Love him or hate him, Webster Tarpley is speaking truth to power in this one.
From Tarpley:
"The cause of the 2008 banking panic was that zombie banks and hedge fund hyenas were speculating with toxic and highly leveraged derivatives. The new bill does virtually nothing to attack the causes of this ongoing financial disintegration. It is a total defeat for the interests of the American people, and an historic victory for the Wall Street financier oligarchy which owns both the Democratic and Republican parties."
And on Scott Brown:
"Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts won election last January by duping gullible voters with a cultural populist prop in the form of a pickup truck. At this point in the haggling, Senator Brown documented his subservience to Wall Street by driving his truck through what remained of the Volcker role. He forced through a provision allowing commercial banks to use 3% of their capital for speculation through hedge funds. It might seem that 3% is a minute fraction of a bank’s Tier I capital, and that Brown’s amendment might not be so dangerous after all. But this is not the case.
If you buy stocks and their price falls to zero, you can lose 100% of your investment, but no more. But when you are dealing with derivatives, your losses can be geometrically pyramided into interplanetary space. This proposition is not a matter of theory, but has been documented through a decade and a half of bankruptcies by hedge funds which had been speculating with derivatives, all the way back to Long-Term Capital Management of Connecticut in 1998."
And on Feingold, who Tarpley sees as the last real Democrat in the senate:
"The one principled no vote of a Democratic senator is now likely to come from Feingold of Wisconsin, who is fighting for political survival against a reactionary Republican opponent. Feingold says that his litmus test for the bill is simply the question of whether this measure can stop the next financial meltdown. Since the answer is so obviously no, and since the fingerprints of Wall Street are all over the bill, he promises to oppose it. Feingold has voted in the past against the Iraq war powers resolution of 2002, against the Patriot Act of 2001, and against the Wall Street bailout of October 2008. He points with pride to his opposition to the Interstate Banking Act of 1994, which would have prevented the emergence of "too big to fail" by maintaining the sensible New Deal ban on commercial banks operating in more than one state. He also voted against the catastrophic Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which opened the door to the derivatives bubble by completely deregulating these toxic instruments."
Love him or hate him, Tarpley is on the mark on this one.