“Minorities have an illustrious past, full of suffering, torture, smear, and even death. Jesus Christ was killed by a majority.”
— Senator William Ezra Jenner of Indiana speaking in opposition to invoking cloture by majority vote on January 4, 1957, cited by Senator Robert Byrd, Senate speech on March 1, 2005, warning against a procedural effort being considered by some senators to shut down minority voices in senate debates.
Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has a piece about the watering-down of legislation intended to give Congress greater oversight over the Federal Reserve.
He writes –
“On page five of Grassley’s amendment, he intends to give the Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office power to audit “any action taken by the Board under…the third undesignated paragraph of section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act” — which would be almost everything that it has done on an emergency basis to address the financial crisis, encompassing its massive expansion of opaque buying and lending.
Handwritten into the margins, however, is the amendment that watered it down: “with respect to a single and specific partnership or corporation.” With that qualification, the Senate severely limited the scope of the oversight.
On the Senate floor, Grassley named the top Republican on the banking committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, as the man pouring the water.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up, the Fed’s been lent much more than the $700 billion odd money of the original bail-out. By January 2009, the figure had exceeded $2 trillion, as this video on the oversight problem indicates. Note that the number is now at least $3 trillion plus, according to the Special Inspector-General’s Report on TARP (SIGTARP).
My Comment
The HuffPo piece is just more confirmation of systemic rot, as delineated in this belated but useful Wall Street Journal report on the selling-out of America by Wall Street and Washington.
I only skimmed the report, but I notice that it seems to be blaming the whole mess on deregulation, pinpointing the late 1990s (and onward) as the culmination of bad practices arising from what it calls without irony the “prevailing laissez-faire ideology of the Bush administration” – this, about the most interventionist administration in modern American history. I like to take a nuanced position on regulation but this sticks in my craw.
Sounds like someone’s hustling the plebes away from the scene of the crime, clapping both hands over their eyes, just in case one of ’em catches a glimpse of the plates on the back of the get-away car – FED1917*
For the WSJ it’s all about the late 1980s. It has nothing – repeat, nothing – whatsoever to do with pre-New Deal policies…… nothing, I tell you.
No one’s defending junk-bond kings here, but that sounds a bit loaded to me.
Why am I getting the feeling that for a cynic the fun only begins now…
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* i.e. the creation of the Federal Reserve itself