Occupy Bread and Circuses: You Can't Reform Decadence

Newly-elected Republicans just repealed significant portions of the post-2008 Dodd-Frank legislation intended to prevent another financial collapse. 

Forbes, December 12th, 2014

"With Dodd-Frank Rollback, The Big Bad Banks Are Back"

"the bill also contained a provision, said to be written by Citigroup, repealing a key part of the Dodd-Frank Act."

"The provision enables the big banks once again to use insured deposits and other taxpayer subsidies and guarantees to gamble in the derivatives markets—the very type of business that drove the 2008 financial crisis and the economic devastation that followed."

"Wall Street had finally found the perfect moment to reshape financial regulation—less than three hours before the government was about to run out of money."

[The bill was signed into law this past week, by Obama]

“In the current election cycle, Wall Street banks and financial interests have so far reported spending more than $1.2 billion to influence decision-making in Washington, according to an updated report by Americans for Financial Reform. That works out to just under $1.8 million a day. It represents an average of about $2.3 million spent to elect or influence each of the 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives.”

AND, this just in...

Huffington Post, December 18th, 2014

Fed Delays Volcker Rule, Giving Wall Street Another Holiday Gift

"The Federal Reserve on Thursday granted banks an extra year to comply with a key provision of the Volcker Rule, a move that gives financial lobbyists more time to kill the new regulation before it goes into effect."

"The Volcker Rule is a key element of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bans banks from engaging in proprietary trading -- speculative deals that are designed only to benefit the bank itself, rather than its clients."

"Every day – every single day –- we are at risk of a market meltdown that would wreck our economy even worse than the 2008 crash did, or even than the 1929 crash did," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost. "Six years after the fact, we have taken no significant action to reduce the Wall Street gambling or 'too big to fail' concentration that caused the 2008 crash. If we can’t even implement the Volcker Rule, an extremely modest effort to stave off total disaster, then total disaster is exactly what we can expect."

So be it.