Zach Carter at the Campaign for America's Future writes:
J.P. Morgan Chase, America's largest warehouse of arrogant financial elites, has issued yet another deceptive lobbyist smear in the guise of an "analyst report." Yesterday, the megabank's Chief Economist James Glassman launched a broadside against Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) for having the audacity to publicly investigate allegations of financial fraud at Goldman Sachs. Glassman—a top official at one of America's most rapacious institutions-- then indulges in a vaguely worded assault on financial reform, arguing that Congress is about to ruin the economy by cracking down on Wall Street. Don't believe a word of it. ...
Right now, J.P. Morgan's derivatives clients don't have access to pricing information, but J.P. Morgan does. That imbalance allows Glassman's firm to make a lot of money by simply gouging its own customers. How much money? Dimon said the company would lose up to $2 billion a year under the derivatives reforms circulating through Congress in early April. That's $2 billion that stays in the real economy, instead of being cannibalized by J.P. Morgan. But good news for the economy is bad news for Glassman, whose bonus depends on profits, however they're collected.
But of course, the point of Glassman's "research report" is not to raise substantive objections to reform. He's just trying to say nasty things about the big bad government clamping down on the righteous and productive activity on Wall Street. This is an exercise in distraction, not debate.
And so Glassman spends a lot of time focusing on Michigan's chronic unemployment problems in an effort to discredit Sen. Levin. This is a disingenuous and irrelevant attack. The U.S. economy has shed over 8 million jobs since the financial crisis set in. We're slogging through a brutal recession caused by unregulated Wall Street excess. If you have to bring up the Michigan unemployment rate in 1981 to counter this view, you're really grasping at straws.
= = =
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
In all our talk over the past four-and-a-half years about who surrendered to the Bush Administration's rancid warmongering by voting for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, we typically forget those who voted against it. ...
I'd like to give a nod of appreciation to those 156 Congresspeople and Senators who voted against the AUMF of 2002. This isn't meant to be praise for everything they've ever done, before or since, merely acknowledgment that, on this, they were right when so many were wrong.
In the Senate:
Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Jon Corzine (D-NJ), Kent Conrad D-ND), Mark Dayton (D-MN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Bob Graham (D-FL), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Patty Murray (D-WA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Paul Sarbanes (D-MD), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Jim Jeffords (I-VT).
In the House ...