Courtesy of Pam Martens.
There has been much focus on the fiery speeches that Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered from the Senate floor in an effort to stop the roll-back of a key derivatives provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation that was slipped into the giant $1.1 trillion spending bill that was signed into law this week by President Obama – who campaigned for passage of the bill despite the weakening of protections against Wall Street abuses. The bill became known as the Cromnibus because it is part Continuing Resolution and part Omnibus spending bill to fund the government through September of 2015. Those who voted against the bill in the Senate are provided here; in the House, here.
But Warren was far from alone in expressing outrage at Citigroup writing most of the provision that was quietly slipped into a spending bill that was critical to pass to avoid a government shutdown. Members of both the House and Senate, from broadly diverse political leanings, not only spoke out against the provision but voted against the spending bill to back up that outrage.
We’ll get to the still festering outrage among members of Congress in a moment, but first a warning for the next member of Congress who might be asked by a slick Wall Street bank lobbyist to try a similar maneuver. The House Rep who slipped the provision into the spending bill, which was effectively written by Citigroup according to Mother Jones and the New York Times, is Kevin Yoder of Kansas.
Yoder is now being viciously assailed on his own Facebook page and held up to public ridicule in Kansas newspapers. On Facebook, a woman identifying herself as Amy Hanks calls Yoder the “lowest of the low” and adds: “Hope you burn in hell.” Another woman calls Yoder “one greedy immoral coward.” OpenSecrets.org shows “Securities and Investment” as the number one industry contributing to Yoder’s campaign committee and leadership PAC.
Senator Sherrod Brown
Citigroup received the largest taxpayer bailout in history during the financial crisis as a result of its unchecked derivatives: $45 billion in TARP funds; over $306 billion in asset guarantees; and more than $2 trillion in low-cost loans from the Fed according to the General Accountability Office. The abject repulsion that the very bank that got the biggest handout and played a pivotal role in collapsing the economy should now be gaming Congress to repeal financial protections drew a joint letter of protest from Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana and Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. (See Senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter Ask House to Remove Citigroup Provision on Derivatives from Cromnibus for full text of letter.)
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