Yesterday, one of my MSNBC favorites, Dylan Ratigan was agreeing with Republican curmudgeon, Senator Jim Bunning, that the finance reform Dodd had put on the table was not enough.To be fair, senators on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown are also pushing for more than is already on the table.
Will the Cards Chris Dodd Dealt Stand up to the Filibuster Gamble the Republicans are Using to Finesse the Dems?
original photos, image processing and remix image by Rob Kall
But the point of this article is that the Dems are gambling. They don't have a great "hand" going into this brinkmanship episode, forcing the Republicans to filibuster. The "shitty" legislation (to borrow Carl Levin's use of Goldman Sachs email words) that Chris Dodd has brought from committee is not close to good enough. That's not surprising. Dodd is a bankster whore and not to be trusted. Is there one person in America who doesn't think Dodd's going to be working for the finance industry after he leaves the senate? If the Dems are really serious about finance reform that should add an amendment that stipulates that any senator who leaves the senate and works for an company or organization remotely related to any committee he's been on in any capacity will lose ALL his government benefits for the rest of his life, and that should include an lobbying firm.
Getting back from my Dodd-digression, I am wondering whether the Democrats have gone far enough. At this point, the Republicans can filibuster until tougher standards are included in the legislation. They can even filibuster until the legislation is WEAKENED and STILL claim it is better, that their stubborness helped Americans. They're lying like that routinely now.
Are Reid and Obama clever enough to pierce this strategy and take the ind out that message? I'm not sure. So far, they have not been very effective in overcoming right wing messaging. Clearly, they are working harder at it, attacking the messaging faster and more aggressively. But the pattern that is beginning to emerge may put the Dems behind the eightball, holding onto a strategy they thought was smart but that, by trusting an untrustworthy Chris Dodd, leads them to being in a worse place than they were in. The sad thing is, if the Republican strategy works, the Dems are already too late.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
