(April 28) -- In terms of rhetoric, profanities serve two chief purposes. "They express emotions for the speaker and to the listener in a way that non-taboo words cannot," says Timothy Jay, a professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and author of "Why We Swear." "They also obviously get our attention." During Tuesday's contentious hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., treated observers to a tirade that did both.

Levin's epic blue streak was prompted by the testimony of several Goldman Sachs executives alleged to have sold what they knew to be a toxic $1 billion collateralized debt obligation to unwitting investors. While grilling the bankers, Levin quoted from a 2007 e-mail from one former Goldman exec describing the transaction, known as "Timberwolf," in decidedly unfavorable terms.

Money and Votes Aligned in Congress's Last Debate Over Bank Regulation

By Massie Ritsch on September 23, 2008 11:43 AM

The last time Congress seriously debated how to regulate the financial industry, the result was legislation that allowed the nation's largest banks to get even larger and take risks that had been prohibited since the Great Depression. A look back at that debate, which was over the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, reveals that campaign contributions may have influenced the votes of politicians who, a decade later, are now grappling with the implosion of the giant banks they helped to foster.

Looking back at the vote on the 1999 act, and the campaign contributions that led up to it, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has found that those members of Congress who supported lifting Depression-era restrictions on commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies received more than twice as much money from those interests than did those lawmakers who opposed the measure.

In 2008, until the U.S. government threw a taxpayer-funded lifeline this month to Wall Street banks drowning in a sea of bad debt, the potential for these financial giants to go under had been dismissed. The banks were "too big too fail." It was the 1999 legislation, commonly referred to as Gramm-Leach-Bliley (for its sponsors' names), that cleared the way for these companies to grow so large.

 


House    Frank A. LoBiondo (R-NJ)     $690,441 Yes
   
                                    http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/09/money-and-votes-aligned-in-con.html