... allow more rationality and less emotion to be applied to the issue

Yes, as with finance and health care, so it goes with oil. Just calm down and roll with the punches said the good rational psychologist. Soon, like finance and health care, you will learn to love oil in its raw unadulturated form, with opportunites to be near it, in it, and form personal experiences with it at its source, even eating it.

This is new to us as well as you said the industry lobbyist with the appropriate scripted unscripted unzealous zeal. We're working hard to construct a bill with 10,000 pages to cover every detail so everything is fixed right the first time around.

We know too big to fail is too highly specialized for ordinary people to understand, like health care and offshore oil. That's why we marginalized Volcker and covered it up in an unreadable bill, so you can be very near it while reading the footnotes, like oil.

See, competition is a highly specialized topic and requires years of training to consolidate it under one tent, so America can be strong internationally, despite a scorched earth approach that wipes out competition domestically. We've learned that competition only works domestically for day labor, standing on the corner waiting for a truck to come by and snatch you up for going rate. We're proud to take competitive prices internationally like day labors take competitive prices domestically.

Have you tasted the new Oil Smoothie that just came out at one of those Open Carry Starbucks? Isn't it great what technology can produce so fast under American Capitalism when commie pinkos like Dean Baker are kept in their place?


Stupid liberals.

Izzatzo writes:
"That's why we marginalized Volcker and covered it up in an unreadable bill,"

Then ends with is ignorant non-sequitor stupid liberals.

Would that he was even slightly familiar with the killing of the Volker Amendment, a death caused by the Conservatives with the silent support of the treasury shills.

Then he/she/it mixes the BP problems - one that was created by eight years of lovefest between our oilmen in chief and the oil industry - to blame the liberals. One might as well blame the person hit by the drunk driver for being on the road at the wrong time.

Stupid Izzatzo

actually, this wisdom was testified to by blankfein at his hearing- since he wouldn't answer the question about the aig bailout, levin asked him, off-the-cuff, "is it better to be angry or greedy?" and blankfein answered "greedy, because greed will always outlast anger"- they thought he was being flippant, but trust me, he knew...
ps- yo Silence Dogood- take a chill pill- isthatso's post is supposed to be ironical (sigh, and i suppose humorous)- the age of irony started in the 80's- thus one may surmise the approximate age of such a poster...

The anger at the conduct of the bank has brought much more public involvement into an area that is normally the exclusive preserve of bank lobbyists. If the anger dies down, then the only people left in the room will be the bank lobbyists. This may not bring more rationality to the debate, but it will likely ensure that the final provisions more closely reflect the interest of the financial industry.

Sounds An argument for free banking. We need a fail safe so that the weakest banks can die without weakening the others. Freed back is the problem. People are not always diligent and nice.

Once upon a time back in the '60s before irony existed, when David Horowitz was a hard core communist trying to kill anyone older than 30, he opened a fortune cookie that said on one side, "For a Sequitor, Turn Over and Read", and on the other side, "For a Non-Sequitor, Turn Over and Read".

After years of reading both sides, Horowitz became a born again McCarthyite Conspiracy Capitalist, today earning a living by exposing non-sequitors of anyone left of Attila the Hun in lectures to Teabaggers, based on his personal experience from the inside as a non-sequitor who once believed in flawed sequitors.


Stupid liberals.

With the deficit hawks in full predatory mode, the public's attention will soon be taken up with more vocal distractions about how Medicare is unaffordable and Social Security is going broke. The trick will be to keep the public's ire at Wall Street alive and red hot. This will be the job of the Democrats, that is, the Democrats not dependent on campaign largesse from the financial lobbyists to retain their seats in November. Unfortunately the liberal (aka progressive) Democrats haven't been much better at reminding the public of the effects of unregulated capitalism than the conservatives.

It has ever been thus. The trick is either to befuddle the issue with bogus counter claims thereby creating decisional paralysis, or to wait patiently until the public is bored to distraction by lengthly technical details, or to draw the public's attention to other more entertaining spectacles, especially something involving blood and/or sex.

In any event, the outcome will insure that the ruling party gets their "cut" or percentage of any deal that passes. This is one battle in the larger war raging today in which long-term lenders are using their political clout to guarantee that their returns are not adversely affected by Fed and Treasury policies related to the money supply, interest rates and inflation.