And please spare me the stale line "well, their incomes went up, too, so its only right they pay more". BS. The top 1% pay 36% of taxes. The top 50% of wage earners pay 96%. This means that, in addition to senior citizens and welfare wards, half of the WORKING population pays about 4% of the taxes. The "rich" create companies and jobs and they are doing less well under Bush than they did under Clinton.

If anyone should be complaining about the ecnonomy, it is the rich, who are the favorite punching bag for politicians playing class wa

Blackrock nailed it; DEMOCRAT Senator Chris Dodd was head of the oversight committee and also received the largest donations of any politician from Mac and Mae. Number two recipient in campaign contributions was former community organizer and DEMOCRATIC Senator Barrack Hussein Obama.

Why are they broke? They encouraged lending for “affordable housing” in the ghettos of Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, etc. to pander for DEMOCRATIC votes. When the economy slipped just a little bit, the house of cards collapsed.

McCain/Palin will clean up the mess as “W” cleaned up the Enron and “dot com” Clinton disasters.

1. Depository institutions now operate in “deregulated” financial markets in which distinctions between loans, securities, and deposits are not well drawn. They are losing market shares to securities firms that are not so strictly regulated, and to foreign financial institutions operating without much restriction from the Act.

2. Conflicts of interest can be prevented by enforcing legislation against them, and by separating the lending and credit functions through forming distinctly separate subsidiaries of financial firms.

3. The securities activities that depository institutions are seeking are both low-risk by their very nature, and would reduce the total risk of organizations offering them – by diversification.

4. In much of the rest of the world, depository institutions operate simultaneously and successfully in both banking and securities markets. Lessons learned from their experience can be applied to our national financial st

3. Securities activities can be risky, leading to enormous losses. Such losses could threaten the integrity of deposits. In turn, the Government insures deposits and could be required to pay large sums if depository institutions were to collapse as the result of securities losses.

4. Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses. An example is the crash of real estate investment trusts sponsored by bank holding companies (in the 1970s and 1980s).

The banking industry had been seeking the repeal of Glass-Steagall since at least the 1980's. In 1987 the Congressional Research Service prepared a report which explored the case for preserving Glass-Steagall and the case against preserving the act.

The argument for preserving Glass-Steagall (as written in 1987):

1. Conflicts of interest characterize the granting of credit – lending – and the use of credit – investing – by the same entity, which led to abuses that originally produced the Act

2. Depository institutions possess enormous financial power, by virt

On November 12, 1999, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. One of the effects of the repeal was to allow commercial and investment banks to consolidate. Some economists have criticized the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as contributing to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis.[7][8]

The repeal enabled commercial lenders such as Citigroup, the largest U.S. bank by assets, to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. Citigroup played a major part in the repeal. Then called Citicorp, the company merged with Travelers Insurance company the year before using loopholes in Glass-Steagall that allowed for tempora