banking committee Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

Monday Afternoon News Roundup

It seems to me that there’s more going on with Hamas in the Gaza Strip the meets the eye. I don’t understand the strategy of lobbing missiles into Israel. What were they hoping to accomplish? Were they thinking that they had improved relationships within the Arab world? Will their Arab neighbors like Egypt come to the rescue? That simply doesn’t make any sense to me. None of this makes any sense, unless Hamas was trying to lower Israel into a ground war. Maybe Hamas has obtained chemical or biological weapons from Iran. Maybe Hamas wants to sucker the Israelis into making some major error which would cause an enormous number of Israeli casualties. I don’t know. It simply doesn’t make any sense.

There are several things that need to be reformed in our government. In no particular order – we don’t need a debt ceiling. It has become a political hot potato in which Republicans can rail on about how much money the government is spending. Election reform is mandatory. We need some sort of national standards for elections. It doesn’t make sense that it took me seven minutes to vote (including time chatting with the folks working at the polling station) and other Americans spent more than seven hours in line waiting to exercise this basic civic duty. The filibuster in the Senate also needs to be rethought and revised. As of now, simply threatening to filibuster causes legislation to be derailed; therefore, almost everything requires sixty votes in order to pass.

British Petroleum is not a criminal. British Petroleum is a company. BP is nothing but a pile of papers and agreements. Criminal behavior can only be done by people; people like the executives of British Petroleum.

Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren should be placed on the banking committee! No one in the Senate is more qualified. In my mind, she should be Senate majority leader, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Look for the financial industry to fight hard to try to keep Elizabeth Warren off of the banking committee.

By ecthompsonmd|2012-11-19T21:12:44-04:00November 19th, 2012|Israel, Party Politics|2 Comments

GOP supporting a Consumer Protection Agency would be news

When was the last time the GOP stood up for anything to help the average American? I can’t think of anything, but maybe you can. In order for the GOP to tell you that they support the average American you have to use some mental gymnastics — by trying to create an environment where big business can trounce any individual initiative or entitlement, big business can then hire more people, so… therefore (here it comes) they support the American people. This is what the GOP has been arguing for over three decades.

So it comes as no shock that Republicans are going to oppose the new consumer financial protection agency.

From HuffPo:

Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency.

Consumer advocates, meanwhile, say the CFPA must have strong, independent authority to craft and enforce rules. Anything less, they argue, would be too much of a concession to banks that have gotten enough already.

“From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema,” said Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, a senior Republican on the banking committee. An independent agency, he said, can go too far in the direction of tight regulation without taking into account the effect of the rules it creates on business and the economy. He said he’s seen it happen before.

“Can you say EPA?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows. The Republican Party has regretted for years that President Richard Nixon made the EPA independent. (more…)

By ecthompsonmd|2010-01-05T07:22:56-04:00January 5th, 2010|Business, Congress, Party Politics|Comments Off