Ruthless and Relentless Republicans
Posted by Michelle Moquin on July 5th, 2011
Good morning!
Financial Reform: Republicans Fight To Dilute Wall Street Regulations
WASHINGTON –President Barack Obama’s financial overhaul law is nearly a year old. For congressional Republicans, the fight to weaken it is just starting.
Wary of trying to repeal the entire statute and being portrayed as Wall Street’s protectors – banks rank among the country’s least popular institutions – GOP lawmakers are trying to nibble away at the behemoth measure. It’s a crusade they’re waging despite lacking the White House and Senate control they need to prevail.
Days ago, one Republican-run House committee approved bills diluting parts of the law requiring reports on corporate salaries and exempting some investment advisers from registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another House panel voted to slice $200 million from Obama’s $1.4 billion budget request for the SEC, which has a major enforcement role.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are continuing a procedural blockade that has helped prevent Obama from putting Elizabeth Warren or anyone else in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opens its doors in two weeks.
The law hurts “the formation of capital, the cost of capital and access to capital, and you can’t have capitalism without capital,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, a leader of the House Financial Services Committee. “So Republicans in the House will be examining each and every one of the 2,000-plus pages” of the law, which he called “a job creator’s nightmare.”
Confident that Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate can prevent the House from doing major damage, Democrats view the Republican drive as a political exercise – for now.
“It’s mostly setting a marker for the election. And it helps with their campaign contributions,” said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who chaired the Financial Services Committee last year and was a chief author of the law. “But it also tells people in the financial community that if they win the next election, they’ll be able to undo it all.”
The financial industry leans Republican in its campaign contributions but not overwhelmingly. Sixty-one percent of the $9 million that commercial banks gave federal candidates for the 2010 elections went to Republicans, while 54 percent of the securities and investment industry’s $9 million went to Democrats, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Democrats are using the GOP drive for their own fundraising.
In one email sent last week under Frank’s name soliciting money for House candidates, the party wrote that Republicans want to “bring back the days of unrestrained excess, deception and de-regulation of Wall Street.” The mailing called it “payback to their big contributors in the financial services industry.”
Obama signed the banking and consumer protection measure last July 21, a keystone achievement that responded to the biggest financial crisis and most severe recession since the 1930s. It passed Congress with solid Democratic support and near-uniform GOP opposition.
Among its provisions, the law:
_ Created the consumer protection agency to oversee mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.
_ Established a body of regulators to scan the economy for threats to the financial system.
_ Required banks to hold back money for protection against losses.
_ Curbed the trading of derivatives, speculative investments partly blamed for the 2008 financial crisis.
_ Gave the Federal Reserve powers to oversee huge companies whose failures could jeopardize the entire financial system.
Yet the law was just a start, since it ordered federal agencies to craft rules to enforce it. As of July 1, out of an estimated 400 regulations to be written, 38 are complete. That leaves 362 proposed, facing a future deadline or having missed due dates for completion, according to the law firm Davis Polk.
Republicans say the overhaul went too far and has saddled banks and other companies with requirements that harm their competitiveness. The House Financial Services panel alone has held more than a dozen hearings on the law, in part to underscore to administration witnesses that some provisions – like forcing banks to hold back capital as a hedge against losses – will hurt business, according to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.
“What we are doing is rational, it is sensible, it is entirely practical, it is compassionate,” said Rep. Nan Hayworth, R-N.Y., a tea party-backed freshman on that panel. “So we are doing the right thing, and it behooves the Senate and the administration to follow suit.”
The highest-profile fight has been over Warren, picked by Obama to set up the new consumer bureau. Many Democrats and liberal groups want her to become its first director.
Following a May clash between Warren and a House subcommittee chairman, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., plans to question the Harvard law professor and long-time consumer activist at a July 14 hearing about her role shaping the new agency.
Meanwhile, 44 GOP senators have promised to block a vote on any nominee unless the bureau is made “accountable to the American people” by replacing the director with a board of directors and giving Congress control over its budget. Forty-one senators can prevent a nomination from coming to a vote.
“You try to get leverage where you can. In the Senate, nominations are your leverage,” said Mark A. Calabria, who monitors financial regulation at the conservative-leaning Cato Institute.
On another front, Republicans want to cut the budgets of agencies that are supposed to enforce the overhaul.
Besides denying the SEC extra money next year, the House Appropriations Committee would limit the consumer protection bureau to $200 million, well below the $329 million Obama wants. The full House has voted to hold the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees derivatives, to $171 million, short of this year’s total and less than two-thirds of what Obama wanted.
Republicans cast the cuts as part of their deficit-cutting drive, but Democrats say the reductions are designed to obstruct the new law.
SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro said in a speech this spring that budget cuts would mean “an investor protection effort hobbled.”
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Anonymous: I remember hearing a woman interviewed on NPR awhile ago – can’t remember her name but I remember the statement she made. Not sure if it is original or not but I like it: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but people do”. I’m tired of “history” – I’m ready for “herstory” to be made and told.
Robert: When I perused the comments on the Huff Po, a reader there had mentioned it: “It’s not the extra 3 words but the missing one word that explains it all: “all [white] men are created equal.” I was wondering if one of my readers was going to bring up the “missing word”. And if I had wagered a bet on who that reader would be, I would’ve won.
I also read this comment: “Makes you stop and think doesn’t it. The Europeans came over and took this land away from the original owners of this land much like we are currrently being invaded by foreigners today. Are we all destined to the same fate as the original Americans.”
Yeah, it makes me stop and think all right, but that statement is not what comes to my mind.
Thanks Robert for continuing to be here and taking the time to spell it all out, clear and concise…keeping it real.
Doug: Ooh…I like the ilove.
Jata: I pray for his safety, and the safety of his men and the people of Sudan. And HOPE for a quick return of the U.N. May peace arrive soon.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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July 5th, 2011 at 11:42 am
CHOCOLATE: EVEN HEALTHIER THAN YOU KNEW
One of my coworkers has a secret stash in her bottom desk drawer. Where the characters in Mad Men keep bottles of Scotch, she hoards piles of chocolate bars, truffles and kisses that would make Willy Wonka envious.
As we all happily know by now, numerous studies vindicate my friend’s sweet tooth — trial after trial confirms that healthful components in chocolate and cocoa can be helpful for everything from heart disease to brain function (assuming that we don’t overindulge, of course).
So, here’s the latest good news for my coworker and all you chocoholics — now researchers are finding that chocolate can help sharpen your eyes… and even cure a cough!
SHARPEN YOUR EYES AND MIND
In a small study at the University of Reading in the UK reported in the June 2011 issue of Physiology & Behavior, dark chocolate beat white chocolate (used as a control) in tests of vision and memory and reaction time tasks.
Researchers had 30 volunteers aged 18 to 25 consume two different candy bars — a 35-gram (about 1.25 ounces) commercially available dark chocolate bar containing 773 milligrams of cocoa flavonols and a 35-gram white chocolate bar with no flavonols on separate occasions one week apart.
Afterward, investigators tested volunteers on tasks measuring vision, memory and reaction time.
When the volunteers ate the dark chocolate they experienced 17% enhanced visual sensitivity (the ability to see in difficult conditions) for up to two-and-one-half hours, as compared with when they ate the white chocolate.
In cognitive tests, compared with white chocolate, dark chocolate stepped up participants’ memory and reaction times — they were able to correctly identify more of a number of objects that had been switched from their original places.
Researchers speculate that cocoa flavonols achieve these effects by increasing blood and oxygen flow. Since the enhanced performance was just among those who ate dark chocolate and not white chocolate, researchers can rule out the “sugar buzz” as being the reason for improved performance.
CHOCOLATE: THE NEW COUGH MEDICINE
What else can chocolate do for us? Produce a more effective cough medicine? Why not, say scientists at Imperial College London, who determined that theobromine — a key ingredient in chocolate — was one-third more successful in quieting coughs than the powerful narcotic codeine.
About the research: On three different occasions, investigators gave 10 healthy volunteers theobromine, codeine or a placebo.
Next they exposed them to capsaicin, the spicy compound in red pepper that can make some people cough.
Higher amounts of capsaicin (about one-third more) were required to produce coughs in the theobromine group, and theobromine proved more effective than a typical dose of codeine as a cough suppressant.
Theobromine directly affects the vagus nerve, which is responsible for coughs, and unlike codeine it does not cause drowsiness.
Codeine is an opiate — so a cocoa-based cough remedy would be much safer for anyone driving, using machinery and so on.
A theobromine-based drug is in clinical trials in the UK.
SATISFY YOUR SWEET TOOTH… BUT IN MODERATION, PLEASE!
Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition, finds chocolate research intriguing and believes it warrants further investigation.
She says that if you enjoy chocolate, go ahead and eat it in moderation — but it should not be your only rich source of flavonols.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s recommendation: Every day, consume a wide range of flavonol-rich foods and beverages, such as blueberries, cranberries, pomegranates, grapes, grape juice, red wine, green tea… and if you like, a little chocolate.
Source(s):
Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, Stanley N. Gershoff Professor of Nutrition Science and Policy, Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, director and senior scientist, Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory, Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Center on Aging Professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston.
July 6th, 2011 at 5:43 am
We are in 1881:
OBITUARY
——————————————
“BILLY THE KID” (1859-1881)
Aka Henry or Michael McCarthy aka HenryAntrim aka William H. Bonney
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Born in New York city, “the Kid” accompanied his mother to Indianapolis in 1865, and to Wichita, Kansas in 1870, where she married her second husband, William Antrim. In 1871 the family moved to New Mexico for Mrs. Antrim’s health, despite which she died of consumption n 1874.
Soon after her death, the Kid turned delinquent and joined Jesse Evans’s desperadoes, adopting the name “William Bonney.”
His youth and daring made him a popular hero for the last year of his life. He was free from racism, and spoke perfect Spanish among the Mexicans, whose dances he loved. Most of the community adored him, but his habit of sleeping promiscuously with their wives and daughters made him enemies, and two of those betrayed him.
July 6th, 2011 at 5:46 am
My, God, the ink was barely dry on the law and the republicans are out in force trying to give back the power to the banks.
July 6th, 2011 at 5:51 am
Wonder what a guy has to do to get some loving?