Matt Taibbi with some news that is making bankers very, very unhappy:

Minds are changing on Too Big to Fail. A month ago, it was just something in the air. Now, it looks like we're headed for a real legislative confrontation. And man, is the finance sector freaking.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.

Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount.

The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they're able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. "ICBA strongly supports this legislation," the release read, "and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail."

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I just love this story. Talk about not agreeing with your in-laws! Josh Mandel is the Republican running against Sherrod Brown for his Senate seat, and some of his family members don't like his position on gay marriage:

With days to go before the 2012 elections, Ohio Senate hopeful Josh Mandel is taking heat from an unexpected source: his in-laws.

On Monday, Mandel’s wife’s cousins took out an ad in the Cleveland Jewish News blasting Mandel for his anti-gay policies. Nine cousins signed the open letter, including members of the Ratner family, a prominent Jewish family in Cleveland that Mandel married into, according to Salon.

In the letter, Mandel’s relatives criticize his opposition to same-sex marriage and his stated belief that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the military policy overturned by Obama that prevented gays from serving openly in the military, should be reinstated. On both points, the letter turns personal, noting how Mandel’s anti-gay policies would directly affect members of his family.

“Your cousins, Ellen Ratner and Cholene Espinoza, are among the many wonderful couples whose rights you do not recognize,” the letter reads. “Their wedding, like yours, was a beautiful and happy occasion for all of us in our family. It hurts us that you would embrace discrimination against them and countless other loving couples in Ohio and around the country.

”

Now that's some real family values!

Every time I suggested something like this, fellow progressives told me it was right-wing, anti-government populism. I didn't agree then, and so I think Sherrod Brown's idea is a good one:

Washington (CNN) -- Should members of Congress cut their salaries or raise the age at which they can draw a congressional pension when many Americans are making personal sacrifices during the country's prolonged economic crisis?

Sen. Sherrod Brown thinks so.

In April, the Ohio Democrat introduced the Shared Retirement Sacrifice Act of 2011, which would require lawmakers to wait until the age of 66 to collect their pensions. Currently, lawmakers can retire as early as 50 with a full pension depending on how long they served.

"The reason I introduced my bill ... on this shared sacrifice in terms of retirement age is I hear lots of members of Congress, especially, particularly conservative members of Congress, say we should raise the retirement age for Social Security," Brown said on CNN's "American Morning."

Brown points to the fact that a member of Congress who gets elected at 35 and retires at 55 can draw a pretty good pension then while other Americans can't draw Social Security benefits until they reach 66.

"So, my thought there was that members of Congress should not be able to get their pension, no matter how many years of service they had; they should get no pension until any earlier than a Social Security beneficiary should get theirs," he said.

In 2009, there were 455 retired members of Congress drawing a federal pension based fully or in part on their congressional service in 2009, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in January.

Of that number, 275 were in office before 1984 and did not pay into Social Security nor can they collect benefits. They received an average yearly pension of $69,012 in 2009.

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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."

Via Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny, some encouraging news - not every member of Congress is buying the Wall Street line:

There is a small group of progressive Democrats-- very small-- who are actually independent of Wall Street. You may have noticed that last week Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim Webb (D-VA) introduced a bill targeting outrageous bonuses of banksters who are getting it out of TARP money.

Yesterday Sherrod Brown (D-OH) introduced an even more stringent bill that targets any bonus over $25,000-- where the Boxer-Webb bill goes after anything over $400,000. I'm with Sherrod on this one. He says he wants to use the proceeds to help small businesses expand and hire new employees. In a talk about how Wall Street benefited from the infusion of taxpayer dollars via TARP, he explained why he thinks Main Street needs to be helped along now and how this is a way to get that started. “It’s time," he said, "for Wall Street to return the favor to Main Street. While big banks have rebounded thanks to the help of American taxpayers, small businesses are still struggling. If a big firm that received taxpayer help is now paying out massive bonuses, they should be able to help American small businesses expand operations and hire new workers. Small business growth will create jobs and get our economy back on track."

In elections this close, anyone who thinks they can be authoritative in knowing exactly what is going on is fooling themselves. This is an incredibly close election, and will remain so in the polling until Election Day. Last-minute efforts to Get Out The Vote (GOTV) and appeal directly to undecided voters are all-important right now.

There are a couple of pessimistic scenarios for us Democrats. The first is that Republicans win the voter suppression wars. The impression I have from the field reports I am getting from people and news accounts around the country is that Republicans seem to be working harder at suppressing our vote than turning their own out, which while morally ugly makes some tactical sense for them since their voters are more likely than ours to show up at the polls. They have done what they can to throw out as many legal hurdles to poor, minority, and young people voting as they can, although thankfully a lot of those efforts have been rejected in court. Now they are mobilizing volunteers to challenge voters at the polls, paying for ads and mailings to discourage people from voting, and having their legal teams ready to try and throw out legitimate voters who show up in Democratic precincts. Democrats are mobilizing to fight back against these ugly Republican tactics, but it will be brutal on the ground in the most competitive states and races. Who wins this battle may well win the election.

The other scenario Democrats have to worry about is the old adage that undecideds almost always break against the incumbent at the end. That is certainly something that happens sometimes in politics, including at the Presidential level such as in the Carter-Reagan race in 1980. However, I tend to think that is less likely for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the great pollster Mark Mellman has pretty thoroughly debunked that notion that it happens most of the time in Presidential races. As Mark points out, in most Presidential races, undecideds break close to 50-50 at the end. But this year, there is another reason to be a little more optimistic about the undecided: they look a lot like Democratic base voters.

This point is worth talking about at a little more length, because it is crucial to understanding this election. The undecided that are left, which may be as few as 3% of the electorate or less (although that’s plenty to decide a race this close), are mostly women and very disproportionately young and lower income and unmarried. In other words, they look a lot like Democratic base voters. That means the people they know and trust to get their political advice from are a lot more likely to be voting Democratic, and it makes the odds of them deciding to vote Democratic in the end quite good.

It also means that our final GOTV operation and our final persuasion of undecided voters’ efforts are very much aligned. This is great news, because there is nothing more painful for a campaign in the closing days than having to juggle messages and final expenditures between swing and base voters who are very different kinds of folks and need to hear different messages. This kind of alignment powerfully favors the Obama campaign here at the end. They can and should be targeting the large majority of their messaging to young unmarried women. And it sure does make clear for all you Democratic activists out there how to spend your time in addition to the door knocking and phone calling you are already doing through campaigns or organizations: talk to/text/Facebook/tweet all your friends who are unmarried women, and make damn sure they are voting, and voting Democrat.

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