(edited for copyright purposes proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)
Go read the whole thing:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/188551?RS_show_page=0# - Rolling Stone
It's not that there's nothing good in the bill. In fact, there are many good things in it, even some historic things. Sen. Bernie Sanders and others won a fight to allow Congress to audit the Fed's books for the first time ever. A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to protect against predatory lending and other abuses. New lending standards will be employed in the mortgage industry; no more meth addicts buying mansions with credit cards. And in perhaps the biggest win of all, there will be new rules forcing some varieties of derivatives – the arcane instruments that Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction" – to be traded and cleared on open exchanges, pushing what had been a completely opaque market into the light of day for the first time.
All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.During an other-wise deathly boring year spent covering this debate, I learned to derive some entertainment from watching politicians scramble to give floor speeches about financial reform without disclosing the fact that they didn't have the first fucking clue what a credit-default swap is, or how a derivative works. This was certainly true of Democrats, but the Republicans were way, way better at it. Their strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: Don't even bother trying to figure out the math-y stuff, and instead just blame the entire crisis on government efforts to make homeowners of lazy black people. "Private enterprise mixed with social engineering" was how Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama put it, with a straight face, not long before the bill passed.
The argument favored by Wall Street lobbyists and Obama's team of triangulating pro-business Democrats was more subtle. In this strangely metaphysical version of recent history, the economy was ruined by bad luck and a few bad actors, not by any particular law or policy. It was the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument expanded to cover global financial fraud. "There is an assumption that math is evil," insisted Keith Hennessey, a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, at a hearing in June. "Credit-default swaps are things, and things can't be culprits."
(snip)
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