... and writing FinReg legislation that is pure power grab of financial industry, where Fannie and Freddie are not even mentioned...
The exact equivalent of Jamie Gorelick getting a seat on the 9/11 Commission "investigating" the reasons behind the successful al-Qaeda attack and why different legal, investigative and intelligence departments and agencies had "problems" communicating with each other... while ignoring and hushing up her own directive mandating precisely "The Wall" between them.
I was watching when John Ashcroft testified before the 9//11 Commission to defend the Justice Department’s role in the War Against Terrorism. They were trying,in the interest of “Internatonal Human Rights”, and against every precedent in US history, to disallow Bush’s use of miltary tribunals to try foreign military combatants. They sat Sandy Gorelich right across from him, making eye contact, trying to make him lose his poise. Instead of trying to sound reasonable”, Ashcroft tore this beeotch a knew one, relating how Ms Gorelich’s “wall” prevented CIA information that could have stopped the enemy from acting from getting to the FBI, who had the authority to get these guys before they hurt someone. Sandy just sat there with this scheiss-eating grin trying to look like she was mocking him. Our intelligence agencies and military did get results after 9-11 succeeded, and disrupted the ability of Al Qaeda’s leadership from moving around and communicating.
There is something in the financial-services bill for almost every interest, but the real winners are the cynics who think Congress can't do anything right. The monster that crawled out of the conference committee on June 25 has about 2,300 pages, and one hostile Republican congressman said it probably has three unintended consequences per page. It will keep the bureaucrats and lobbyists busy, that's for sure: The Chamber of Commerce counted 355 potential new agency rule-makings, 47 studies and 74 reports required by the bill. The infamous Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2002 -- the previous congressional exercise in futile corporate regulation -- demanded only 16 rule-makings and six studies. The general intent of the financial-reform bill was impossible. Sponsors wanted to reduce the risk in an inherently risky industry, and they wanted to do it without tightly regulating it or subjecting it to the discipline of a free market. The big issues will remain untouchable. What is to be done with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-government agencies that have become the nation's main source of new home mortgages? There's no answer in this bill. Converting Fannie and Freddie to Feddie hasn't stopped them from losing more tens of billions of dollars on bad loans, and it hasn't brought order and good sense to the housing market. ..... If the bill becomes widely known as Dodd-Frank, then maybe Sen. Christopher Dodd, D., Conn., and Rep. Barney Frank, D., Mass., finally will acquire the reputations they so richly deserve. It happened to former Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D., Md., and former Rep. Michael Oxley, R., Ohio. Their Sarbanes-Oxley "reform" of corporate accounting and other issues has turned out to be an expensive failure, blighting their names for the history books. Dodd and Frank deserve the same, only more so.The huge overhaul bill ignores most big problems and dodges the rest.