Yesterday it was Greenspan saying dump the "too big to fail banks. Today Summers is born again as a reformer.

Action would be nice for a change. That would include Treasury telling the Special Inspector General of TARP where the dollars went, which Geithner has refused to do. Further signs of good faith would ensue by repealing the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (thus restoring the Glass Steagall Act repealed in 2000) and also doing away with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, the justification for the derivative frenzy.

Talk is cheap, as you indicate. Summers can talk reform all day long. Until he admits the folly of his support for these two disastrous bills as part of a bipartisan coalition, then he's just "distancing."

They'll find new unregulated financial instruments to gamble on.

If the monetary reform ends up being pursued the same way the health care reform did, we can can expect another huge bill made of pork, full of loopholes, and compromised to the point where it makes the situation worse than it was before they started.

We can start by making political office pay the same as any other government clerical job. And by severely limiting campaign spending.

Demolishing K-street and replacing it with affordable housing wouldn't be a half-bad idea either, along with outlawing the practice of lobbying completely.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget, how about taking away the status of personhood from corporations. The truth is that corporations are NOT people, too. The law should reflect that.

Sorry, but from where I sit, this looks like more populist double-speak coming from somebody whose whole life has been about riding the next big bubble.

I am not buying it. No pass.

when Larry Summers is lying...his lips are moving.

Yes, they should have allowed the banks to fail, thus eliminating all of the bonuses, and federalized them. Yes, they should have held the banks accountable for the money given to them, with specific lending requirements to put money back into the system to jump-start businesses, and required that no bonuses be paid until all the money from the government was paid back. Yes, there are other things they should have done that had worked elsewhere.

The conservatives think that Summers is a "communist," which makes little sense in light of the pass given to financial institutions so far, and Geitner claims he has never worked in the private financial sector.

There is a danger in not allowing things to unfold in a way that benefit progressives in the election cycle. Opening the door to financial reform, at this time, when the American middle and blue collar classes are deeply hurting, losing their homes and more and more without health insurance, may provide the opportunity to allow the conservatives to show their true spots and alienate themselves from a number of "conservative" blue collar workers who have felt akin with conservative social values but have allowed themselves to be shafted by conservative economic policies.

A core value of many conservatives can be seen in the younger William Rehnquist's showing up at the polls, decades ago, to demand that a Black woman recite the Constitution to him or be turned away from the voting booth. Such an audacious and desperate act, halted by the police but then he returned to try it again, demonstrates the conservative passion to maintain their sense of status over people of color and to maintain workers of all colors in a condition of de facto slavery to enhance the financial divide to insure that elite conservative families would always maintain their wealth and sense of entitlement at the expense of the masses of the working class. That was an under-girding value of Reagan and one reason he is beloved of the conservative elite.

Such social evil, it seems to me, lies at the heart of the present struggle. Conservatives are going to find themselves more and more in the grips of a siege mentality. With the number of community militias on the rise and ammunition selling out of gun shops on a regular basis, one must question the extent to which conservatives are willing to go to preserve their delusion that should have but did not die with the Confederate defeat in the Civil War.

Pushing too fast, on the part of the Obama administration, could ignite passions far beyond those with which the nation is prepared to cope. There is conservative rage and it must be allowed to fester without pushing it to the point igniting into violence. So we need to move step-by-step with time to allow the Republicans to implicate themselves in screwing over the working publics to help workers, now deeply hurting, make the right decisions in the coming elections.

Patience is very important, allowing conservatives to self-destruct individually without igniting the critical mass of anger that could make some of the city riots of recent decades look like child's play.

Channing
Ventura CA USA