CARRYING WALL STREET’S WATER…. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is nearing completion of its work, but as is usually the case, the panel’s Republican members are rejecting the bipartisan findings.
They’ve apparently been a joy to work with.
During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.
I generally find the Republican worldview to be incomprehensible, but I’m not even sure what the point of an effort like this would be. Some of these words and phrases are pretty integral to understanding the industry crisis. As Kevin Drum noted earlier, “It’s like writing about the New Testament without mentioning Jesus. I guess you could do it, but what’s the point?”
The larger takeaway, at least for me, is that the GOP is getting more brazen when it comes to these issues. It was discouraging enough when Republican leaders partnered with Wall Street lobbyists to try to kill financial regulatory reform.
But it keeps getting worse. Just this week, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), who is poised to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, announced, “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
That said, exit polls from the midterm elections found that a plurality of voters believed the financial industry deserves the most blame for the recession — and those voters strongly preferred Republicans to Democrats.
Why? Because sometimes politics doesn’t make sense.
