What a fitting coincidence that the DVD version of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” movie was released last week, and the Senate also passed that strange financial reform bill! Starting with the ObamaCare mess, and now with this most recent piece of ill-begotten legislation, I feel like Alice, fallen down a rabbit hole and into a world I barely recognize.
Curiouser and curiouser, I say to myself as I survey this legislative monstrosity. Congress seems to be in a huge hurry to pass this bill, as if they are late for a very important date. Democrats blame the Wall Street Fat Cats for causing the crisis, but didn’t government policy play a huge role in requiring banks to make excessive amounts of “affordable” sub-prime home loans, starting in the 1990s? As far as I know, government failings were not addressed by Congress, but there sure have been plenty of hearings to chastise Goldman Sachs.
The SEC even filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman about their trading practices in 2007, but didn’t I hear recently that several dozen SEC employees were caught surfing internet porn at work, in an investigation over several years? Don’t worry, news reports tell us that some of them got a reprimand, but most are still on the job. So, just how is creating a new federal bureaucracy going to protect consumers when the same agency that was supposed to protect us let Bernie Madoff run his Ponzi scheme into the multi-billions of dollars?
Then we have Fannie and Freddie (otherwise known as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum), sticking their hands out for eight or ten billion dollars at a time, while the bill ignores this REAL CRISIS and commissions a…study. Oh, and Treasury has until December to come up with a report. No rush or anything, we’re only $145 billion in the hole on that investment, so far.
In Lewis Carroll’s 1865 story, the Red Queen’s court is made up of a deck of cards, and I can’t help but think of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and all the Democrats who shuffle and fold at every threat or favor. What they don’t realize is that we the American people are watching, we are paying attention, and we are tired of seeing them play games with our country’s financial future.
As this bill makes its way through conference committee, we need to keep the pressure on Congress to stop the madness. This so-called financial reform legislation just adds more spending, bloats the bureaucracy, and doesn’t address any of the major issues our country faces today – unemployment, help for businesses who need credit, or our looming, $13 trillion national debt. If they continue on this path, our elected incumbents will find out in November that voters hold the winning hand. We can send them home from Underland and back to the real world, where they might find it difficult to find a job!
