The nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight and Reform recently
revealed that the top 100 government contractors made nearly $300
billion from federal contracts in 2007 alone. Since 1995 these same
contractors have been involved with 676 cases of "misconduct" and were
paid $26 billion in fines to settle cases stemming from fraud, waste or
abuse. Fines and other penalties, it seems, are simply the stunningly
small price of doing government business.
After healthcare--if you can imagine an "after healthcare"--the next
Big Fight in Congress will likely be over financial reform,
particularly the proposed creation of a Consumer Financial Protection
Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would focus solely on protecting consumers'
financial interests--a task currently shared (with disastrous results)
by several agencies whose primary focus is on monitoring the safety and
soundness of financial institutions.
WASHINGTON - The meeting with Bank of America executives came less than a year after American taxpayers rescued the institution with a $45 billion emergency bailout. The subject was derivatives, the complex securities that helped trigger Wall Street's crisis and drag the country to the edge of an economic abyss.
The guest of honor: Barney Frank.
WASHINGTON — If you doubt that U.S. banks long to return to the days of impotent regulation, you need only look at one of the financial sector's top legislative priorities: killing a proposed new agency that would be dedicated solely to protecting consumers' financial interests.
The Obama administration is asking Congress to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to regulate consumer financial products ranging from credit cards to mortgages, and to simplify disclosure about them all.
NEW YORK - Bank of America is seeking to repay some of the billions of dollars in US government aid it has received in a bid to reduce federal involvement in the company, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The federal government, meanwhile, is pressing the bank to pay about 500 million dollars to end a tentative pact that would have seen the government share its losses on some Bank of America assets, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.
Every
day legal corporate behavior causes much more damage to the commons
than corporate illegal behavior. Electricity generators do not
break the law when they emit billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere
every year warming the Earth to dangerous levels. No law is broken
when automobile manufacturers put out millions of vehicles that contribute
to the same problem. Tobacco companies do not break the law when
their products kill nearly 5 million people a year. Consumer goods
companies are within the law when they buy from third world suppliers
who operate sw
To advocate a new, robust stimulus package, as in my last column, invites some predictable comments. Government is inefficient, politically motivated in its choice of winners and losers, and out to pad its own wallets.
Neil Barofsky, the chief watchdog over the
$700 billion TARP bank bailout program, is one of those rare creatures
in Washington: he takes very seriously his responsibilities of
independent oversight and accountability. A career prosecutor,
Barofsky is a life-long Democrat who donated money to Obama's
presidential campaign.
Ever since The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had spent the last four years illegally
spying on Americans' communications without warrants, there have been
numerous additional revelations of various types of massive illegal
government spying. Yesterday's New York Times article
by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- reporting that "recent intercepts
of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of
An "era" used to last, but not so much anymore. We've already heard GOP
Chairman Michael Steele proclaim that "the era of apologizing for
Republican mistakes" was over (when many of us didn't know it had begun), and now it appears that Barack Obama's era of openness has closed, too.
