News you're probably not focusing on:
Mary Jo White, President Barack Obama's pick to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will likely face tough questions Tuesday from senators about her decade of legal work representing some of the nation’s largest banks and corporations.Last night, on Rachel Maddow's show, Eliot Spitzer and guest host Ezra Klein briefly discussed the fact that Democratic senator Sherrod Brown has been working with a Republican colleague, David Vitter, on legislation to break up the big banks. I have no idea what they'll come up with -- though it doesn't really matter, because we know that the legislation won't even come close to passing.
But after the Senate Banking Committee hearing is over, White is ultimately expected to win confirmation from the full Senate....
White, 65, would step into the job at a critical moment for the SEC.
Critics have complained that the agency has failed to act aggressively to charge top executives at the biggest U.S. banks who may have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis....
But you know when I'd stand up a cheer a Republican senator, and happily join in a Twitter "#standwith" campaign? I'd cheer if David Vitter conducted a 13-hour talking filibuster against Mary Jo White's nomination, just to protest the mollycoddling -- the bipartisan mollycoddling -- of the big banks, the way Rand Paul used Chuck Hagel's nomination as an excuse to inveigh against drones.
I'm not saying that Vitter has any intention of doing something like this. I'm just offering this as a hypothetical.
Here's the thing: It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone I know will ever be the noncombatant victim of a U.S. government drone strike. It's not going to happen to anyone you know, either.
But we will all suffer in the next financial crisis -- and there will be another crisis, probably within a decade or so. That's about how often we've had them since Reagan became president.
If a Republican broke with party orthodoxy and bipartisan conventional wisdom and stood in the well of the Senate for hours to protest an outrage that will actually happen? Then I'd #stand.
2 comments:
Vitter certainly could filibuster at greater length than Paul given his predilection for diapers.
Oh, I would, too!
But it ain't gonna happen.
NOT EVAH!!!
Teddy Roosevelt is dead almost a century, and I don't even see a single Rooseveltian genome in the Republican Party today.
Plenty of Coolidge's, Hoover's, and Phil Gramm's genetic code, but none of Lincoln's, Teddy's, or Ike's.
The time to take the big banks apart would have been at the end of '08, or early '09, when the stench of the economic collapse was still there, right in front of everyone's noses.
But now that the country and world are starting to recover, it's too late.
Sadly, "Too big to fail," is now, "Too big for trial," let alone, "Too big to jail."
Thus spake Obama and Holder.
What we need to prepare for, if we can, is the next collapse caused by these Vulture Capitalists, Shark Bankers, and Bottom-feeding Hedge Fund Managers.
THAT will be the time to take them apart!!!
If, that is, there's anything left to take apart.
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