White House crumbled. Maybe this gives people a little hope. This viral video of rescue efforts may as well:
The devastation in Haiti is truly heartbreaking. It’s impossible to read or watch the coverage without tearing up at the indiscriminate nature of this disaster. I keep hoping that more aid will get through, but also that short-term assistance is coordinated and that rescue and recovery efforts — to the extent practical — minimize waste and chaos and maximize the chances that Haiti will be able to successfully rebuild. In other words, that international aid organizations and governments work together, reduce turf wars, put aside profit and greed, and do right by the country and its people.
Tonight, a segment on the Rachel Maddow Show introduced me to Partners in Health, a primarily U.S.-funded organization that works in the suburbs and ex-urbs of Port-au-Prince delivering health care services to the Haitian people. Its largely indigenous staffers, well supplied at the moment, are seeing earthquake patients right now. Pulitzer-prize-winning author Tracy Kidder, who wrote an article yesterday in the New York Times about Haiti, its history, and the tangled tale of humanitarian assistance there, spoke movingly about supporting Partners in Health and organizations like it that build grass-roots institutions, and about being mindful about where to donate now and in the future.
No, the spirit of Glass-Steagall, as in that’s what the current White House plans revive with an imminent proposal to curb the power of big banks. (
