"How Wall Street Bought Barney Frank"

[WhiskeyGirl]

Lots of interesting stuff out there today -

Frank on 'FIRE'

On one day in late July of this year, the Weiss family of Brookline, Mass. gave a whopping $24,000 to Barney Frank...

Joining the Weiss family in funneling Wall Street dollars to Frank that day were two other hedge fund managers, Eric Vincent and Michael Inserra, and former Republican Congressman Richard Baker. Baker is president of the Managed Funds Association (MFA) -- the hedge fund industry’s main lobby -- and Inserra and Vincent are both board members.

Baker had testified before Frank’s committee just ten days earlier on the financial reform package snaking its way through the House. The MFA PAC cut Frank a $10,000 check a few days after the testimony.

By the time the House of Representatives passed financial reform legislation on Dec. 10, the bill reflected one of the hedge fund industry’s main asks -- lax oversight of the financial instruments known as over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. After the bill passed, financial analyst Chris Whalen told Bloomberg News that “the OTC reform has gotten to be basically irrelevant as far as change… compared with what we thought we were going to get over the summer, it’s night and day.”

The global casino is still open?

In 1999, LaFalce was credited with being a key force behind landmark legislation in the history of financial deregulation -- the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

GLB, as it is known, tore down the walls between commercial and investment banks set up by the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act, paving the way for the creation of too-big-to-fail behemoths like Citigroup.

Indeed, the derivatives market reforms passed by the House this month look like they were written by an Enron attorney; the legislation exempts “end users,” a classification that loops in speculative financial engineers like Enron.

The numbers don’t lie. Forget Fannie or Freddie -- Wall Street owns Barney Frank. He has been lifted to power by the entire class of Wall Street financiers that brought the U.S. economy to the brink.

Why should he abandon them now?

lots more here - http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144454/how_wall_street_bought_barney_frank/