Banking Deregulation/NSA Spying - Significant Democrat Support

[bshole]

Very disheartening. How can Democrats attack one of Obama's most important achievements? Were their constituents clamoring for this? Who benefits from this and who is put at risk? More importantly, how much money did the Democrats who are supporting this receive from banking interests?

Buoyed by their success in rewriting the tax code, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have now set their sights on helping the financial industry, which has been engaged in a quiet but concerted push to relax many post-crisis rules and regulatory obligations, particularly for thousands of small- and medium-sized banks.

But unlike the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul, which passed along party lines, the effort to loosen the post-crisis rules is somewhat bipartisan. A group of Senate Democrats has joined Republicans to support legislation that would mark the first major revision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a signature accomplishment of President Barack Obama that has been deemed “a disaster” by President Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/us/politics/democrats-banking-rules.html


If that wasn't enough, Democrats just sided with Republicans in the house extending NSA spying on Americans (a clear violation of our civil rights).

Yet up until just hours before the vote, the most powerful member of the Democratic Caucus, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, was notably silent on the bill. If Pelosi had whipped Democrats to vote against the bill and supported the USA RIGHTS Act instead, there’s a good chance that Trump and Ryan would have failed to get their full extension. Yet, just before the floor vote today she said she would not support the USA Rights Act and shamefully voted to hand Trump exactly what he wanted.

Almost worse than Pelosi's willingness to go along with the NSA was Rep. Adam Schiff's, D-Calif., who has seen his star rise over the last year being the Democrat’s go-to voice on the Russia investigation. On CNN with Jake Tapperthis weekend, Schiff talked at length how he thought Trump was abusing his power and misusing the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Nonetheless, Schiff was a leading driver in the House to extend the NSA's surveillance powers, and has been undercutting the more robust reforms proposed by other Democrats, like longtime Senate Intelligence Committee member Sen. Ron Wyden, for months. (The Senate is expected to take up their own vote sometime in the next week if the House passes its bill.)

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opini...ic-surveillance-powers-they-should-ncna836836

 

[UNCjigga]

Not sure if anyone saw this, but Mulvaney (as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) requested a Q2 budget of $0. Remember the recent scramble to appoint a director after Cordray left, and how Leandra English lost to Mulvaney? Well now we know for sure that Trump's mission is to defund the agency tasked with taking on the big banks.

 

[darkswordsman17]

This is actually one of the few instances where conservatives can legitimately cry "both sides!" The stupid thing is, the morons that will fluff Turmp at every turn, who have been crying about this, will defend him and the Republicans on this. Just like they did with the FCC and net neutrality. And in spite of their claims otherwise, I regularly see Obama supporters that say this is one of his biggest failures, and many that felt betrayed by him and the Democrats not dismantling the FISA sham court and surveillance apparatus. I even saw quite a few that pointed to Hilary being even more hawkish about it as a reason they felt they couldn't vote for her (although many have also lamented doing so in hindsight).

The weirdest thing though, is that, this apparatus played a role in exposing the Turmp/Russian interactions. Plus, Turmp has chosen to deliberately ignore what it provides (which might actually be the best thing, although he has others pick out the "blame the brown people" info so they can try and spin their racism as necessary protection), but then that's also partly because he's convinced that its just there to harangue him and his cronies. The alarming thing is that they didn't seem terribly keen on exposing them (pretty much released info when it became an actual issue and started being properly investigated), but they certainly made note of them, which should tell you plenty about the motivations of the intelligence "security" apparatus when it comes down to it. Then again, it being reactive is better than the times it tried to be proactive since so much of that blew up in our faces.

No one should be surprised though considering many Democrats are still quite centrist (not the worst thing, even if I don't agree with them on many points, it sure beats the way Republicans are falling over themselves to see who can skew as far right without being exposed for being sexual predators or complete and total nutjobs). We need to put pressure on them to try to make changes, even if they're small, to help reign this stuff in though.

It'd be nice if our political situation showed people supporting this type of stuff to be extremist and not the relatively rational ones.

 

[dank69]

If conservatives weren't tripping all over themselves to prove how insanely far right they can be, Democrats wouldn't be able to get away with this shit and still be the better choice.

 

[Exterous]

Very disheartening. How can Democrats attack one of Obama's most important achievements? Were their constituents clamoring for this? Who benefits from this and who is put at risk? More importantly, how much money did the Democrats who are supporting this receive from banking interests?

Well, Tim Geitner, Ben Bernake and Frank Dodd all agree the banking regulation is overly restrictive (Tim and Ben have some other issues with the bill as well)

Frank says his namesake financial reform law has been too restrictive on smaller banks. He also believes the threshold used to identify other banks "as too big to fail" should be higher.

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/08/5320...at-reversing-dodd-frank-financial-regulations

The biggest players (the ones who caused the most panic in 2008 and would have crushed everyone if they failed) are unaffected by this change due to size. The biggest failure - WaMu - would still have been covered under the increased capital requirements given its $300bn size. The second largest - IndyMac wouldn't have been covered under the original law anyway ($30bn).

There are some fairly onerous compliance costs for small regional banks, which just encourages the environment of bank mergers leading to 'too big to fail' institutions. While I don't see anything about that yet, loosening those restrictions would be a benefit without significant risk to the over all economy

However, previous Republican talking points have covered significant weakening of powers used to fight the last crisis which would be a huge negative given that the Democrats already stripped fairly significant crisis fighting powers in Frank-Dodd

 

[fskimospy]

Well, Tim Geitner, Ben Bernake and Frank Dodd all agree the banking regulation is overly restrictive (Tim and Ben have some other issues with the bill as well)

https://www.npr.org/2017/06/08/5320...at-reversing-dodd-frank-financial-regulations

The biggest players (the ones who caused the most panic in 2008 and would have crushed everyone if they failed) are unaffected by this change due to size. The biggest failure - WaMu - would still have been covered under the increased capital requirements given its $300bn size. The second largest - IndyMac wouldn't have been covered under the original law anyway ($30bn).

There are some fairly onerous compliance costs for small regional banks, which just encourages the environment of bank mergers leading to 'too big to fail' institutions. While I don't see anything about that yet, loosening those restrictions would be a benefit without significant risk to the over all economy

However, previous Republican talking points have covered significant weakening of powers used to fight the last crisis which would be a huge negative given that the Democrats already stripped fairly significant crisis fighting powers in Frank-Dodd

Yes, raising the capital requirements to be deemed a systemically important institution is something I support. We don’t want to raise it too high, but one step towards limiting the dominance of the big banks is making regulatory compliance easier for smaller ones.

 

[dank69]

Well, Tim Geitner, Ben Bernake and Frank Dodd all agree the banking regulation is overly restrictive (Tim and Ben have some other issues with the bill as well)



https://www.npr.org/2017/06/08/5320...at-reversing-dodd-frank-financial-regulations

The biggest players (the ones who caused the most panic in 2008 and would have crushed everyone if they failed) are unaffected by this change due to size. The biggest failure - WaMu - would still have been covered under the increased capital requirements given its $300bn size. The second largest - IndyMac wouldn't have been covered under the original law anyway ($30bn).

There are some fairly onerous compliance costs for small regional banks, which just encourages the environment of bank mergers leading to 'too big to fail' institutions. While I don't see anything about that yet, loosening those restrictions would be a benefit without significant risk to the over all economy

However, previous Republican talking points have covered significant weakening of powers used to fight the last crisis which would be a huge negative given that the Democrats already stripped fairly significant crisis fighting powers in Frank-Dodd

Remember when Hillary talked about fixing all these problems during the debates? Haha, me either, I just remember she was a she-beast that dines on young children in greasy pizza shops.

 

[werepossum]

Well, Tim Geitner, Ben Bernake and Frank Dodd all agree the banking regulation is overly restrictive (Tim and Ben have some other issues with the bill as well)



https://www.npr.org/2017/06/08/5320...at-reversing-dodd-frank-financial-regulations

The biggest players (the ones who caused the most panic in 2008 and would have crushed everyone if they failed) are unaffected by this change due to size. The biggest failure - WaMu - would still have been covered under the increased capital requirements given its $300bn size. The second largest - IndyMac wouldn't have been covered under the original law anyway ($30bn).

There are some fairly onerous compliance costs for small regional banks, which just encourages the environment of bank mergers leading to 'too big to fail' institutions. While I don't see anything about that yet, loosening those restrictions would be a benefit without significant risk to the over all economy

However, previous Republican talking points have covered significant weakening of powers used to fight the last crisis which would be a huge negative given that the Democrats already stripped fairly significant crisis fighting powers in Frank-Dodd

Agreed, and well said. On the NSA, the best anyone can hope is for their party to be slightly less evil.

 

[Moonbeam]

Yes, raising the capital requirements to be deemed a systemically important institution is something I support. We don’t want to raise it too high, but one step towards limiting the dominance of the big banks is making regulatory compliance easier for smaller ones.

Are you trying to say this isn't black and white? If so I may want to take my 'I fucking know what's going on' hat off and listen more carefully.