Because the Wall Street Big Money interests, along with their Republican lackeys in D.C., have spent the past couple years doing everything in their power to de-fang any real controls on the post-2008 financial industry, we have a Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that's a shadow of its original self, with a Volcker Rule that's yet to be enforced and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which has become not an independent watchdog, but the lapdog of Ben Bernanke and the Fed.
These days, any sort of genuine progressive reform legislation must withstand a withering barrage of well-funded lobbyists, propagandists, and professional nay-sayers. Should Congress actually pass a good and useful law, it can no longer guarantee it will stay passed. Good laws now face a constant battle to remain on the books. Look at Dodd-Frank. Look at health care reform.
In the 5/24/12 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi puts it like this:
"Real people -- even committed public servants -- get tired of running through mazes of motions and counter-motions, or reading thousands of pages of acronyms and minutiae.
"But money never gets tired. It never gets frustrated. And it thinks drilling holes in Dodd-Frank is every bit as interesting as Kate Upton naked. People think passing a new law means end of discussion, when it's really just the begining of a war."
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