New Financial Reform Bill Will Not Prevent Another Crisis As Being Sold By White House

Maybe it was a good thing Shirley Sherrod's ordeal dominated the news on the very week that the government passed its landmark financial reform bill. I don't know how much you may have been paying attention to the debate surrounding this bill. Given the fact that there were no angry mobs screaming on television about it in defiance as they did another landmark piece of legislation, I'd have to say you probably paid very little attention - yeah, thank the media for that one.

Yeah, I'm thinking that it was a good thing that we were all caught up with the issue of race and the necessity for a conversation on the subject in the face of yet another teachable moment. Yeah, and I'm thinking the president has to love the fact that the news cycle was more interested in the firing of a black woman than this much watered down version of proposed (and necessary) reform of the financial industry. The bill is being touted as a legislative victory for the administration. But the question remains: will it prevent another crisis?

This bill has some good provisions, but much like the Health Care Reform bill, it is yet another one of those, "we'll take what we can get for right now," pieces of legislation, that I'm tired of being forced to accept. What can I say? I'm just a "get it right the first time," type of person who rails against the status quo. Checkout Bill Black* in an interview via The Real News Network on the strength and where this bill falls short:




Those Who Betrayed Got Rich (Part II):




*BIO: William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri — Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" — frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.