Complete Text of the Glass-Steagall Act
March 29, 2010
Read it.
Copy it.
Print it.
Go shake it at your Congressperson.
We need a new one.
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Good job ! I’ve posted this as a link in our blogroll for permanent quick reference once this post scrolls off. It is also good to know that Scribd works here. Could be handy in the future.
Now to read the thing.
And just in case Mr. Taibbi shows up I would like to give him a huge high fucking five, for all his great squidly contributions and for skewering the ratfuckers at Goldman with such wonderful linguistic acrobatics. :-)
Here are some extremely good arguments for why we need a new Glass-Steagall Act and other regulation like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
And let’s not forget it was under Democratic president Bubba Clinton that the original Act was gutted so beware of weasel words from the weak kneed Democrats in Congress (and republicans too-kind of goes without saying) now pushing for “reform”.
From Allen Farago – An Economy Without Firewalls.
Read the whole thing and note how lack of regulation in this area indirectly allows a lot of environmental destruction as well.
Elizabeth Warren rips into the banking lobby – Banking on Hypocrisy.
James Kwak at the Baseline Scenario concurs.
Also from Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson weighs in – Volcker, Warren, and Kaufman: There Must Be New Law.
And here is Senator Kaufman’s speech from a few days ago on the subject – Ending Too Big Too Fail.
For those not familiar with Kaufman, he is a Senator from Delaware appointed to serve the remainder of Joe Biden’s term. He is not running again so he is not raising money and is beholden to nobody. He seems to be taking his job a lot more seriously than back-slapping Biden did. Take the time to read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that the currently proposed legislation is not nearly strict enough and basically just reiterates regulations that are already on the books but were not enforced and still aren’t being enforced. The only solution is a new Glass-Steagall with new firewalls which would break up the too-big-to-fail banks once and for all.
Also, another book to add to the reading queue – 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown from James Kwak and Simon Johnson.
Ha! This little post sums up Paul Krugman pretty well.
A couple years ago I took what he had to say a little more seriously but in the ensuing months he has definitely NOT been one of those who is willing to criticize the Democrats harshly when they do the exact same fucked up things as the republicans. His coverage of the health care “reform” sham went almost exactly as the author above speculates his coverage of financial “reform” will go.
Just got an email that “<0" will be making an appearance in my fair city on April Fool's Day.
How utterly appropriate.
Indeed. It is also, if I remember correctly, the one year anniversary of our little blog. An auspicious day to be sure. I have always identified with court jesters and truth telling fools. I promise in advance that I won’t delete this blog like some other fool of the briney variety, even in jest.
Let me know if you’ve got a good anniversary post to put up! I’ve got no good ideas right now.
I’m working on an image, so at the least I can post another thread. Not sure of any substantive text though. At the moment I only feel like flinging expletives at Obama.
More on elephant locomotion: elephants move like 4×4 vehicles in the sense that each limb acts in propulsion and in braking.
Details sadly behind the Great Wall of PNAS.
Interesting. My first thought was that it wasn’t really all that complicated and the reason they walk funny is because their back legs bend in the opposite direction than most (all?) other four-footed mammals. Here’s another article from a few years ago about the same researcher. Evidently he’s heard comments like mine before. :)
Here’s an interesting article from what I gather is a relatively new Discover website called Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Tree ring analysis has shown that the one glittering city of Angkor Wat may have fallen into ruin due to two severe droughts.
As with the plight of the Mayans the Khmer could not adapt to the environmental flux, their infrastructure too rigid, the exploitation of resources too demanding. The lessons stare us all in the face and our leaders keep us in stasis.
Check out this bullshit on the SEC’s decision to limit short-selling – SEC Let Politics Spur Short-Sale Decision. Whether it’s health care or economics or the environment the actual facts seem irrelevant to the government these days. Decisions get made entirely on the basis of what the corporate masters who paid for their political whores want.
There’s been a lot of back and forth with the rules on shorting and I just don’t get it. The problem is not shorting stocks. If we are going to live in a system which allows the casino that is the stock market to operate and we are going to allow the idiots on CNBC with their horns and bells and whistles blaring to do things like tout the stocks of companies that have never made a dime, sending their prices higher on no fundamental basis whatsoever, then there is nothing wrong with allowing those who call bullshit on all this into the market too. Again,the problem is not with short-selling, it is with naked short-selling aka counterfeiting. That’s already illegal as well it should be but of course nobody at the SEC has bothered to look into who was doing all the naked shorting of Lehman brothers before its collapse.
More vitriol about this from Zerohedge:
He could use a little help with his French history (pedant alert! :P ) since it was Louis XV who said “Apres moi, le deluge” and it seems he may be confusing that Louis with Marie Antoinette, married to Louis XVI, but other than that he sounds right on to me.
Good on you. High five with 8 tentacles.
Drill, Barry, Drill
Obama to permit oil exploration off Virginia coast
And those Republicans are saying he isn’t going far enough. Reagan really is a zombie and he has come back as Obama. Jesus fuck. The capitulation from this horrible point of origin can only end very badly for the environment, not to mention the environmental movement.
He is keeping the promise of his State of the Union. His groupies are no doubt going to cheerlead that fact. Sickness.
Truly sickening. Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Barry’s going to allow drilling in order to get the support from republicans whose support he doesn’t actually need since the Dems have a majority in both houses of Congress in order to pass a climate change bill that likely won’t do jack to help the climate because it’ll be all about carbon credits and even if it did help it would all be offset by the extra fossil fuels from the drilling he started in the first place.
And yeah, the same people who would have excoriated Bush will cheer Barry on.
Check out this video interview with Bill Black from Real News Network.
Here’s Part 1:
The rest of the series can be found here.
Good post by Yves on the continued practice of mortgage fraud. Again, this is the core problem in my view. No matter the green shoots, the uptick in mortgage applications, the elevation in the manipulated markets, the marginal increase in hiring the corruption engaged in by fraudsters is still there; their wheeling and dealing enabled, not deterred. The pirates are still pillaging, the criminals are still stealing. There is no grounds for credibility or trust.
Rampant fraud in the mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned Friday of an “epidemic” of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become “the next S&L crisis.”
And here is a related story from the LA Times about the larger long term picture
Housing crisis turns some suburban neighborhoods into ghost towns
For our vast readership who may not click that link, the FBI wasn’t warning this past Friday, but a Friday back in 2004. Nobody listened then and nobody among those who have the power to change those practices is listening now.
Some food for thought – James Lovelock asserts that humanity is too stupid to prevent climate change.
And a link to a larger transcript of the interview.
More Brave New World – Columbia scientist grows a human jaw bone from stem cells.
A big fuuuuuuuuuuuu-uuuu-uuuuuck you to Olympia Snowe. I didn’t like the health care bill either but bullshit like this is just ridiculous.
So quickly????!?!?!?! Correct me if I’m wrong here Olympia but hadn’t all of you assholes in DC been dithering about this bill for well over a year? There was absolutely nothing done to ‘cram this down anyone’s throat’ and certainly nothing that the republicans hadn’t done dozens of times themselves to pass even worse legislation.
And I’m sure Ms. Snowjob is well aware that any of her concerns about small business suffering could have been alleviated by passing a real government run universal single payer system rather than continuing to coddle the parasites in the health insurance industry which Snowe supports.
On a related note, I got another email today about the upcoming “<0" visit to my fair city from a local activist group which ostensibly supports a single payer system. They got wind that the nutjobs will be there protesting the recently passed health care reform and wanted to make sure others were there to "thank" "<0" for his efforts with suggestions for positive signs that could be made. I wrote back giving my own suggestions for some signs, told them it was a peasant mentality that thanked the powers that be for the crumbs they threw to the rest of us, and that I would not be volunteering my efforts any longer if this was the best they could come up with.
What passes for the left in this country has truly been kneecapped and rendered useless by the snake oil salesmanship of Obama and the Democrats. Time to grow some balls and remember that it's not OK when the Dems pull the same fucking bullshit as the republicans do.
More evidence of the police state this nation has become.
For the sake of argument, let’s just say the police do spot somebody on the subway who wants to blow some shit up. They’re going to open fire on a crowded subway with automatic weapons? Really? I’m sure that wouldn’t cause any “collateral damage” whatsoever.
Way too much crazy going around with just about everything. Isn’t there just one issue that could be discussed without injecting copious doses of insane into it?
Need a job? Looks like there’s a demand in the NE for people willing to run a slaughterhouse to meet the demands for locally grown meat.
The article concentrates on Vermont, an area I’m very familiar with, and gets to the root of some of the problems.
My family’s farm in VT used to slaughter animals for other people until new regulation made it not worth their time. Now they just do it for personal consumption. So much regulation, sometimes by design when the big companies write it, actually hinders small business and adds to the bottom lines of the corporations as their competitors go under. Some reasonable regulation that allows small operations to slaughter animals without having to build a facility only a big corporation can afford would probably alleviate that problem for a lot of farmers.
One other problem.
I don’t think it’s really that complicated since, as melvin mentioned in this excellent post, there are plenty of people (like my family) who know how to do this stuff already – they just get forgotten and forced out. My family’s farm is fed by an abundant natural spring and is in a rural area where there aren’t too many people around to bother. My relatives can turn a live cow into two sides of beef in about an hour. The waste gets thrown in the fields and eaten by coyotes and other animals (Of course the coyotes in turn sometimes get shot as they’re eating the offal, but that’s another story).
If small slaughterhouses were as abundant as they used to be there would be more waste. I’m quite familiar with the man who used to take care of this problem in the town of Woodstock mentioned in the article. His name was Cy Osmer and he was a knacker who picked up dead farm animals in his pick up and sold them. He didn’t smell that great and he used to put off the tourists by driving through town with four stiff legs sticking up from of the back of his truck which I found highly amusing. Just found this little blurb which has a good description of him too. Despite his choice of work, the man was definitely not poor as my family has attested to on several occasions when I asked about the guy as a kid.
Anyway, this is a problem which can be solved pretty easily by simply going back to the way things used to be not all that long ago if the politicians and the corporations they represent would just get out of the way.
I loved this one. Former coca grower and current Bolivian president Evo Morales has long argued that Bolivian government would take care of the cocaine produced in Bolivia without the “help” of US anti-drug crusaders and that the coca plant has many beneficial uses and it should be allowed to continue to be cultivated. Now Evo and the Bolivians are sticking it to Coca-Cola with Coca Colla.
Ha! I’ll drink to that!
Raincoast Conservation Foundation has finally coughed up its report What’s at stake? The cost of oil on British Columbia’s priceless coast (63-page pdf). This report was much hyped last week as part of the Exxon Valdez anniversary push against the horrors of the tar sands coming to the coast, but then the electronic version mysteriously never appeared. Allegedly for technical reasons, but a very quick scan suggests that the legal advisors were probably having fits. There is a review of Enbridge’s record on pipeline leaks, for instance, which is not what you’d call favorable.
Will have to be updating this at the Deli later – today is not my best day.
Oh, Discover magazine also named Human predators outpace other agents of trait change in the wild one of its Top Science Stories of 2009. Its first author Chris Darimont is also one of the principal authors of What’s at stake?.
How cool is this?
Dome School Biochar Project
The Dome School is a
That was pretty neat. I think it’s great that they are teaching kids how to actually do things and make the things they may need rather than letting them think it all comes from the big box store. And they learn a lot about science in the process. The whole saving the urine thing I’m not sure I’d be that into, but other than that it was really cool.