MB Civic

Taibbi has a follow up post to his excellent Rolling Stone article about the FinReg bill ..

I didn’t have a very good understanding of how bills moved through the Senate until I wrote this piece. But if you did follow what happened to the FinReg bill .. what you observed is that the Senate is really designed to be controlled by a handful of people — and that those people in this case used their power to make sure that this bill targeting Wall Street was much weaker than it could have been, had its various parts been left to an honest vote .. [E]ven though mainstream news organizations typically sell their viewers/readers a storyline of fierce partisan bickering and gridlock, the reality in this case was much more subtle — there were numerous examples of the top Democrats working with Republicans to make sure that the stuff that made it to the floor for a vote either a) didn’t have the votes to pass, or b) wasn’t terribly scary to Wall Street.

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