This is how the GOP Congress will regulate Wall Street?

[ProSense]

This is how the GOP Congress will regulate Wall Street?

"My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks"

<...>

Let's recap: Who hates the Volcker rule the most? The banks. Who is most annoyed by the Consumer Financial Protection Agency? The banks. Whose agenda is Spencer Bachus already serving to the best of his ability? The banks'.

With a Democratic majority still controlling the Senate and Obama in the White House, Bachus and Shelby won't be able to completely subvert bank reform and gut regulatory oversight. But there's little doubt there's a new sheriff is in town. Alabama, a state that, in terms of GDP, is about one-sixth the size of New York, is set to exert a disproportionate influence on how Washington rides herd on Wall Street.

The Birmingham News tell us that Bachus is the first Alabama Republican to chair a House committee since the 19th century. This is mostly an accident of history. Deeply conservative Alabamans have previously run the primary committees overseeing banking in both the Senate and the House -- but they were Democrats back then, since there was no place for Republicans in the post-Reconstruction South. The chain of events set in motion by the Voting Rights Act that eventually transformed the Democratic South into a sea of red states changed all that. (Richard Shelby, it's easy to forget, was a Democrat as late as 1994, when he switched sides after the big Republican victory in the midterms of that year.)

The most famous Alabaman to influence how Washington regulated Wall Street was probably Henry Steagall, whose name resonates through history from its inclusion as part of the name of the Glass-Steagall Act that separated investment and commercial banking for the better part of 60 years. Both Bachus and Shelby voted to repeal Glass-Steagall, and both of them have worked hard to make sure that the spirit of regulation birthed in the Great Depression, and revivified by the Great Recession, dies stillborn. Henry Steagall was no flaming liberal, but it is hard to imagine he'd be too pleased by today's Alabama agenda.

[ProSense]

1. Republicans Lay Out Plan To Slow Walk Derivatives Reform

Think Progress: Republicans Lay Out Plan To Slow Walk Derivatives Reform

Incoming House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) told the Birmingham News this week that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And Bachus plans to provide that service by trying to slow down a whole host of measures being implemented under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

<...>

[CanonRay]

2. Who is really governing the United States? The banks.

[ProSense]

3. There are

those who are working to change that.