Hey Buddy, Can You Spare 5 to 10 in the Federal Pen?

The next big battle in Washington in heating up.

And, as they have since January, Republicans are ready to "just say no." They should probably re-think that plan.

 Because this fight won't be over providing access to health insurance, which could be characterized as "helping poor people," although it actually benefits everyone. You can always drum up some opposition to helping the poor in America.

The coming battle will be over punishing the bankers, traders and Wall Street fat cats whose greed and dishonesty almost threw us into a second Great Depression. And, so far, the GOP has come down firmly on the side of the bad guys. In a letter to President Barack Obama, every Republican member of the House and Senate declined to support financial reform legislation backed by the president.

You'd think Republicans would have learned something from the first Great Depression, when Herbert Hoover sided with the folks who'd caused the crash and handed Washington over to the Democrats for a generation.

The Great Depression also created a long-standing distrust of Wall Street and the financial system among working class and middle class Americans.

My Dad, a Depression baby, used to tell me that the stock market was just a scam to fleece the little guy for the profit of the big guys.

Turns out he was right.

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Financial Safeguards: A little late, not nearly enough

Congress and the Obama administration finally got around this week to considering reforms to the financial industry to try to avoid the type of theft, malfeasance and greed that ran the economy into the ground over the last few years.

Frankly, it’s surprising that this wasn’t a matter of first priority for the incoming administration.

One of the stated priorities of Obama’s administration was to restore confidence in the nation’s financial system. It eludes me, how that could be done when the lax rules, watered down regulations and paltry oversight that let a few Wall Street greed heads bring the nation to the brink of another Great Depression for the own personal gain remained in place.

How the faint-hearted proposed reforms will avoid a repeat of that situation also eludes me.

Financial reform should have been pretty straightforward. All it really required was a repeal of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Depression-Era Glass-Steagall Act and replaced the regulations that had kept our economy safe from Depression for 60 years with a deregulation scheme that turned Wall Street into the Wild West.

What was needed were restraints on the trading of derivatives that have no underlying value in the economy and turn the stock markets into casinos.

With all due respect to Colonial Williamsburg, which managed to offset $120 million in losses during the stock market plunge with put contracts on the Standard & Poor 500, such contracts add nothing to the economy of the nation. They don’t represent an investment, they represent a wager.

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