-Ephesians 5:11-13
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, May 25, 2018:
In her reelection campaign video posted last week at NowThisNews, far-left anti-gun Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (aka “Pocahontas,” with a Freedom Index Rating of just 13 out of 100) promised not to take any money from the National Rifle Association (NRA), declaring:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, May 25, 2018:
It is said that politics is the art of compromise. An uglier but perhaps more accurate assessment is that politics is the art of sausage making: no one wants to know how sausages are made, nor laws.
To their credit, two researchers for the Wall Street Journal, Ryan Tracy and Andrew Ackerman, have exposed the sausage-making behind passage of the Dodd-Frank deregulation bill by the Senate earlier this month. Through the efforts of Senator Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the bill passed the Senate 67-31 and headed for the House. It was passed by the House on Tuesday, 258-159, but that gets ahead of the story.
Here is what they learned, expressed in their own words, and repeated here through liberal extractions from their Journal article for our purposes:
The story of how the legislation came together, based on interviews with current and former officials, demonstrates how policy makers scaled back their priorities to maintain support for a compromise.
Comment here: notice please that it’s political considerations, not the Constitution and its limitations, that set the table for the compromise.
To continue:
A senior White House official said the administration wanted to help smaller lenders and “recognized that this was about as much as we could get.” The bill is one part of the administration’s agenda to roll back Dodd-Frank rules, the official said.
The bill reflects the outline agreed to by Messrs. Crapo and Cohn. It would raise to $250 billion from $50 billion the threshold at which big banks automatically face strict stress tests and other rules. It would also make community banks eligible for relief from mortgage-underwriting standards.
Comment here: notice that the big banks enjoy a sizeable “carve-out” from the onerous Dodd-Frank rules, but that is given up in exchange for the lessening of rules on local “community” banks, i.e., small banks and local credit unions in their mortgage lending practices. Also note that Mike Crapo is a relatively conservative senator (his Freedom Index rating is 69 out of 100) who is head of the Senate Banking Committee, while Gary Cohn who served briefly as Trump’s chief economic advisor was formerly the president and CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Back to the Journal:
Mr. Crapo, who declined to comment, became Senate Banking Committee chairman in 2017. A conservative known for his “no drama” demeanor, he told Mr. Cohn that he believed he could enact significant Dodd-Frank changes.
The senator discussed with the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive the outlines of legislation rolling back rules on smaller to medium-sized banks. Both agreed such legislation would be worth doing, even though the strategy would leave behind other GOP priorities.
They didn’t, for instance, try to reorganize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a move backed by Republicans but opposed by Democrats.
Just a word on the CFPB: it’s the brainchild of far-left liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren, who designed the agency to be completely independent of Congress, with its own funding provided by its landlord, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. See Sources below for two articles on that agency inside the Fed’s offices.
Back to the Journal:
Mr. Crapo, in the previous Congress, had reached broad agreement on such a package with four moderate Democrats: Sens. Joe Donnelly (D., Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (D., N.D.), Jon Tester (D., Mont.), and Mark Warner (D., Va.). He wagered he could win their support again, and that they would bring additional members of the Democratic caucus to secure the requisite 60 of 100 Senate votes.
Democratic supporters in the Senate—17 in all—say the legislation is needed to help smaller, community banks unduly affected by post-crisis regulations. “Too big to fail had become too small to succeed,” Ms. Heitkamp said.
Comment here: Heidi Heitkamp is too clever by half. She is running for reelection as a Democrat in a state that went heavily for Trump in 2016. She is running scared and needs to placate her constituency, which is probably very tired of her according to the latest polls.
Said the writers: “Ten of them are also up for re-election in 2018, with seven representing states that Mr. Trump won in 2016.”
Crapo is a seasoned politician, and knows these Democrats are fearing for their political lives. Once again: the Constitution is of no concern here, just political survival.
Back to the Journal:
During the negotiations, Mr. Crapo rejected potentially controversial proposals such as consumer bureau changes. He narrowed others to win Democratic support: Mortgage-underwriting-standards relief would go only to banks with fewer than $10 billion in assets, for example.
Democrats, anxious to limit the bill’s scope, resisted some provisions related to capital markets. Lawmakers also ultimately didn’t include language giving new class-action rights to trial lawyers.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cohn spoke with wary Democrats, sometimes daily, reassuring them that the White House wouldn’t scuttle a limited deal.
By the end of October, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a member of Crapo’s committee, told Crapo he wouldn’t support the bill and so Crapo took him off his list.
There was a Halloween party, according to the journalists:
That evening, at Ms. Heitkamp’s Capitol Hill home, the North Dakota senator and Mr. Tester shared beers and vowed to press on. The two began the process of finding co-sponsors by dividing up names in the Democratic caucus on a napkin.
On Nov. 13 – two weeks later – Mr. Crapo said he had a bipartisan deal. It split moderate Democratic supporters and more-liberal opponents led by Mr. Brown and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who thought the bill went too far to help an industry posting record profits.
Warren was so opposed to anything that might damage in the slightest her illegal, unconstitutional, and totally unaccountable creation inside the Fed that she named those favoring the small modifications to the Dodd-Frank bill in a move that was politically stupid:
Ms. Warren criticized other Democratic supporters by name in a fundraising email, a move some colleagues felt crossed a line.
The journalists left their readers in limbo, concluding only that, when all the sausage-making had been completed and the votes were tallied, the bill passed the Senate 67-31 and headed over to the House.
There, there was more sausage-making. As the House was considering the Economic Growth Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act – the official title of the weak Dodd-Frank deregulation bill – House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) pressed for more drastic changes. Long opposed to the original Dodd-Frank law enacted in response to the financial collapse that triggered the Great Recession of 2007-08, Hensarling was rounding up support for additional changes to the law.
Until he got a call from the president, who said, “Jeb, I want the bill now.” In exchange for backing off, Hensarling received assurances from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that he would bring a bill containing more Dodd-Frank deregulations to the Senate floor before the November elections.
And so, on Tuesday, by a vote of 258-159, the Dodd-Frank deregulation bill passed the House in the same form as it passed the Senate earlier, and is headed for the President’s desk. White House officials said that Trump will sign it before the Memorial Day weekend, perhaps sooner.
And that, friends, is how things are done in Washington. Sausage-making is what happens when the Constitution is ignored and political considerations rule in its place.
Trump has another “bullet point” as the November elections draw closer, large banks have more leeway, smaller banks have slightly more freedom, and the odious Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is firmly cemented into place.
Sources:
Politico: House sends major bank bill to Trump, capping years of effort
CNBC: House votes to ease bank rules, and Trump says he will sign the bill
NJTVONLINE.org: House rolls back Dodd-Frank regulations
The Wall Street Journal: How Congress Rolled Back Banking Rules in a Rare Bipartisan Deal
Background on Dodd-Frank, aka Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
The New American: Taming the Tyranny of the Agency
The New American: Unaccountable CFPB Ruled Constitutional; Spends Millions on Office Makeovers
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, May 24, 2018:
As the House was considering the Economic Growth Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act — a weak Dodd-Frank deregulation bill passed earlier by the Senate — House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) pressed for more drastic changes. Long opposed to the original Dodd-Frank law enacted in response to the financial collapse that triggered the Great Recession of 2008-09, Hensarling was rounding up support for additional changes to the law. One of the most pernicious pieces of Dodd-Frank — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau invented by far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — remained untouched by the compromise bill passed by the Senate and Hensarling wanted to do something about it.
That is, until he got a call from the president, who said
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, May 23, 2018:
Thanks to the mass exodus of citizens from the Land of Lincoln, Illinois has dropped from the fifth most-populous state in the union to sixth. According to Chicago’s WGN TV, it’s due largely to the state taxing them out of their homes.
Over the last two years, more than 70,000 people have left Illinois for warmer and more tax-friendly climes such as Texas, Florida, and even South Dakota and Wyoming. In fact, Chicago is the only city in the United States that has consistently lost citizens over the last five years. The so-called “U-Haul index” — a measure of the difference in rates charged for outgoing rental trucks versus incoming trucks — rates Illinois as number one for outbound moving vans.
They are no doubt getting out while the getting is good.
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, May 23, 2018:
America’s recovery from both the Great Recession and the oppression of the Obama years has shown up not only in the numbers but in attitudes, both economic and political. And with that improvement, talk of the “blue wave” taking over the House of Representatives by the Democrats in November has virtually disappeared.
The numbers are remarkable, as The New American and other real news outlets have repeatedly reported. Job growth, unemployment, and even poverty levels have all benefited from the release of pressure from the central government under the Trump administration. Job openings are the highest since 2000, unemployment is at 3.9 percent and falling, and real (inflation-adjusted) wages are improving. According to Sentier Research, “Median household income in April of this year was higher than for any other month since January 2000 [and] 12.9 percent above the post-recession low point [in] June 2011.”
A report from the Census Bureau on income and poverty levels already showed great improvement during the last two years of the Obama administration, as shown below, but Obama reigned over the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Trump has simply supercharged the economy during his time in office.
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, May 23, 2018:
John Mauldin, the New York Times best-selling author and publisher of his Thoughts from the Frontline, reminded his readers of the story of Casey Jones:
For those who don’t know the story or haven’t heard the songs, Casey Jones was a talented young railroad engineer in the late 1800s. On April 30, 1900, Casey Jones was going at top speed when his train tragically overtook a stopped train that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Traveling at 75 miles per hour, Jones ordered his young fireman to jump, pulled the brakes hard, and blew the train whistle, warning his passengers and the other train. Later investigations found he had slowed it to 35 mph before impact. Everyone on both trains survived… except Casey Jones.
His heroic death made Jones a folk hero to this day. Many songs told the story and even the Grateful Dead and AC/DC paid tribute decades later. (Trivia: He actually tuned his train whistle with six different tubes to make a unique whippoorwill sound. So, when people heard his train whistle, they knew it was Casey Jones.)
His point?
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, May 22, 2018:
In his newsletter to Goldman Sachs’ clients published on Monday, Jan Hatzius, the investment banking firm’s chief economist, wrote, “An expanding deficit and debt level is likely to put upward pressure on interest rates. While we do not believe that the U.S. faces a risk to its ability to borrow or to repay, the rising debt level could nevertheless have [serious] consequences.”
Borrowing from the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis following the passage of the tax reform act, the two-year budget deal in February, and the massive “omnibus” spending bill in March, Hatzius projected that annual deficits will shortly exceed a trillion dollars a year, pushing the national debt close to $30 trillion in less than 10 years. He warned:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, May 21, 2018:
To no one’s surprise, the Marxist dictator running Venezuela into the ground won a farcical reelection to a third six-year term on Sunday. Exulted Nicolás Maduro, the former cab driver who learned his politics in Communist Cuba, “You have confided in me and I’m going to respond to that infinite confidence, that loving confidence. All Venezuela has triumphed. Legitimate elections, accompanied by the only one who can decide the future: the people.”
He added: “We will be the most powerful and largest political force in Venezuela for a long time. It doesn’t faze me when they say I’m a dictator.”
Nearly every claim in those statements is a lie.
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, May 21, 2018:
Following the high school shooting in Texas on Friday, many were asking the wrong questions. Some were asking, how could this happen? Others were asking, how could future massacres be prevented? Still others saw an opportunity to promote gun control, including the president and the governor of Texas. Said Trump: “This has been going on too long in our country … [my administration is] determined to do everything in our power to protect our students, secure our schools and to keep weapons out of the hands for those who pose a threat to themselves and to others.”
Right behind him was Texas Governor Greg Abbott who claimed that “We need to do more than just pray for the victims.”
Hollywood starlets weighed in on the matter, blaming the NRA. “Charmed” star Alyssa Milano – the starlet who formed an anti-NRA campaign last month – tweeted:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, May 21, 2018:
Nearly two out of three Americans polled by CBS rate the economy as either “very good” or “somewhat good,” while only nine percent rate the economy as “very bad.” The poll, CBS News Nation Tracker, which was released on Sunday, showed that respondents think the president is largely responsible for it: When asked, “How much do you think Donald Trump’s policies are responsible for the current state of the economy?” more than two out of three said “a great deal” or “somewhat” responsible.
The poll contained additional good news for Republicans heading into the November midterm elections: Seven out of 10 GOP voters told CBS that they prefer a candidate that the president supports.
These results are consistent with those from CNN earlier this month that showed that
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