Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I’ve sometimes wondered what it would take to get a guy like Dana Milbank to wipe the smirk off his face and get genuinely outraged.  Now I know: listening in on a call with the finance lobby.

On Tuesday, the American Financial Services Association even held a conference call with reporters to update them on its efforts — successful so far — to torpedo plans for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect people from the sort of lending abuses that led to last year’s implosion.

….”It looks more and more like Senate banking won’t take it up until January or February, and with next year being an election year, that does raise the concern level,” [Bill] Hempler reported with satisfaction. “This could delay the overall effort.” Or, with a bit of luck, kill it outright.

….In Tuesday’s conference call, AFSA’s executives offered the many familiar reasons why government regulations are bad….But the argument most likely to prevail for the financial firms on Capitol Hill was offered by Chris Stinebert, the trade group’s chief. “Especially now, when we’re in a very, very sensitive time, when the capital markets are just starting to recover,” he said, “introducing a high level of uncertainty in the marketplace could be very detrimental.”

Or, to put it another way: Don’t regulate us now because the economy is still suffering from the mess we made because we weren’t regulated the last time. Chutzpah, it appears, is recession-proof.

In other finance lobby news, Simon Johnson reads and explains a new research report from Morgan Stanley insisting that increased capital requirements for large banks would be a terrible thing for the economy:

The bottom line, translated: let us adjust our balance sheets (downwards to some degree) and continue with our existing business models (including unconstrained bonuses), and we will bring you back to growth eventually.  If you mess with us, unemployment will stay high for a long time.  And any future crises that may befall us are just a cost of doing business, and making us whole is just what you have to do.

All this lobbying and more1 will be crashing down on the United States Congress soon, insisting that any but the most anodyne new regulations will wipe out the economy, wreck the banking system, and turn the country over to the Chinese with barely a whimper.  They will be eagerly assisted by Fox News, the entire Republican Party,2 the Wall Street Journal, the business community, and — in a tremendous irony — tea partiers of all stripes, who will somehow be gulled into believing that good, hardworking bankers are under attack from the same malign forces that are trying to kill grandma.  Raise your hand if you think a majority of our members of Congress have the stones to stand up to this.

1And by more, yes, I mean tidal waves of campaign cash.

2Plus, as several commenters have mentioned, a dispiritingly large portion of the Democratic Party.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate