Put Wall Street Back On Its Leash: Restore Glass Steagall

Marcy Kaptur is a catholic-variety anti-choice freakazoid, but on economic issues she's an FDR Democrat to the bone.

Kaptur Urges Return to Prudent Banking Standards To Restore Integrity to the Housing Market

Speaking at a House Budget Committee hearing (June 2), Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur today blamed deregulation of the financial sector for the collapse of the housing market in the United States in 2008 ....

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"Who drove the meltdown in the housing sector?" asked Kaptur, a member of the Budget committee. "High-risk behavior in America's housing markets began during the early 1990s when deregulation of the private sector, which was pushed by some Members here in Congress, allowed the private sector to turn formerly-prudent loans into bonds, and then to securitize them into the international market in a manner that bore no relationship to their true value or to local real estate markets."

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She said deregulation, culminating in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, "unleashed the speculators" that eventually pulled the market under. She is the author of H.R. 1489, the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011, that would reinstate the provisions of Glass-Steagall legislation that prohibited banks from engaging in both commercial banking and investment banking.

"For our nation to dig itself out of the worst housing depression since the Great Depression, we must go back and unwind what happened and restore prudent standards," she said.

Her House colleagues - even most members of the Progressive Caucus, who know goddamn good and well that she's right - have not exactly been flocking to her side.

On June 15, Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) became the 15th and 16th members of Congress to sign on to the bill. Action is still pending in the U.S. Senate, which does not yet have a bill to restore Glass-Steagall before it.

No, of course it doesn't have a chance in the repug-run House, but neither does any repug legislation from the House - 99 percent of which is batshit insane - have any chance in the Democratic-run Senate.

So why not take a stand? Why not throw this in the repugs' face? Why not draw a thick, bright, heavy line between those members of Congress who put the financial security of working families and the nation's economy first, and those who put their campaign contributions from Wall Street first?

I'm looking at you, Congressman John Yarmuth, D-KY3. Your reputation as a Proud Liberal and Congressman Awesome is at stake.