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I don’t read KOS much. I tend, or perhaps tended; past tense, to disagree with much of what is said there. I used to think of myself as an independent sort who was moderate on most things. Some would even call my beliefs “wishy washy”. I never believed the mantra “The government which governs least, governs best”, but I did think a good government was one that stayed out of the personal lives of it’s citizens. People should be left alone if that is what they want, however, giving people who are down a hand up seems like a good idea. I tended to vote republican (I won’t vote republican again for a very long time) because they said what I wanted to hear, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics and thus what they actually did.  I really miss the days when I could ignore politics.

I truly believe that commerce must be regulated. Some of you probably disagree, but personally I like knowing that the government makes sure the milk I buy isn’t poisonous and doesn’t contain trout, that the people running ponzi schemes are jailed, that local monopolies can’t do as they please, and that people have the right to demand a livable wage. Another of the things I believe, is that no corporation should be ‘too big to fail’. The fact that our government allowed such entities in the first place is, in my opinion, a failure of government. It is also not capitalism, it is crony capitalism at best or an oligarchy at worse. Capitalism demands that failures fail. What risk do the people running ‘to large to fail’ businesses face? If they fail they still succeed, because ‘the people’ bail you out. Why WOULDN’T they take as many risks as possible? If they screw up, they get paid, if they succeed, they get paid more, it’s ‘no lose betting’ for them. You want the government to stay out of your business as much as possible? Then make damn sure that when a corporation fails, it actually fails.

Back to KOS. Take a look at the following videos of Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) giving a speech back in 1999 on his understanding of the soon to be passed ‘Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999‘. The act which basically removed The Glass-Steagall Act’s prohibition of a bank from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. [You know, basically the whole reason Glass-Steagall was created in the first place!]

For me, the money quote,

“We have this bill, which I will bet, in 5, 10, 15 years from now, we will be back thinking of this bill like we thought of the bill passed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which this Congress unhitched the savings and loans so some sleepy little Texas institution could gather brokered deposits from all around America and, like a giant rocket, become a huge enterprise. And guess what. With all the speculation in the S&Ls and brokered deposits and all the things that went with it that this Congress allowed, what did it cost the American taxpayer to bail out that bunch of failures? What did it cost? Hundreds of billions of dollars. I will bet one day somebody is going to look back at this and they are going to say: How on Earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate, through merger and acquisition, to become bigger and bigger and bigger; far more firms in the category of too big to fail? How did we think that was going to help this country? Then to decide we shall fuse it with inherently risky enterprises, how did we think that was going to avoid the lessons of the past?”

THAT, my friends, is what I consider a conservative point of view, and it is from a Democrat? If you want to read the whole speech go to KOS. It is worth the read.

What is the point of all this?   We the ‘little people’ the ‘main street’ are fucked. We’ve been sold out! Unless we see dramatic changes at the federal level with regards to finance regulation, corporation size, and yes even executive pay structure; the current power of Wall Street will make it impossible for our government to work for anyone but them.

Also, I won’t take the “we couldn’t have seen this coming” non-sense from either party. YOU WERE TOLD THIS WOULD HAPPEN WHEN YOU FAILED US THE FIRST TIME AND BASICALLY REPEALED GLASS-STEAGALL!

PS: I also noticed a name in that legislation, the name ‘Gramm’. Like I said, I’ve started paying attention to politics. Now where have I heard that name before, and what was it linked to? Oh yeah, he was also co-sponsor of the ‘Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000′ which was never debated in either the house or senate, and had that really nice ‘Enron loophole‘.  You guys remember Enron right? You know, it really was just unlucky that Phil Gramm’s wife, Wendy Lee Gramm was on its board of directors. Gramm like a lot of Republican’s seems to never have met a deregulation he didn’t like.