NPR: What Happened To The Push To Reform Wall Street? : by Kevin Whitelaw

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What Happened To The Push To Reform Wall Street? - by Kevin Whitelaw

Michael Bernstein, an expert in political and economic history who is currently serving as provost at Tulane University, says Obama's position is very different from that of President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, when FDR harnessed popular anger against bankers to pass key financial reform laws as part of the New Deal.Both then and now, it was largely up to the president to rally public sentiment, Bernstein says. "But I don't see Obama out there on the road, saying, 'You have to help me here go after the moneybags.' That's the kind of card Roosevelt played."

Heather Booth who runs Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group with nearly 200 institutional members, including AARP and the AFL-CIO has organized a push for widespread financial reforms. She expects a growing grass-roots call for change. She says - "We think people have been operating out of not just frustration, but fear. If that fear turns to hope for a real solution, and also, as fear changes to anger towards those who created this, we think there will be mobilization for change."

"If political leaders wanted to make it an issue, they could succeed in mobilizing people, but they're not," says Robert Shapiro, a political scientist and expert on public opinion at Columbia University. "For the people to mobilize themselves, it would take either another big drop in the stock market, or if not that, something worse."

Still, even if Americans aren't clamoring for a regulatory overhaul, the rest of the world is, says Fred Block, a professor who specializes in economic and political sociology at the University of California, Davis. "The Europeans, the Chinese and the Japanese are putting on continuous pressure," Block says. "If this were simply a matter of internal American politics, one would have to be more pessimistic. But the rest of the world has suffered from what the US allowed to happen in the financial market."

Note EU-Digest: So far nothing substantial has been done by our politicians to really correct what has gone wrong in the financial markets except help those who caused the problems. Politicians are the ones to blame for failing to do the job we "hired" them to do - watching over the well being of the citizens who elected them. Instead they turned a blind eye to the real needs of their constituents and a financial community gone out of control. The question which now must be answered without delay - can we trust our politicians with the power we gave them or should we get rid of them and the corrupt system they created? The answer should be quite simple.