Rachel Maddow talks about the Good Old Days when Enron was the worst financial crisis..

Last week Rachel Maddow had an insightful piece about big bank swindlers, the Occupy Wall Street and Bank Transfer Day activism movements, and had Barney Frank on to talk about the Dodd-Frank bill.  Last night she had another piece about the recent history of massive swindles of the American population, focusing on the Enron scandal which should have sunk the Bush43 Presidency, and the later the 2008 financial system collapse.  The cause of both of these problems directly stem from deregulation of the banking and finance system, allowing these institutions to cook the books, make fraudulent transactions, and essentially swindle the population.  The response to those problems was to create two regulatory systems, the Dodd-Frank law and the Sarbanes-Oxley law.  The current crowd of Republican Presidential Candidates want to undo those laws, repeal them, in effect returning the country to the regulatory system that allowed the Enron collapse and the later general financial system collapse of 2007-8-9.

Under the old system Rachel talks us through a deal between Blockbuster Video and a large energy company who wanted to launch a joint venture with Blockbuster related to online video streaming and sharing.  That deal eventually fell through at a loss of $113 million, but that large energy company didn't record it on their books as a loss.  That company, Enron, recorded the $113 million as income and was part of the larger cook-the-books fraud committed by Enron.

Enron was a major supporter of the Republican party, to the extent of lending GW Bush the use of their corporate jet during his 1999-2000 Presidential campaign.  Enron was also in the room during Cheney's secret energy policy planning in early 2001.

Basically Enron was propped up by accounting tricks in a charade of lies and shell companies.  Later in the 2007-8-9 financial system collapse we had a different set of companies running a massive charade of lies, accounting tricks, etc, eventually defrauding the American public of massive quantities of money.

But the Republicans want to undo the modest regulatory stuff that came into being after these problems.  So that these kind of problems can happen again?

Let's be real - the actions of these fraudulent were enabled by decades of deregulation.  I can't imagine that Dodd-Frank or Sarbanes-Oxley did very much to recreate the necessary regulatory structure required for an honest and open financial and business climate.  As Barney Frank said during the prior episode, if the population had been calling loudly enough for tough financial reform, then Dodd-Frank could have done much more.

There have been decades of deregulation and I can't imagine that the Republicans are the only culprits here.  Both Democrats and Republicans have been taking payola from the major corporations for decades.

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Who protects us from banking swindlers? Rachel Maddow, Barney Frank, on the Dodd-Frank law that's getting attention in OccupyWallStreet and 'Bank Transfer Day' protests

The OccupyWallStreet movement and its sister movement, Bank Transfer Day, are up in arms about banking bailouts, the general state of banks swindling the mass populace, and so on.  Part of the anger is at the Dodd-Frank bill.  Rachel Maddow had Barney Frank (the Frank in Dodd-Frank) on to discuss protest movements and consumer protection laws.

Maddow started the segment going over the Bank Transfer Day planned protest - and discussing what she calls Banks and other Corporations committing Swindles against all of us.  An example was an American aid worker who was in Haiti on the day of the massive earthquake last winter, who shot a bunch of cell phone video uploading it to the Internet so she could tell her friends and family she's okay, and ended up with a $35,000 charge for going over her data plan allowance.  A recent regulation change is requiring cell phone companies to notify their customers before committing the swindle of charging for going over data plan limits.

Whether that particular instance was a swindle or not is debatable - but it's true that in general the Corporations and Rich People (the 1%) are continually lobbying to tilt the playing field in their favor, to remove regulations in the name of personal freedom and whatnot but for the real purpose of swindling us - their customers.

I would refer back to something like the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration.  Perhaps the food industry feels overly burdened by the regulations, but the food industry also proved a hundred years ago that they're quite willing to sell crap poisoned products they claim are food.  In other words - in the Conservative wing of the world they have an ideology of Enlightened Self Interest, and that by removing laws everyone will magically act out of Enlightened Self Interest and make their behaviors benefit others, because they know in Enlightened Self Interest other peoples behaviors will benefit themselves.  It sounds great in theory until you remember that there are plenty of people who have zero enlightened self interest, and are instead bent on screwing everyone they can so they themselves can get ahead.

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