Republicans Object To Tighter Regulations On Shady Businesses

Today's Fox and Friends segment with the Doocy, tries to rile up their gun-crazed audience over the feds cracking down on the banking practices of these unsavory businesses that are often fronts for money-launderers.

"This is a very clever way to get around the Second Amendment,"

claims Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy (R). Remember Pretty Boy Duffy? The guy who bitched and moaned about his paltry $174,000 per annum salary? He's beyond livid that some of the death merchants, a.k.a. "gun dealers" in his district are facing scrutiny by the D.O.J.'s Operation Choke Point.

What is Operation Choke Point? (It) is a federal initiative that aims to crack down on fraud by honing in on banks and payment processors—the companies that serve as middlemen between merchants and banks on credit card transactions. Financial institutions are not supposed to do business with companies they believe might be breaking the law. But Justice Department officials suspect that some payment processors ignore signs of fraud—like high percentages of transactions being rejected as unauthorized—in transactions they process, and banks go along for the ride, earning massive profits. READ MORE

Republican senator says restaurants should be able to opt-out of mandatory handwashing

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis is not so sure we need laws requiring food service employees to wash their hands:

Tillis made the declaration at to the Bipartisan Policy Center, at the end of a question and answer with the audience. He was relaying a 2010 anecdote about his “bias when it comes to regulatory reform.” “I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,’” he said, “as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employment literature, or whatever else.”

Restaurants can just opt-out and let the free market take care of business after word spreads of unsanitary conditions. Never mind that a lack of hand washing by food service employees accounts for the vast majority of food contamination:  READ MORE

Here's a little Seinfeld episode that puts things in perspective:

The "Keating Five" Corruption Story Has Lessons for the Citizens United Era

Tough, smart, effective, and apolitical regulators are key to avoiding rampant fraud and future financial crises.

April 11, 2012

April 9, 2012 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most infamous savings and loan frauds -- Charles Keating’s successful use of five U.S. Senators to escape sanction for a massive violation of the law. The Senators were Alan Cranston (D. CA), Dennis DeConcini (D. AZ), John Glenn (D OH), John McCain (R. AZ), and Donald Riegle (D. MI). They became infamous as the “Keating Five.” I was one of four regulators who attended the April 9, 1987 meeting and took the notes of the meeting, in transcript format, that were so detailed and accurate that the Senators testified that they were sure I had tape recorded the meeting. (The reality is that I owe my note taking abilities to Bill Valentine, my high school debate coach, and experience debating for the University of Michigan.)

Reviewing my (near) transcript of the April 9 offers a large number of important lessons that would have allowed us to avoid future crises. We suffered the crises because we ignored all the lessons about which approaches are criminogenic and which are successful. The transcript shows four things that work.
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Enough with the GOP's Faith-Based Economics

Photo Credit: Bête à Bon-Dieu

Some politicians believe that less regulation, spending and taxes will help the economy -- this belief comes from a longstanding blind faith in the so-called "free market."

April 3, 2012

"I will do all I can to help you," Montague answered. "And you must be very severe with me," Lucy continued, "and not let me spend too much money, or make any blunders. That was the way [former business advisor] Mr. Holmes used to do, and since he is dead, I have positively been afraid to trust myself about."

-Upton Sinclair, "The Moneychangers"

From Ron Paul to Mitt Romney, politicians consistently employ their own framing of why the economy is performing poorly, and thus, promote a consistent remedy for how to improve it. Government doesn't need to do more, they contend, it needs to do less - less regulating, less spending, less taxing. They believe in these solutions, I argue, not necessarily because of some secret allegiance to the rich, but because of their longstanding blind faith in the ability of the so-called "free market" to correct economic problems on its own.

During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, the libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) championed the need for free-floating interest rates by analogizing interest rate movements to the human body's production of insulin.[1] That such a complex economic process could be equated with an automatic physiological process was not at all accidental. Just as though it were a natural science, free-marketers firmly believe in capitalism's ability to self-correct. Government, they argue, will only mess up (or, as they like to say, "distort") this process. This is precisely what Ronald Reagan was intimating when he famously declared, "Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem."

The Myth of Self-Correction  

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