If you like Wall Street, vote Republican!

As a financial reform bill starts to take shape in Washington, two key lawmakers came to New York City last week to explain what it means for Wall Street, and how financial executives might help prevent some of its least market-friendly aspects from becoming law by electing more Republicans, FOX Business Network has learned.

Although the Democrats only look good by comparison, of course.

I was on the road today, and found this piece on the Progressive Review that was so good, I read the entire thing on my phone.

I can’t break it apart, you should read it all. I don’t agree with everything author Sam Smith says, but I’m with the gist of it.

Because this is exactly how I feel right now, and I don’t think I’m alone. Am I?

This mess with the unemployment benefits had really brought it home to me. If Democrats don’t stand for helping people in trouble during a major recession, exactly what do they stand for?

This isn’t just about winning. What do you want to win for?

That’s what it’s all about these days. Ian Welsh:

Value Added Tax (VAT) version:

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Charlie Rose last October that a value-added tax was “on the table” as a possible way to solve the nation’s fiscal woes, the remark didn’t generate much interest. But as recent budget figures have put the depth of America’s problem into black and white, and with former Federal Reserve Chairman and White House adviser Paul Volcker nearly secondingPelosi’s view recently, the idea of a VAT — already in use in nearly 160 countries — is gaining traction.

Trillions were spent to bailout bankers, and every dollar spent fixing the mess since then is also effectively caused by the failures of the rich.

A VAT isn’t necessarily evil, but until progressive taxation is restored, capital gains are taxed at the same level as ordinary income, corporations are forced to pay taxes on their actual profits (rather than making billions and paying no taxes) and a financial transactions tax is implemented, why is another regressive tax (one that hits the poor instead of the rich) even being considered?

Oh, yeah, because this government exists to do unpopular things Republicans want to do while allowing Republicans to vote against them, as with Medicare, essentially a 1994 Republican plan.

With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

I was thinking today that I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to vote again. I just don’t see the point.

On the Rachel Maddow show last night:

MADDOW: “You can tell just by looking around that the foreclosure crisis is NOT over. The main street side of the bail-out? Hmmmph.

[…] “Did I get that roughly right? TARP was supposed to be trying to stop foreclosures at the same time that it bailed out the banks – bailing out the banks basically worked, but the foreclosures part really didn’t?”

WARREN: “Actually, if you read the statute, what the statue talks about is not bailing out Wall Street banks. What the statue talks about is ‘here is $700 Billion to help repair the economy – remember, it was supposed to be about troubled assets, mortgages, that were in trouble – and it says, Congress says, the way we are going to measure the effectiveness of this program is what it does for unemployment, what it does for American savings, and really focus on what it does on home mortgage foreclosures, how it works to stop this crisis. That’s what Congress said it wanted for it’s $700 billion.”

MADDOW: “So that’s been your job, as chair of the Congressional oversight panels, is to monitor, essentially, what it’s doing for unemployment, and American savings and foreclosures. And the result is not positive.”

WARREN: “Well, we are now fifteen months, after Treasury has announced its program, and tried to get it up and running, and basically 167,000 families have gotten into some kind of modification that we hope will turn out to be permanent, although there are gonna be some problems with that down the line.

But just to put that in some context, every single month, 200,000 families are posted for foreclosure. That’s where we stand right now – 167,000 over 15 months have received assistance under this program, and every month, 200,000 are posted for foreclosure.”

[…] WARREN: “Well, we raised this issue when the program was first announced. We said we had problems about the scope of the program, problems about the scalability of the program, and problems with whether or not it was going to create permanent solutions. But let me say it in a slightly different way: In a sense, what this program was is incentives put on the table to invite the financial institutions and the mortgage servicers to come to the table, please, to negotiate with the families who are facing foreclosure, and it is a program of limited scope and it is a gentle program.

And today, we heard from those large Wall Street banks. They went in to Congress to testify about where they stood on mortgage foreclosures, and they basically said: “Don’t push us too hard, because we don’t plan to cooperate.’

I mean, this is really a STUNNING response from large financial institutions. So, we just have a real disconnect here about what it is that TARP is supposed to be, or at least originally, was supposed to be about.”

[…] WARREN: “This is about the group of people, who could actually pay, and pay a reasonable amount on these mortgages, and everyone would ultimately be better off. But it’s also about the rest of us in the economy. You know, even if you are not one of the 1 in 4 homeowners with a mortgage who’s underwater, the value of your home is dropping when mortgage foreclosures keep occurring. It presses everybody’s values down. And that has echoes throughout the economy. A huge part of our economy is the construction industry, which has ground to a halt and has huge unemployment in it right now. It has devastating effects on communities. Ultimately, we are going to have a very difficult time restarting our economy if we continue a downward spiral on home values because of the downward pressure with mortgage foreclosures.

A year and half ago, we bailed out large financial institutions on the argument that, you know, like it or not, we are all in the same boat economically, and we need to save those guys, and we did it, and they are now back to profitability, spending bonuses.

But now we turn to the homeowners, the people who are also in real trouble and it’s having a real effect on the rest of our economy, and the response seems to be ‘well, we’re not all in the same boat here…’

[…] WARREN: This is a problem we MUST fix.”