JUAN GONZALEZ: And William Black, what is your sense of the prospects now for stronger financial regulation, given the fact that—my understanding is now that the financial and securities firms have invested about $200 million in lobbying—in their lobbying efforts in Congress, and the halls of Congress are filled with the lobbyists now who are trying to influence the members of Congress on the new regulation of the financial system?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, the earliest effort is—should be a real wake-up call, because it’s horrible. Barney Frank has proposed legislation on financial derivatives that essentially exempts what are called over-the-counter derivatives from most regulation, and it is over-the-counter derivatives that have been a major cause of this crisis. So that’s utterly insane. There’s no conceivable justification for it. And he stacked the hearing. There were nine witnesses; eight of them were from the industry and, of course, testified that they were vital to the world. The ninth witness was the only person who was in the least bit skeptical, and he was promptly gaveled down, unlike the others, by the chair. So it’s not only a farce; they’re willing to have us see that it’s a farce. They are so little afraid of public opinion and outrage that they’re not even taking steps to cover up the cover-up.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Black, how much does the 2010 elections coming up have to do with what’s happening now—I mean, from preserving the health insurance industry to preserving the financial elite in this country and the money that goes into the—back into politicians’ pockets, into their coffers?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, it has a lot to do, in particular, with the Blue Dogs. The Blue Dogs are the more conservative Democrats, and they are racking up unprecedented political contributions, because, of course, they’re such a powerful voting bloc. Even though they’re not all that large in number, they can be decisive in whether anything gets through the Senate, in particular, but they can also be real obstructionists in the House. And by being obstructionist, they make themselves very attractive to the lobbyists. And a number of the Blue Dogs are in jurisdictions where, you know, they have to worry about reelection, and so they think maximizing political contributions is the best possible thing they can do. And the result is very perverse, in terms of our ability to get any reforms.

And that skeptic, Robert Johnson, had this to say on Democracy Now! just yesterday:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to a clip of Timothy Geithner speaking on Meet the Press.

TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are moving comprehensive financial reform through both houses of Congress now. Chairman Dodd is drafting a comprehensive bill. Chairman Frank, working with the House Financial Services Committee, has passed through the committee very important reforms to give consumers better protection and to prevent kind of risk building up in the system that brought us this system to the edge of collapse, left taxpayer exposed. And I think we’re making a lot of progress. I’m very encouraged by how much progress they’ve made.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. I’d like you to talk about what he said.

ROBERT JOHNSON: He speaks as though they’re doing very comprehensive reform. Unfortunately, in the United States, one of the reasons we had the bubble and the crisis was because we have a broken political system, where campaign money, lobbying influence of the financial sector is enormous, and it created bad regulations, bad laws. I’m going back into the Reagan period, Bush the senior, particularly the Clinton era. We’ve made a mess, and now we come back from a crisis where the population knows darn well what a mess we’ve made. But the problem is, at this point, the people in power, the moneyed interests are still in power. And a large portion of these reforms are either cosmetic or designed by the industry and quite ineffective.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean the people who have always been in power are still in power? I thought a new administration was elected last year.

ROBERT JOHNSON: We’ve got a new administration, but we have the funders from the four or five largest banks—Citibank, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs. JPMorgan, I understand, has hired many of the lobbyists that used to represent Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The amount of money they’re spending has induced Dick Durbin from Illinois to say the banks own this place. So it’s really the lobbyists and the executives of the financial sector that I’m talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Obama is not in control?

ROBERT JOHNSON: Well, it’s a good question. He’s, like the members of the House and Senate, ultimately very dependent upon campaign finances, so I would say he’s very sensitive, disproportionately sensitive, to their needs, as he must be. This is a structural problem. This is not about bad wiring of Barack Obama; this is about a social architecture that’s malfunctioning.

[...]

ROBERT JOHNSON: I spoke, and during my verbal testimony, Bean cut me off. And then I asked her—

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Bean.

ROBERT JOHNSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Congresswoman.

ROBERT JOHNSON: And I asked her to continue, and she said to sum it up. And I said, “I’ll put my statement and my interpretations of your bill in the record.” But I said, “There are people other than industry groups that should be heard. And in particular, taxpayers and working people in this country should have a voice, because they’ve been paying the bills.”

AMY GOODMAN: Now, we’re talking about a Democratic-led Congress, a Democratic-led committee.

ROBERT JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got Barney Frank, who was considered one of the most progressive members of the Democratic Party in Congress.

ROBERT JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why is it that you’re forced in at the last minute? It sounds a little like the whole single-payer representative controversy.

ROBERT JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: When President Obama had his healthcare summit, 120 people, none of them represented single payer, until there was an outcry, and Conyers, Congress member Conyers, got invited.

ROBERT JOHNSON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But why are they just having pro-industry representatives for starters?

ROBERT JOHNSON: My interpretation of this is that we have a lot of people in the House of Representatives in the Democratic Party who believe that the banks are strong enough they can block anything in derivatives legislation that they don’t like. Number two, we have a situation where, in 2006 and 2008, many traditional Republican districts went Democratic. Now the Democrats are in a place where, with roughly ten percent or more unemployment, they’re going to have to go up for reelection, and they see this as a way to build their war chest for their reelection campaign.

That doesn’t sound at all like “Camp two, endorsed by the White House and influential Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), would impose tougher regulations on too-big-to-fail banks to keep them from getting out of control.” What’s up with that? Sounds like a myth with which to jack the public again, to me.

Did Frank absent himself so Bean could do the dirty work? By keeping Johnson’s expert testimony off the Web, of course, it’s being excluded from search results, and thus our shared narrative. Talk about “message discipline!”