It wasn't even close.

I'd suggest that anyone who hasn't done it yet should find a small bank and move their accounts. Clearly, the people we elected aren't going to do anything about these monster banks:

A move to break up major Wall Street banks failed Thursday night by a vote of 61 to 33.

Three Republicans, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Ensign of Nevada, voted with 30 Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, in support of the provision. The author of the pending overall financial reform bill in the Senate, Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, voted against it. (See the full roll call.)

The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), would have required megabanks to be broken down in size and capped so that their individual failure would not bring down the entire system.

Under Brown-Kaufman, no bank could hold more than 10 percent of the total amount of insured deposits, and a limit would have been placed on liabilities of a single bank to two percent of GDP.

In practice, the amendment required the six biggest banks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley -- to significantly scale down their size. It was touted as a way to end Too Big To Fail.

Though top Obama administration officials have not publicly opposed the amendment, its leading economists have opposed ending Too Big To Fail simply by breaking up the nation's financial behemoths. Austan Goolsbee and Larry Summers have both fought back against this idea, as has Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

"This is certainly a defeat for those who are concerned about the dangers of financial concentration in this country," Kaufman said in a statement after the vote. "Some causes are worth fighting for, and for me, the concern about the risks 'too big to fail' banks pose to the American economy and people is deep and profound given the economic tragedy millions of American have endured. I believe the debate itself -- though failing to gain a majority of votes -- has helped to change attitudes about the degree of financial concentration and power these megabanks now represent."

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(Here's video of Shelby being called out about his lack of ethics during the Auto rescue Plan by Carl Levin with Chris Wallace.)

Sen. Richard Shelby does his part to block all things Obama:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary "blanket hold" on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

"While holds are frequent," CongressDaily's Dan Friedman and Megan Scully report (sub. req.), "Senate aides said a blanket hold represents a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal." The magazine reported aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were the source of the news about Shelby's blanket hold.

Ms. McConnell didn't even know what Shelby was doing, but much of this is based on blocking business for Boeing. It's all about giving the business to a foreign corporation.

He just loves Airbus:

The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.

If you remember, back in 2002, Shelby was the one who allegedly leaked NSA intercepts to Carl Cameron of FOX News and the media and then refused to take a lie detector test about it right after 9/11.

"A sharp disagreement ensued between the FBI and senior Justice Department officials overseeing the case, according to federal law enforcement officials. The FBI was convinced not only that Shelby leaked the information regarding the intercepts, but also that the senator might have misled the FBI when he was interviewed about his actions, according to sources. They advocated that Shelby be prosecuted." Read the whole article. Pat Roberts helps ruin the investigation.

He got off because Pat Roberts screwed up the investigation like he usually does. And he's the one on TV the most trying to force the auto industry to go belly up.

And we can't forget that he acted like Herbert Hoover during the Auto crisis by using a "filibuster."

CREDO has a petition going that says:

It's time for Democratic leadership to stand up to Republicans, starting with Sen. Shelby. Senate Majority Leader Reid should refuse to honor Shelby's "blanket hold" on more than 70 nominees. If Republicans want to block every single Obama appointee, they must filibuster them one-by-one and deal with the very public consequences of their obstructionism. Sen. Shelby should be ashamed -- but he is not.

Sign up if you can.

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Republicans have been all over the teevee telling us what a swell place that Guantanamo Bay can be. Club Gitmo! And if we close it down, we'll be getting terrorists in our neighborhoods!

So of course, Senate Democrats quickly caved on funding the prison's closure:

WASHINGTON - In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison.

The 90-6 Senate vote — paired with similar House action last week — was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.

But listen to the Republican arguments and you just have to scratch your head.

There was John Ensign saying the health care was better than most Americans get. Then Sen. James Ihofe of Oklahoma went on Fox yesterday with Neil Cavuto and declared that "there's no place like it, the treatment is good."

But Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby really took the cake this morning on with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC:

Shelby: The Democrats saw the vote coming, should have, and saw that nobody in America wants a terrorist in their neighborhood. That's the bottom line.

Scarborough: Well, the Democrats were so sure six months ago they were going to shut down Gitmo. What happened?

Shelby: Well, they might shut it down. But I don't know why they would want to shut it down and bring terrorists into the United States of America, even into some of our neighborhoods, if they deem them not to be terrorists anymore. That's a dangerous road to go down, Joe.

Evidently, Shelby doesn't believe that when it turns out that some of these suspects are innocent that we should permit them to go free.

And, as Glenn Greenwald says,: "Is there anything the right wing isn't afraid of these days?" (His column on this is a must-read, as always.)

Moreover, Republicans (including Cavuto) are claiming that no one in the USA wants the prisoners. But that's not true. Already, folks in Hardin, Montana, are lining up:

Continue reading »

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How can this country ever get through this economic nightmare with leaders of the Banking Committee that are Republicans like Sen. Shelby, who just want the banks to go under:

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said today on "This Week" that the government should let troubled banks fail.

"I don't want to nationalize them, I think we need to close them," Shelby told me this morning.

"Close them down, get them out of business. If they're dead, they ought to be buried," he said. "We bury the small banks; we've got to bury some big ones and send a strong message to the market. And I believe that people will start investing [again] in banks."

I asked Sen. Shelby if he was referring specifically to Citigroup, the struggling bank that has received about $45 billion in taxpayer money.

"Well whatever. Citi's always been a problem child," said Shelby, who has long opposed giving federal TARP money to struggling banks.

But Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed.

"It's not practical to talk about closing a bank that is integrated throughout the whole global economy," he said. "It is practical to talk about buying some of those assets away from those banks and holding them in an institution that would have both public and private money." Donohue said federal bailout money for the banks was the right thing to do for the economy

How can we accomplish anything with a ranking member giving us the Hoover treatment? The banks are so interconnected to the global economy that you just can't treat them like a mom and pop grocery store, but thi sis what Republican leaders want to do.

From Josh Marshall:

Something like this is both heartening and insanely distressing at the same time because what exactly does he think people are talking about when people talk about nationalization? They're talking about some form of FDIC-like takeover, though probably one that would take longer and be much more complicated since you simply can't find another bank that is going to buy up most or all of Citi's assets at some knock-down price over the weekend -- certainly not in the present climate. You either clean the bank up (which would require what amounts to a de facto bankruptcy proceeding) and sell it back into private hands or break it up and sell it off in individual pieces -- likely some combination of the two.

It would be one thing if Shelby were just one more Fox News robot. But he's the ranking member of the friggin' Banking Committee.

C&Ler David emailed me this:

Keith Olbermann: Shelby didn't just say the banks should be left alone to meet their own fate to fail if that's the case. He suggested having federal regulators come in and shut them down. How is that not government intervention? How is that not nationalization?. And just because there's no bank standing at the end of this, how is that not socialism by [Shelby's] own terms and definitions?

Richard Wolffe: Well, I love the "socialist" debate. It's just so

amazing that people throw the word around and they have obviously no idea what it actually ever meant. You just have to be grateful that this congress wasn't dealing with the Soviet Union otherwise they would have threatened Sweden with nuclear annihilation.

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As Heather wrote earlier, Shelby is threatening a filibuster if there is an Auto rescue plan. At least Carl Levin calls him out over his obvious conflict of interest with the big three American automakers since his state went out of its way to bring foreign auto makers to Alabama. I've been calling for someone to call him out on this publicly since he has been given plenty of air time to attack Detroit while never revealing that the companies in his home state would stand to profit the most out of the bankruptcy is is pushing for.

Wallace: Sen Levin, you said the other day that southern lawmakers like Senator Shelby and you have mentioned his name. have an agenda because they have foreign, non union car companies in their states who will benefit if Detroit goes down, do you really believe that"

Levin: I think there would be some companies that would benefit if Detroit goes down I'm sure. They're competitors. A number of them have opened up plants in the south which they have a right to do, but there will be winners and losers and the big losers will be the American people here

Wallace: Do you have as Sen Levin has an agenda to help your local foreign auto makers?

Shelby: I don't have an agenda, but I'll tell you this, in the south, from South Carolina to Kentucky, Geprgia, Tennesse, Mississippi, Texas, we have about 124,000 people employed in the automible industry. They are competing. They are competing. GM, Ford, Chrysler can compete, but not under the model that they have now.

Notice he never tells the audience what car companies that are in his own state. He just brings up the number of people being employed.

UPDATE: He does remind me of Herbert Hoover too.

The Republican Senator from Alabama has been getting a lot of airtime lately because of the problems in the auto world, but here's a letter from Peter Karmanos, Jr., chairman and CEO of Compuware Corporation, to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a critic of bridge loans for American automakers, that gives us a little history on his political motives for why he'd like to see them all go under.

I trust it is safe to say that when you refer to "government subsidies," you are referring to subsidies provided by both federal and state governments. And if this is in fact true, then I am sure you were adamantly against the State of Alabama offering lucrative incentives (in essence, subsidies) to Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s to lure the German automobile manufacturer to the State. As it turned out, Alabama offered a stunning $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Additionally, the state also offered to train the workers, clear and improve the site, upgrade utilities, and buy 2,500 Mercedes Benz vehicles.

All told, it is estimated that the incentive package totaled anywhere from $153,000 to $220,000 per created job. On top of all this, the state gave the foreign automaker a large parcel of land worth between $250 and $300 million, which was coincidentally how much the company expected to invest in building the plant...read on

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Auto industry CEOs appeared on Capitol Hill today to ask for a $25 billion bailout. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked the top execs if they would be willing sell their corporate jets and travel home on commercial flights.

Sherman asked the CEOs, "I'm going to ask you to raise your hand if you are planning to sell your jet in place now and fly back commercial." "Let the record show, no hands went up," noted Sherman

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer and Mike Viqueira discussed the CEOs' lack of response. "I have to tell you, just listening to that is awkward," said Brewer.

These idiot CEO's are not helping themselves and they need to change their King Maker mentality very fast or they will go down in flames. Asking for a rescue package while flying in on private jets is freaking ludicrous.

No matter how we slice it, the Auto Industry is in big trouble and needs some help. We can't allow it to fold because of the ramifications that will be felt throughout the country and the good people who will lose their jobs. Millions of them actually. Matt Stoller told me in an email exchange: "What most people (including politicians I've talked to) don't realize is that the auto industry dying will hurt every single community in America through the dealer network."

Richard Shelby and his pals are hellbent to break the UAW and as many unions as they can get their hands on and that's what is really going on here, but the media will never say that. Shelby has deep ties into the auto industry that wants unions busted.

What Shelby doesn't mention, of course, is that Alabama is a right to work state. Shelby also doesn't mention that Alabama is home to Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes plants.

Shelby also doesn't reveal that many of the cars those manufacturers make in Alabama, without unions, are precisely the kind of behemoths critics attack Detroit for making--only these have foreign nameplates: M-Class SUV, GL-Class SUV (a new model), Pilot SUV, Santa Fe SUV, plus engines for Tacoma and Tundra pick-ups and Sequoia SUVs.

In other words, Shelby isn't opposed to car companies that are stupidly committing and recommitting to SUVs. Rather, he's just opposed to car companies that make SUVs with union labor.

If you remember, Shelby was the one who leaked NSA intercepts to Carl Cameron of FOX News and the media and then refused to take a lie detector test about it right after 9/11.

"A sharp disagreement ensued between the FBI and senior Justice Department officials overseeing the case, according to federal law enforcement officials. The FBI was convinced not only that Shelby leaked the information regarding the intercepts, but also that the senator might have misled the FBI when he was interviewed about his actions, according to sources. They advocated that Shelby be prosecuted." Read the whole article. Pat Roberts helps ruin the investigation.

He got off because Pat Roberts screwed up the investigation like he usually does. And he's the one on TV the most trying to force the auto industry to go belly up.

And Kathy G writes:

I've written about this before, but I'm doing it here again, because the wingnuts really need to put an end to this irresponsible bullshit, and pronto. Repeat after me: unions do not cause lower productivity.

The latest conservative to lie about this is Soren Dayton (who, last I heard, was "suspended" from the McCain campaign for peddling a sleazy, racially charged anti-Obama video). In a recent post about "card check," aka the Employee Free Choice Act (a proposed law that will make it easier to organize a union -- see here for more), Dayton wrote:

The unions and their lackeys in the Democratic party are intent on a path that will destroy our productivity for a significant period of time.

Um, not hardly. Even if you didn't know what the economic literature says about this topic, if you stop to consider that the postwar era saw the record high union density in this country as well as unprecedented economic growth and productivity gains, it might give you pause. Indeed, Ezra made just this argument recently.

I want an overhaul in the auto industry for sure, but this country is spending millions of dollars a day to pay for two wars while our country is going bankrupt. This is criminal and I think we have to remember that these are incredibly difficult times. Historic times and Obama is facing challenges like almost no other president has had to face as he gets ready to take office.

The Hill asked the other 97 sitting US Senators whether or not they would accept the offer to be #2. Richard Shelby's answer was probably the most, shall we say, colorful:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) ruled himself out because of disinterest and said McCain would look elsewhere anyway.

“Besides, there was a famous quote about the vice presidency from Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president,” Shelby said. “You should look that up.”

Shelby was referring to John Nance Garner, who served under Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941 and described the job as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

See what your Senator said here.

Via The Guardian:

A military cargo plane carrying three senators and a House member was forced to take evasive maneuvers and dispatch flares to avoid ground fire after taking off from Baghdad on Thursday night.

The lawmakers said their plane, a C-130, was under fire from three rocket-propelled grenades over the course of several minutes as they left for Amman, Jordan.

"It was a scary moment," said Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who said he had just taken off his body armor when he saw a bright flash outside the window. "Our pilots were terrific. ... They banked in one direction and then banked the other direction, and they set off the flares."

Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., as well as Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., were also on the plane.

"We were jostled around pretty good," said Cramer, who estimated the plane had ascended to about 6,000 feet. "There were a few minutes there where I wondered: 'Have we been hit? Are we OK?'" Read more...

Greenwald:

"Recently, close Bush ally, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, was found by investigators to have leaked highly sensitive, classified information to Fox News' Carl Cameron and CNN's Dana Bash while Shelby served on the Senate Intelligence Committee -- an unauthorized and serious leak which, for some odd reason, the Bush Justice Department refused to prosecute. No Bush followers, at least that I know of, objected to the decision to allow Sen. Shelby to leak with impunity...read on

I actually have much more information about this part of Glenn's article that I'll post when I get a few more confirmations, but part of the reason Shelby got away with it was because :

"Two witnesses interviewed by the FBI in its probe of classified information leaked from a joint congressional inquiry in 2002 say they are very concerned about cooperating with a Senate Ethics Committee review of the matter because Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) has not recused himself from the review--read on"