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Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Wonder what’s happening with bank reform? Watch your wallets.

Having created giant loopholes in the Dodd-Frank law recently passed by Congress (keeping “customized” derivatives underground, for example), fighting off attempts to cap the size of the biggest banks, and keeping capital requirements relatively modest, Wall Street is now busily whittling back the rest through regulations.

Squadrons of lawyers and lobbyists are now pressing the Treasury, Comptroller of the Currency, SEC, and the Fed to go even easier on the Street.

Their main argument is if regulations are too tight, the big banks will be less competitive internationally. Translated: They’ll move more of their business to London and Frankfurt, where regulations will be looser.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is warning Europeans that if their financial regulations are too tight, the big banks will move more of their business to the U.S., where regulations will be looser. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

A full 90 members of Congress who voted to bailout Wall Street in 2008 failed to support financial reform reining in the banks that drove our economy off a cliff. But when you examine campaign contribution data, it’s really no surprise that these particular lawmakers voted to mortgage our economic future to Big Finance: This election cycle, they’ve raked in over $48.8 million from the financial establishment. Over the course of their Congressional careers, the figure swells to a massive $176.9 million.

The complete list of these Crony Capitalists is below, along with the money they pulled in from Big Finance, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org). The career data goes back to 1989. Of the 69 House members who voted with Wall Street on both the bailout and financial reform, 60 are Republicans, while nine are Democrats. All 21 Senators who voted with Wall Street on both issues are Republicans, and Republicans raked in over
90 percent of the total campaign contributions.

Here’s a chart showing Wall Street’s total contributions to this crowd for the 2010 cycle, by political party:

And here’s one showing total Wall Street contributions over the course of their careers:

These aren’t the only politicians carrying water for Wall Street–only the most flagrant. Some of the bank lobby’s savviest servants on Capitol Hill do their dirty work early in the legislative process. They push through technical amendments and deploy complex procedural tricks to defang a bill, but when the final vote comes, they can still create the appearance of taking a stand against Wall Street’s interests. Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., is a master of this technique, and Tea Party favorite Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was able to claim credit for voting in favor of reform after demanding–and receiving–a host of big bank giveaways in return for his vote. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

The ranks of the working-age poor in the United States climbed to the highest level since the 1960s as the recession threw millions of people out of work last year, leaving one in seven Americans in poverty. The overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 per cent, or 43.6 million people, the Census Bureau said last week in its annual report on the economic well-being of US households. Gulfnews.com

While 43.6 million Americans live in poverty, the richest men of finance sure are getting pissy. First Steve Schwartzman, head of the Blackrock private equity company, compares the Obama administration’s effort to close billionaires’ tax loopholes to “the Nazi invasion of Poland.” Then hedge fund mogul David Loeb announces that he’s abandoning the Democrats because they’re violating “this country’s core founding principles” — including “non-punitive taxation, Constitutionally-guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority, and an inexorable right of self-determination.” Instead of showing their outrage about the spread of poverty in the richest nation on Earth, the super-rich want us to pity them?

Why are Wall Street’s billionaires so whiny? Is it really possible to make $900,000 an hour (not a typo — that’s what the top ten hedge fund managers take in), and still feel aggrieved about the way government is treating you? After you’ve been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $10 trillion (also not a typo) in loans, asset swaps, liquidity and other guarantees, can you really still feel like an oppressed minority?

You’d think the Wall Street moguls would be thankful. Not just thankful — down on their knees kissing the ground taxpayers walk on and hollering hallelujah at the top of their lungs! These guys profited from puffing up the housing bubble, then got bailed out when the going got tough. (Please see The Looting of America for all the gory details.) Without taxpayer largess, these hedge fund honchos would be flat broke. Instead, they’re back to hauling in obscene profits.

These billionaires don’t even have to worry about serious financial reforms. The paltry legislation that squeaked through Congress did nothing to end too big and too interconnected to fail. In fact, the biggest firms got even bigger as they gobbled up troubled banks, with the generous support of the federal government. No bank or hedge fund was broken up. Nobody was forced to pay a financial transaction tax. None of the big boys had a cap placed on their astronomical wealth. No one’s paying reparations for wrecking the US economy. The big bankers are still free to create and trade the very derivatives that catapulted us into this global crisis. You’d think the billionaires would be praying on the altar of government and erecting statues on Capital Hill in honor of St. Bailout.

Instead, standing before us are these troubled souls, haunted by visions of persecution. Why? (more…)

Marc Stier

By Marc Stier
Executive Director, Penn Action 

Over the next month, Penn Action will be sponsoring a series of events around Pennsylvania, some in conjunction with other groups, that aim to build a strong progressive movement to get voters who share our ideals out to the polls in November and then to keep the pressure on our elected officials to support progressive legislation over the next two years and beyond.

Why we need to take action now.

Why are we doing this? Because two years ago, we all worked together to elect a progressive President, and a Congress who would support him.

And, in the last two years, we’ve kept working as we helped President Obama and the Democrats in Congress pass a stimulus package that avoided a second Great Depression, a strong financial reform bill, and health care reform legislation that will go far in making quality health care affordable for all.

We have accomplished more for working people in the last two years than the last two Democratic Presidents accomplished in 12 years.

But we haven’t attained all we wanted.

The stimulus was not big enough to keep unemployment from rising to terrible levels. The financial reform bill was not strong enough. And the health care reform bill did not include a public option. And the reason we have not done more is that, while we elected a President and Congress in 2008, we haven’t built a movement strong enough to attain all we progressives want. (more…)

Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

The financial reform bill that passed both houses of Congress was far less than we needed. But it was a start — enough of a start that the bankers have spent tens of millions trying to kill it. And now, with the House-Senate conference version of the bill coming back to Senate for final approval, the reform is in jeopardy yet again.

On May 29, the bill passed the Senate, 59-39, just enough to block a filibuster. Four Republicans voted in support and two progressive Democrats voted no to protest its weaknesses. But the banking lobby has used the Congressional recess to work the four Senate Republicans.

And, sure enough, three of the four Republican supporters have gone wobbly. Olympia Snowe of Maine voted for the Senate bill, but is now making equivocal noises about whether she’ll support the conference bill (which is weaker in some respects than the Senate’s version.) Likewise Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

The always wily Scott Brown of Massachusetts threatened to withhold his vote until the House and Senate leaders agreed to scrap a $19 billion tax on large banks. He voted for the senate bill, but now Brown is warning that he may vote against the final bill anyway. Apparently there is no honor among thieves. The financial industry was the largest donor to Brown’s Senate campaign.

Among Republicans, only Susan Collins of Maine is standing firm in her support. The fewer Republicans who are still officially committed to the bill, the easier it is for the banking lobby and the GOP leadership to intimidate or seduce others. (more…)

Les Leopold

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

Take a hard, cold look at June’s tragic unemployment numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics rate is 9.5 percent, roughly where it’s been for more than a year. The BLS jobless rate (U6) is 16.5 percent — nearly 30 million people are without jobs or forced into part-time work. More than 6.7 million workers have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks. The administration can spin these numbers like a top, but Americans know in their bones that no one in Washington has a real plan to get our people back to work.

But Wall Street has a plan and a new logic that is quietly infiltrating the media and policy circles. It’s called “structural reform.” Although it is likely to involve some additional pain and suffering, it’s being sold as the new the magic bullet for our ailing economy. The story goes like this:

1. Banks and consumers took on too much debt during the housing boom (largely because of misguided government policies that enabled people who really couldn’t afford homes to buy them).

2. When the bubble burst, the government had to bail out the financial system to avoid a devastating collapse. This essentially moved debt from the books of private banks (and consumers) to the government (mostly the Treasury, the Fed, Fannie and Freddie).

3. But there’s a real limit to how much debt the government can absorb. Look how markets and voters around the world have reacted to rising deficits. (Think Greece, Germany, the Tea Party…)

4. This signals that the Keynesian moment is over. The government just can’t keep spending its way out of this mess by shouldering bank debt or passing huge stimulus programs.

5. That leaves only one last viable option: Structural Reforms!

Structural reform is Wall Street speak for reducing what is often called the “social wage” for working people in every way possible: increasing the retirement age and cutting Social Security benefits, government employment and benefits, funds for public education, defined benefit pensions, and health care expenditures….and of course, extended unemployment benefits as well. (The Senate’s refusal, yet again, to extend unemployment for 1.3 million laid-off workers comes straight from the “structural reform” playbook.) (more…)

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., is defending his decision to vote against the Wall Street reform bill on the grounds that it is simply too weak to prevent future crises, and Tim Fernholz is crying foul.

On policy substance, Feingold is undoubtedly correct. From Feingold:

At the start of this process I made clear that I had a simple test for financial reform — will it stop another financial meltdown? This bill fails that test.

Fernholz claims, to the contrary:

The bill will make bailouts very unlikely and bring derivatives out of the shadows.

I just can’t see how Fernholz can believe that line. Megabanks have spent the past two years “earning” their way back to health with the riskiest businesses—derivatives operations and proprietary trading. They’ve managed to make enormous profits from these trading operations even as the global economy has crumbled. At some point, the economy is going to catch up with the trading, and there is going to be a problem. But it will be seven to 12 years before the critical reforms reining in these activities will actually take effect (and for the most part, those reforms have been gutted). Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives language has a seven-year phase-in, and will not apply to the vast majority of derivatives currently being traded. The Volcker Rule ban on prop trading still allows banks to gamble with hedge funds, and this rule will take a dozen years to implement. (more…)

Astonishingly, as Wall Street reform enters its final hours a tired, generic corporate refrain against regulation is gaining traction. As bigwig bankers and their lobbyist brethren fight to defeat tough new rules on derivatives—the crazy casino that brought down AIG—all their sloganeers can come up with is the trite wail that serious rules will send this risky business overseas. It’d be funny if members of Congress weren’t taking it seriously.

“Oh no—the business will go overseas!” is the last-ditch, we’re-about-to-lose-this-one cry of despair for corporate executives in every industry. Crack down on a profitable abuse in the United States, and the entire business will move to London or Mumbai, sending jobs and tax revenue abroad– or so the argument goes. You only hear this line when CEOs know they have no case, and have to divert attention away from the real substance of the policy debate. In the case of Wall Street abuses, this nonsense is especially ridiculous. The bank lobby really just doesn’t have any good arguments to launch in its favor, so it’s falling back on generic corporate jargon.

In reality, the U.S. has extremely broad authority to crack down on derivatives activity abroad, we just don’t have a whole lot of good rules on derivatives for regulators to enforce. It’s extremely difficult for financial institutions to simply offshore their risky derivatives business to avoid oversight. Under current law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has the authority to regulate any trading done by foreign firms on behalf of U.S. clients, any trading of U.S. assets conducted by foreign institutions and any trading that causes a “substantial disruption” in U.S. markets. Just about anything the CFTC wants to get its hands on, it can, and the current CFTC Chairman, Gary Gensler, is a committed reformer. We just need to write good rules for his agency to enforce.

Moreover, finance tricksters will have no incentive to move their destructive derivatives trading abroad, because the rules in other countries are, in fact, much tougher than those the U.S. is currently considering.

There are a lot of ways to crack down on Wall Street, but none of them will work without reining in the insane, secretive market for derivatives—speculative instruments that allow financiers to gamble on anything from subprime mortgages to the price of corn. Right now Wall Street is making a big push to roll-out new derivatives on movie box-office receipts, allowing the financial world to place raw bets on how much money a movie is going to make. It sounds crazy and destructive, and it is.

Germany is leading the way on derivatives reform by simply banning this kind of naked gambling outright. The U.S. effort is critically important, but much more modest. Instead of banning the casino, reformers in Congress are hoping to shrink it by ending the taxpayer subsidies that fuel it. This is at the heart of the proposal from Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., that has earned so much ire from the bank lobby. Bankers love their taxpayer subsidies, and love converting them into bonuses—who wouldn’t? The trouble is that this business is inherently risky, and can jeopardize the entire economy, as the collapse of AIG attests.

But ending subsidies is still not as strong as banning gambling, which Germany is doing. The entire European Union is currently making a move to follow Germany’s lead. Businesses can’t exit U.S. markets to skirt regulations if their Wild West trading schemes are outlawed everywhere else.

In the U.K., officials are poised to impose a hefty tax on all financial assets, prevent banks from ballooning their balance sheets with derivatives trades. That means, U.S. banks can’t send their derivatives operations to the U.K. without paying a big price.

Outside of Europe, few nations have the financial infrastructure to support derivatives trading on the scale of what we currently have in the U.S., where $300 trillion in trades are housed at just five banks. Some Asian nations do have this kind of infrastructure, big financial firms in Asia all realize that they will have to comply with U.S. rules if they want to keep doing business in the U.S. And indeed, policymakers in Hong Kong and other financial centers are looking to the U.S. for leadership on derivatives, and are likely to mimic whatever reforms are adopted here.

But more broadly, we have to ask why the U.S. should be worried about this activity being offshored at all. Raw gambling by financial institutions brought on one of the greatest economic catastrophes in American history. It forced the government to pony up over $4 trillion in bailout funds, expanded the national debt by 40 percent, and killed over 8 million jobs. If this business goes overseas, so be it! Let other nations bailout their megabanks and wreck their own economies if they want to. Today’s derivatives casino is a job-killing nightmare that produces nothing other than megabonuses for bankers. Taxpayers have no business subsidizing such economic destruction.

Compared to international efforts, Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives bill is overpoweringly mild, but it remains the only serious attempt to rein in the speculative casino that crashed our economy. The fact that the bank lobby’s only tactic left is the wail “offshore!” shows how desperate our bank executives have become. Congress has no business caving to such nonsense at this stage of the reform process.

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This piece is re-posted from the Campaign for America’s Future blog, OurFuture.

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Zach Carter also is a Fellow a Campaign for America’s Future. His work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Salon.

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet

A coalition of conservative New Democrats, whose leader is being investigated by a Congressional ethics committee over Wall Street fundraising, has officially come out in favor of gutting financial reform. The issue they’ve targeted: derivatives, the most closely watched effort of the bank overhaul. Good luck in November, guys.

New Democrats like to say they are “pro-business,” but what they usually mean is, “willing to funnel federal gifts to bigwig executives.” Their chair is Rep. Joseph Crowley, D-N.Y., currently under investigation by the House Office of Congressional Ethics over a fundraiser he held just days before the final House vote on the Wall Street reform package back in December 2009. Crowley is a favorite of Wall Street CEOs, who has pulled in more than $2.6 million from the finance industry over the course of his Congressional career, over 250 percent more than any other industry.

Crowley isn’t the only New Dem close to Wall Street. Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut is a former Goldman Sachs executive, Rep. Melissa Bean of Illinois has been doing big banks’ dirty work for years, and New Dems score more campaign contributions from Wall Street than their regular-old-Democrat colleagues.

The new Dems are opposing the tough derivatives overhaul being pushed by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., known on Capitol Hill as “Section 716.” The Lincoln plan is a huge blow to Wall Street profits and the first real crack in the too-big-to-fail armor worn by the nation’s largest banks. The derivatives market is the risky casino that brought down AIG and Enron, and played a huge role in the inflation of the subprime mortgage bubble and necessitated the bailouts of megabanks when that bubble burst. While a little under ten percent of the market consists of risk-hedging by businesses, the remainder is a speculative nightmare.

Taxpayers actually subsidize this market by allowing commercial banks to deal derivatives. Since commercial banks have access to cheap Fed loans and FDIC-guaranteed deposits, this funding ends up feeding the global casino. If you force banks to move their derivatives operations to an independently-capitalized subsidiary with no access to taxpayer perks, the market shrinks, and with it, big bank profits and bonuses.

But of course, bankers like their bonuses, and they’ve enlisted the New Dems to protect them. A total of 43 New Democrats are circulating a letter around Capitol Hill in an effort to defang the derivatives overhaul (interestingly, 26 New Dems have refused to sign on to this overt Wall Street sellout). Here’s the key section:

“Section 716 . . . would increase systemic risk by forcing derivatives transactions into less regulated and less capitalized institutions and impede effective oversight of the derivatives markets . . . Legitimate conflict of interest concerns are addressed by the ban on proprietary trading in the Volcker rule, and, accordingly, we believe Section 716 should be removed from the legislation.”

Nobody in Washington takes these claims seriously. One is a bald-faced lie, the other an effort to obfuscate other New Dem efforts to defang the Volcker Rule itself.

First, the lie. The New Dems are claiming that the Lincoln provision would push derivatives into the shadows, when, in fact, it would bring them into the light. Right now, most derivatives transactions are conducted off-balance-sheet, meaning banks don’t have to disclose information about these risky deals to their investors, making it easy for them to skirt capital requirements. The idea that the Lincoln plan could actually make the derivatives market more opaque or harder to regulate than they are now is just laughable.

The Wall Street reform bill includes a set of capital rules for all derivatives trading, rules which apply to everybody who engages in derivatives activity, be they a hedge fund, a bank, or a bank-affiliate. There is absolutely no way in which Lincoln’s plan would be “forcing derivatives transactions into less regulated and less capitalized institutions.”

The opposite, in fact, would happen. Banks would have to put up more of their own money in order to back derivatives trades, because they wouldn’t have access to taxpayer money to back them. That’s why the bank lobby is fighting the Lincoln language like crazy.

The bank lobby has been pushing for weeks to secure some kind of compromise in which the Volcker Rule is substituted for Lincoln’s derivatives plan. There is almost no overlap between the two proposals. The Volcker Rule bans outright gambling by banks– Lincoln’s plan is an effort to rein in gambling outside of the banking system itself.

And New Dems are also making a huge push behind the scenes to gut the Volcker Rule. As Brian Beutler has reported, New Dems Dennis Moore, D-Kan., and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., are part of a team that hopes to secure a giant fatal loophole allowing banks to invest up to 5 percent of their capital in hedge funds. In other words, no gambling, except when you conduct this gambling with a hedge fund. This would totally gut the purpose of the Volcker Rule. Hedge fund investments have a habit of creating absolutely massive losses—even when the upfront investment is relatively low. In the go-go years of the housing bubble, Bear Stearns put $40 million into a hedge fund to gamble on mortgages. As Mike Konczal has emphasized, when that hedge fund blew up in 2007, Bear Stearns had to payout over $3.2 billion in losses—80 times what they put into it. If that $40 million had been 5 percent of Bear’s capital, the company would have been bankrupt four times over when the hedge fund went down.

The New Dems are hoping that this overt hatchet-work for the bank lobby will simply go unnoticed in the media firestorm surrounding the BP oil catastrophe and General McChrystal’s inability to understand chain-of-command under a Democratic commander-in-chief. Don’t let them get away with it.

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This piece is re-posted from the Campaign for America’s Future blog, OurFuture.

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Zach Carter also is a Fellow a Campaign for America’s Future. His work has appeared in The Nation, Mother Jones, The American Prospect and Salon.

Richard Eskow

 By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Senior Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

“What do I have to do to get you into this car?”

“How much can you afford to pay every month?”

“My manager’s in a good mood.”

These are the car salesman cliches everybody knows. Now they’re trying to add a couple more to the repertoire:

“When you take out a car loan – probably the second-biggest financial decision of your life – you don’t need a watchdog looking out for you.”

“Watch out … this will cost you a lot more if somebody’s representing your interests.”

And if you believe those last two statements, allow me to show you this brand new baby – it’s got whitewalls and mag wheels, tinted windows, I’ll throw in the deluxe sports package along with that … oh, and we strongly recommend undercoating.

Fortunately, there’s something you can do: You can go to this site, prepared by CREDO and Campaign for America’s Future, where a simple one- or two-click process will send a fax to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd urging them protect American consumers from shady auto loans. It’s easy to do, it’s important – and, if you act now, it’s absolutely free! (Racing stripe and rustproofing not included with fax.)

It’s easy to sound flippant, since everybody knows why we all hate car dealers, but the topic is deadly serious: As we’ve discussed at length, auto dealer lending practices are a disgrace. A massive, multi-year study showed that African Americans are charged more than whites for the same loans. Auto dealers routinely mark up the loans they offer, without disclosing that information to customers – a practice that costs consumers $20 billion per year and adds an estimated $647 to the cost of each vehicle sold. Auto dealers also play games with “gap insurance” that covers the replacement cost of your vehicle for loan purposes if it’s totaled.

Another common car dealer trick is to “sell” a car to a customer by claiming they qualify for a no-interest or low-interest loan, letting them drive away in it, then calling them a week or two later to say the loan fell through. Dealers do this because most customers will have gotten used to the car by then, which means that many of them will accept loan terms that wouldn’t been unacceptable at the point of sale.

Car lenders have made a particular point of preying on young soldiers, who are living far from home in great distress. That’s why Holly Petraeus, wife of Gen. David Petraeus, is strongly in favor of regulating auto loans. The Petraeus family are hardly known for their left-wing views. Mrs. Petraeus speaks movingly of the harm unscrupulous salespeople have inflicted on our troops.

What are the counterarguments? Car dealers and their allies love to say they should be exempted from financial reform because they weren’t part of the financial crisis. But think about it: Why should auto loans be regulated when they’re provided by banks and credit unions, but not when they’re provided by auto dealers? That’s anticompetitive. What’s more, we’ve already seen that auto dealers sometimes encourage applicants to lie when applying for a loan. If bank auto loans are regulated but car dealer loans aren’t, unscrupulous bankers will simply use car dealers as willing minions to make an end run around consumer protection. With auto lending a nearly $1 trillion market, the last thing we need is a replay of the “no doc” mortgage scandal with car salesmen playing the part of mortgage brokers.

The defend-car-salesmen crowd has a couple more arguments, and a credulous Associated Press commentary by Rachel Beck summarizes them: First Ms. Beck repeats the assertion that lending legislation would affect dentists who allow patients to pay over time (the Senate bill does not and this will undoubtedly be clarified and corrected in conference.) Then, she conflates “family dentists” with auto dealers, as if they were both trusted service providers. (It’s true that buying a car is as painful as a root canal, but that’s as far as the comparison goes.)

That sleight of hand allows her to come up with this:

Just like the dentists, (auto dealer Tony) Federico says that more regulation will boost his costs. It could mean he does fewer loans, or is less generous in the deals he offers. Consumers then would have to seek out loans elsewhere, which could be less convenient and cost more.

“I am always looking out for my customers’ best interests, but I also want to do deals that are worthwhile,” Federico says.

So, who are you gonna believe – somebody named “Holly Petraeus,” who’s concerned about military families, or your trusted family friend Tony Federico? Tony says you’ll pay less getting a loan through him, even when he’s done taking his market – and when has a car salesman ever lied? Sure, studies show that he’s wrong, but who are you gonna trust here – the Center for Responsible Lending …. or your old pal Tony?

I’m sure Rachel Beck is a very nice person, but her piece is embarrassing to read. Why would newspapers run it? Let’s not forget that, like politicians, newspapers rely on car dealer revenue for their bread and butter. (Why, the Sun-Times was even willing to cut a deal with the New York Times this week to run luxury car ads in the Chicago market; luxury ads are especially lucrative.) Ad revenue buys a lot of credulity, especially on the editorial pages.

Hey, maybe everybody’s wrong but Tony Federico and Rachel Beck. They’re not – but let’s say for argument’s sake they are: : Why not support this provision anyway? It doesn’t prevent auto dealers from handling loans, it simply provides oversight when they do. If the Federicos of the world are really providing better loans at reasonable rates, there’s no reason why the Consumer Financial Protection organization won’t simply give them an “attaboy” or “attagirl” and tell them to keep up the good work. (Attaboy, Tony!)

Or look at it the other way: If they’re not doing anything wrong, why are they so concerned about a little oversight?

Auto dealers throw a lot of lucrative fundraisers back home for DC politicians. That’s why 62 House Democrats have joined their Republican colleagues in pushing for an auto dealer exemption. That’s the money talking. Talk back to it: Send a fax. Call your Senator and Representative. If you do, we can have you in a nice financial reform package, complete with consumer protections against auto dealer rip offs, probably by this time next week.

Now that’s what I call a deal.

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Richard (RJ) Eskow is a consultant and writer. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard blogs at Campaign for America’s Future’s: No Middle Class Health Tax and A Night Light. His website is Eskow and Associates.