Soldiers Lose Out to Yo-Yos

Here’s a snapshot that puts into sharp focus where we are politically this summer:

In a showdown between the U.S. military and the nation’s car dealers over protecting soldiers from predatory lending, the car dealers won.

Even though the commander-in-chief said he wanted the fighting men and women to be shielded by the proposed new consumer protection agency when they went to get a car loan, congressional Democrats Tuesday sided with the car dealers, who would prefer not to face any additional regulation, thank you very much.

After all, they argue, we didn’t cause the financial meltdown, so leave us alone.  But according to the Better Business Bureau, new car dealers rank fifth in complaints about lending practices.  Used car dealers do a little better; they rank seventh.

The military says its soldiers, focused as they should be on other matters, are particularly vulnerable to predatory lending.

Rosemary Shahan, president of a Sacramento-based nonprofit, Consumers For Auto Reliability and Safety, told the Chicago Tribune that auto dealers pack financing contracts with costly items such as extended warranties and insurance to cover loan payments if the vehicle is wrecked.

One of the more obnoxious forms of predatory lending is something called a yoyo loan. The buyer is told they can drive the car off the lot with a deal they can’t refuse – subject to loan approval. Then the dealer calls back and tells the buyer the initial loan wasn’t approved but they can have the vehicle at a higher interest rate.

The car dealers argue that they’re already subject to other forms of regulation. But they also have other means of persuasion: the National Association of Auto Dealers is among the elite top 20 campaign contributors since 1989, according to the Center For Responsive Politics, with more than $25 million in contributions. During 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, the National Automobile Dealers Association and another group that represents foreign-car franchises, the American International Automobile Dealers Association spent almost $3.5 million to lobby on financial reform and other issues, the Center For Public Integrity reported.

Call President Obama and let him know we need him on the front lines in the battle against predatory lending.

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 06/22/2010

Around the Web: Tweak Show

Rather than providing a terrifying wakeup call to reshape our financial system, the economic meltdown turned out to be a boon to bank lobbyists.

The fight for financial reform looks like it will be a long war.

Who won the first battle? The too-big-to-fail bankers, who spared no expense in protecting their interests. Now they’re stronger than ever, and the job of regulating them has largely been turned over to the same regulators who failed to protect the country from the recent debacle.

House and Senate conferees are still haggling over the final details. In the latest “compromise” to emerge, Rep. Barney Frank has given up fighting for an independent consumer financial protection agency, agreeing with the Senate proposal to house consumer protection within the Federal Reserve.

It hasn’t helped that the man who was supposed to lead the charge  – President Obama – ­ has largely been missing in action. An independent consumer financial agency was once a linchpin of President Obama’s financial reform package. But it’s gone the way of other provisions that the big banks opposed. The president also once threatened to veto reform if it didn’t contain strong derivatives regulation, now the administration is actually working to undermine it.

One of the most articulate advocates of a stronger overhaul of the financial system isn’t waiting around to see the final bill to declare a verdict. Baseline Scenario’s Simon Johnson declares the reform effort a failure. Rather than joining with a handful of congressman and senators fighting for a more robust overhaul, Johnson concludes that the White House “punted, repeatedly, and elected instead for a veneer of superficial tweaking.”

Now the focus of financial industry lobbying will shift to the regulators, who will have the task of writing the new rules the administration and Congress balked at providing. The conference committee is televising its proceedings. It’s not a pretty picture, as when Texas Republican congressman Jeb Hensarling argued to gut some controls on bankers’ compensation out of concern that the federal government would be setting bank tellers’ pay.

If you have a strong stomach, you can view the remaining sessions here. The Democrats want the negotiations wrapped up by July 4.

Around the Web / Martin Column - 06/21/2010

Listening to Our History

Driving through the west, headed towards home from a cross-country road trip with my wife Stacie and dog Billie, there's endless hours on the highway, no Internet and not much radio except for hard-right talk.

Hearing the voices passing through the desert states is a grim reminder of the forces we're up against, who now characterize themselves as the real "community organizers," who represent the real people.

It’s not just the right wing. Lots of people have adopted the timid trickle-down theories embodied by our political leadership: "Don't get too tough on BP or they’ll take away our jobs. Don't cross Wall Street, we need to keep the market stable."

We’re in Winslow, Arizona, wondering whether a boycott will worsen the dire poverty we see in front of us. It’s easier and more politically expedient to make immigrants the scapegoats for lack of jobs and economic uncertainty than it is to question a system that is seriously out of whack, that offers the biggest rewards to those who gamble on our collective losses without risking their own wealth.

That's what a big chunk of the financial system like hedge funds and derivatives has become. Cynical and bloodthirsty, producing nothing except profits for the few. And the gesture toward financial reform winding its way through congressional conference committee does little to change that.

I understand the fears of friends and family that the money they have saved and invested over the years will be lost if we challenge Wall Street and the robber barons of our time. The financial industry has shown that if it doesn’t get what it wants it is capable of wrecking our economy and causing great suffering for others. But this kind of blackmail undermines democracy. We deserve a financial system that provides both transparency and financial security.

Traveling through the country, along roads adjacent to rail lines and mile-long freight trains, I kept thinking about our nation's history and those rare moments of courageous leadership like Teddy Roosevelt tackling the railroad trusts, and FDR and his team creating the New Deal to save the financial system from its own excesses. And the creation of the GI Bill, which was designed to bolster possibilities for people who risked their lives for our country, and had played a huge part in the creation of a vital middle class. These were moments when audacious politics met pragmatic problem-solving.

I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City earlier this month. The topic of the wide-ranging conference was “Can the Internet Save Politics?”

One of the most inspiring speakers was Daniel Ellsberg. Amid all the excitement over the possibilities for political activism and engagement with new social media, Ellsberg reminded us that one of the most important ingredients is the same as it always was: moral courage.

Ellsberg was the Pentagon military analyst who leaked a secret Defense Department account of the disgraceful political decisions that led the country into the Vietnam War and its outcome. Plenty of people on the inside knew what was happening in Vietnam, Ellsberg said, but they had kids to put through college and mortgages to pay. They were not about to step outside the system and jeopardize their careers.

Not everybody has the nerve or inside information to be a whistleblower like Ellsberg. But we can demand a financial and economic system where we don’t have to sacrifice our financial security to those who gamble against our futures.

We can demand that our president delivers on his campaign promise of real change. There can be no real change without confronting corporate power over our government and political system. We are as controlled today by the financial and oil industries as we were by the railroad barons when Teddy Roosevelt took them on. TR said one should speak softly and carry a big stick. President Obama has been doing the opposite. We need to demand that Barack Obama follow TR’s suggestion.

Action / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 06/20/2010

Consumer Protection, Fed Style

One of the big unsettled issues for the congressional conference committee considering financial reform is whether to create an independent financial consumer protection agency.

That’s what the House bill does. The argument for an independent agency is that consumers need a strong advocate in the financial marketplace.

The Senate decided that an independent consumer financial watchdog wasn’t needed, and that the consumer financial protector should live in, of all places, the Federal Reserve. After all, the Fed already has responsibilities to “implement major laws concerning consumer credit.” We all know how well that worked out.

The problem is that the Fed has functioned as a protector of the big banks, never more so than since the big bank bailout and in the battle over financial reform.

Despite promises for greater transparency, the Fed has repeatedly resisted attempts to get it to disclose all the favors it’s done for financial institutions since the bailout. If the Fed had put up half the fight against bank secrecy that it’s waged on behalf of bank secrets, consumers would never have been subjected to all those lousy subprime loans.

It is telling that no actual consumers or consumer organizations actually think that housing consumer protection inside the Fed is a good idea. Who does? The big banks and the Fed.

For those who still need convincing that a Fed-housed consumer protection agency is a bad idea, the Fed has provided a more recent example of what it means by consumer protection.

Last month it unveiled a database that’s supposed to help people choose the most appropriate credit card.

The database might be useful to professional researchers but provides little that would be of use to ordinary consumers. It presents the credit card statements by company but provides no other search functions, such as comparing credit cards by interest rates or fees.

Some of the presentation suggests that the information was dumped onto the Fed’s website without much thought. Bill Allison, who is editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organization that digitizes government data and creates online tools to make it accessible to readers, said the following:

“I don't think there's anything wrong with posting it, but this is obviously not data you can search,” Allison told Bailout Sleuth.

He also pointed out that some of the agreements themselves aren't particularly informative. He cited the entry for Barclays Bank Delaware, which notes that the bank may assess fees for late payments and returned checks. “The current amounts of such Account Fees are stated in the Supplement,” the agreement reads.

But that supplement is not contained in the Fed's database. The Fed promises to go back and refine its database. But if they’re not devoting the resources to get this right now, with their ability to protect consumers under the microscope, do you really expect they’ll do better later?

An independent consumer protector is not simply some technicality to be bargained away. We’ve learned from the bubble and its aftermath that consumers need all the help they can get. Contact your congressperson and tell them you’re still paying attention to the reform fight. Check out your congressperson and see if they’re on the conference committee. If they are, your voice is especially important. While you’re at it, contact the president and remind him we won’t settle for any more watering down of financial reform.

Action / Federal Reserve / Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 06/02/2010

The Top 10 Reasons Not to Call Your Senator Now

I’m in beautiful Glenwood Springs, Colorado with wife Stacie and dog Billie in front of the fireplace in the lobby of the historic Hotel Colorado, which Teddy Roosevelt used as his western White House. There’s the Roosevelt Suite on the second floor, leading out to the grand balcony from which he addressed the masses.  Pictures and cartoons of him line the hallways.

I wish our president was more inspired by TR. He tackled the economic powers of his day—the railroads—with tough regulation, using existing antitrust laws to bust them up. Our political leaders don’t have the stomach for tough regulations or antitrust crackdown on too-big-to-fail financial institutions, let alone insisting on accountability for those bankers and politicians whose greed and carelessness actually caused the crash.

There’s wireless Internet, in the lobby of the Hotel Colorado. Barely. It’s so slow that I imagine overworked employees at Google receiving my page request, then sifting through voluminous files to find the page, then ambling back to their desks, where they stuff it into a pneumatic tube to my Macbook.

We’ve been talking to people who are weathering the economic storm. One waitress told us tourists used to line up four-deep at local bars. They’re still at the bars, but they’re not coming in the crowds they used to. Not a biggie for her: She’s third-generation Coloradoan. People here are used to a boom-and-bust economy: There was a silver crash in 1893; nearly a hundred years later, Black Sunday, May 2, 1982, Exxon pulled out and took a big chunk of the state’s economy with it.  She says her people are ranchers and live within their means: They save, pay cash and know how to live lean, when they have to.

The battle over financial reform is hot and heavy in the U.S. Senate. Looks like the best we’re going to get out of this president and Congress is a series of baby steps—as “Baseline Scenario’s” Simon Johnson describes them—that leave the status quo in place. But even these baby steps are better than the alternative: giving the bankers and their lobbyists a complete victory.

Contact your senators. Tell them you’re paying attention to financial reform. You’re keeping track of how they vote. Tell them not to water down financial reform any more. Ask them to support the Merkley-Levin amendment, the Volcker rule and Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives reform plan.

Unless, of course, you believe the following top-ten reasons for apathy, in which case, do nothing, and things will stay exactly as they are now:

One. You like it when banks gouge you on credit card and bank fees.

Two. You think the poor banks have suffered enough.

Three. You believe the banks’ propaganda that new proposals to rein in credit card fees will cost them $5 billion and cause them to extend less credit.

Four. You believe that the Obama administration’s toothless foreclosure prevention program has been a whopping success.

Five. You’re convinced that banks do need to continue the secret high-risk trading that caused disaster for the economy.

Six. You agree with the bailed-out bankers that their bonuses are none of our business.

Seven. You agree with the Federal Reserve that their secret handouts to banks shouldn’t be any of your business.

Eight. You agree with the bankers that they can protect consumers’ interests just fine without interference from any regulators.

Nine. You agree that the bailout really did work well for Main Street as well as Wall Street.

Ten. You’re convinced Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual did nothing wrong when they cooked their books to hide their bad loans from investors and the public.

Financial Reform Legislation / Martin Column - 05/20/2010

The Marx Brothers' Guide to Financial Reform

“Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” asks brother Chico in the madcap classic “Duck Soup.”

It’s the middle of the night in the imaginary European nation of Freedonia. Chico has disguised himself in a scheme to convince a skeptical wealthy widow, the country’s major creditor, that he’s actually the country’s newly elected president (Groucho) to get her to hand over Freedonia’s top secret war plans.

The trouble is Chico’s Italian accent.

And Harpo. He’s disguised himself as Groucho too. And of course there’s Groucho. Three Grouchos. Who’s the real one?

Chico’s line reminds me of the not so funny antics of the Obama administration and our political leadership in their various efforts to convince us that financial system should be left intact and that reform should just be left up to the same regulators who colluded in creating the economic crisis and protecting big bankers’ interests.

That’s essentially what our leaders have proposed, wrapping themselves in the disguise of real reformers.

We may have been blinded for a while by the riches the bankers were offering us, but we can see clearly now what they were: a gaudy mirage.

If we didn’t get it when the economy crashed, we get it now, after we toted up the bill from the unsavory wreckage of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, as well as the expense from the equally unappealing survival of Goldman-Sachs.

It’s plain to see that if any bank presidents lost their jobs they were handsomely compensated. None have been forced to face foreclosure or have had their unemployment or health insurance cut off.

The rest of us have a choice: believe our leaders or own eyes.

We understand what happened: the bankers got too big and powerful, got rid of all the rules, got greedy and brought the economy down – except for the part that kept churning out gargantuan bonuses to the financial titans.

We understand what we need to do, too: break up the big banks, curtail their power and wall off their gambling games from the economy the rest of us have to live in.

But the leadership that’s trying to control the debate seems hopelessly out of step with the country.

Not all the politicians are as clueless as the leaders. In fact, more than a dozen senators have signed on to what not long ago would have been considered a radical proposal – to audit the Federal Reserve. It already passed through the House by a wide margin.

This terrifies the administration, which doesn’t want any more details leaking out about the favors the Fed has been granting the big banks at public expense.

So the president’s chief of staff, former investment banker Rahm Emanuel, is working the phones. If the administration favored real reform, they’d be stiffening the politicians’ resolve against the massive bank lobbying intended to gut strong regulation. But instead, the president has sent Emanuel out to do the regulators’ bidding, to dissuade senators from voting for a Fed audit.

In the Senate, a handful of senators have proposed a stronger dose of reform than the administration and Democratic leadership have prescribed. But the Senate’s Democratic leaders are squeamish about even allowing their colleagues to debate these more robust proposals.

Meanwhile, the Republican leadership seems to be getting inspiration from the same Marx Brothers’ movie they’ve been glued to since Obama got elected –  “Horse Feathers.” Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell may not have any ideas of their own but they’ve managed to perfectly capture the spirit of the lead character, Samuel Quincy Wagstaffe (played by Groucho) in his opening number, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.”

The Marx Brothers’ wit and wisdom never go out of style but they’re especially timely now. They began their film careers satirizing the hysteria surrounding a real estate bubble: the Florida land boom in “Cocoanuts” in 1929. “You can get any kind of a house you want,” Groucho assures prospective buyers as he auctions off some land of dubious value. “You can even get stucco.  Oh, how you can get stuck-o.”

While he poked fun at speculative investing, in real life Groucho was also a victim. He lost his savings in the 1929 crash. “Some of the people I know lost millions,” he quipped bitterly in his autobiography. “I was luckier. All I lost was two hundred and forty thousand dollars. I would have lost more, but that was all the money I had.”

Federal Reserve / Goldman-Sachs / Lehman / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 05/05/2010

Taking Aim at Wall Street - With Jack Bauer

After a day consumed with the Goldman-Sachs hearings, last night I caught up with the latest installment of  the television show “24.”

Spoiler alert: I’m going to disclose what’s happening in “24, ” which focuses on the life of a mythical high-level super antiterrorism agent, Jack Bauer, who is pitted constantly and single-handedly not only against the wily, relentless terrorists but against the corrupt and inept politicians and government officials who are his bosses, usually at the same time.

I don’t always agree with the politics of “24.” But I find it insanely entertaining and profoundly troubling. It’s also one of the few public entertainments that confronts directly the issues of authority and morality we’ve been grappling with since 9/11.

In the latest episode, Bauer actually goes against his president, to whom he’s previously shown the utmost loyalty, because he finds out she’s covering up evidence of an assassination. She’s doing it for the greater good of course; to promote a fragile Middle East peace agreement.

At some point, Bauer finds that the principle of accountability is stronger than his ingrained loyalty to his president.

Accountability, Bauer says, is so fundamental to democracy that it cannot be compromised.

When one of his former colleagues, now his new boss, hears what he’s scheming, she cautions him not to go against his president. “You’re not thinking clearly,” she says.

“I’m the only one who’s thinking clearly,” Bauer shoots back.

After a day of watching Goldman’s officials studiously avoid answering questions in the Senate, “24” put a grim exclamation point on one of the most infuriating aspects of the financial crisis: the utter lack of accountability the financial industry has borne for how it wrecked our economy, through fraud, ineptitude, greed and recklessness.

The Obama administration has made clear it’s not interested in punishing bankers: for the greater good of repairing  the economy, we’re told,  we don’t want to look backward too closely.  We need to move forward.

Left unspoken are the millions in contributions that Wall Street has lavished on the Democrats, and the web of interconnections between the administration and the financial industry, most notably Goldman-Sachs.

We’re offered the faux accountability in the emotionally gratifying theater of the Senate Goldman hearings, the SEC’s attempt at reviving its abysmal reputation after missing the Madoff and Stanford massive fraud schemes by suing Goldman for fraud, and the limp, clumsy Financial Inquiry Commission led by Phil Angelides.

Which are fine as far  as they go. I hope they provide some impetus to put real muscle into financial reform, and they serve some purpose in reminding people how angry and ripped off they feel.

But let’s not forget they’re mostly theater. For example, the Republican senators took turns with their Democratic colleagues beating up on Goldman for CSPAN, while outside of camera range they get their Wall Street fundraising mojo back.

One of the sharpest critics of the lack of accountability has been Bill Black, a former bank regulator during the S&L crisis, who emphasizes that it was multiple robust criminal investigations that uncovered the widespread wrong-doing at the heart of that financial meltdown.

One official who gets it is Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka the bailout, who has raised the possibility of criminal investigations and tangled with the Treasury Department.

Meanwhile the mainstream media  serves up pap about how the mild financial reform proposed by the Obama administration is “the biggest overhaul of the nation’s financial system since the Great Depression.”

That’s just not true. The largest overhaul of the system would be the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had kept federally guaranteed traditional banking from riskier casino-style gambling activities which banks found fabulously lucrative before they blew up the economy. The current reform proposals contain nothing as earth-shattering as that.

Despite happy talk of an economic recovery  that still looks far off to many on Main Street, the politicians are finding the public’s outrage over their handling of the financial crisis is not abating, fueled in part by the political grandstanding.

Like Jack Bauer, we’ve had it with the corruption and the blundering. Public outrage over Sen. Chris Dodd’s close ties to subprime cronies forced him to retire. Conservative Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln, facing a tough reelection battle, wrote a tough bill that would regulate toxic derivatives. Then she was forced to give away  her Goldman-Sachs campaign contributions. On Tuesday, 62 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding that the Justice Department, not just the SEC, investigate Goldman-Sachs. And a handful of senators are preparing amendments that would toughen financial reform.

I know “24” is a fantasy but one of the reasons it’s so compelling is the way it embodies and scrambles the desperation of our current moment, and Jack Bauer, armed to the teeth in a stolen helicopter, touched a nerve this week. Accountability is our most important arsenal.

Martin Column - 04/28/2010

Around the Web: Taking Reform Fight to the Streets

The Republicans apparently think it’s too soon to start debating Wall Street reform, and the Democrats didn’t seem to mind too much.

After all, their secret weapon is coming to town: The banker America loves to hate, Goldman-Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, who will testify Tuesday before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

But the political theater can’t conceal what’s really happening. The lobbyists are working overtime working to kill, dismember or water down legislation.

The public’s continuing frustration and rage over the on-going bailout and continuing disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street finds little expression in what passes for debate in D.C.

A handful of Democratic senators – Kaufman, Shaheen, Merkley, Brown, Sanders, Levin and Cantwell – are waging a battle for the party’s soul against a leadership and administration that wants only as much reform as will not offend Wall Street. Meanwhile, the Republican leadership postures and preens and preaches about how the Dems’ proposals will hurt Main Street while they try to woo Wall Street campaign donors away from the Democrats.

What we have been getting from the Obama administration are words of caution, from the president to top economic adviser Lawrence Summers.

The Fourteenth Banker suggests a disinvestment campaign like the one that brought pressure on South Africa.

There will also be demonstrations across the country all week to galvanize public support for reform.

Around the Web / Martin Column - 04/26/2010

Just Who is Us, Mr. President?

President Obama went down to the playground where Wall Street bullies have been beating up kids and taking their lunch money. He suggested that the bullies should help create rules that would stop them from beating up kids.

How lame is that?

One blogger compared Obama’s timid performance to FDR’s attack on Wall Street for its rabid opposition to the New Deal. But I kept thinking about the other Roosevelt, the one who took on the railroad trusts.

While Teddy Roosevelt was far from perfect, he had his moments: “A typical vice of American politics,” he said, “is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.” He could have been talking about Obama.

What we saw on Thursday was a terrible thing: a brilliant and articulate president of the United States unwilling or afraid to tell it like it is.

It’s not the Republican minority who pose the greatest danger to real financial reform. It’s the powerful Wall Street wing of the majority Democrats who don’t want to offend the bankers. Our representatives need to know we want real reform, not just lip service that basically preserves the status quo. Our representatives need to have the courage to support the stronger proposals by Sens. Kaufman, Brown, Shaheen, and Merkley that would do more to actually break up the big banks and put limits on their risky gambling.

Mr. President: Let’s get real. Let’s say out loud that banks and bankers have grown too powerful.

Let’s get real. It’s absolutely not in the banks’ interest to “join us” in supporting reform. By suggesting that as the solution, you abandon your own credibility and avoid the “real issues” of a government corrupted by those bankers’ money.

Stop negotiating with Wall Street. Cop to their massive financial support for your campaign, and those of your colleagues in Congress. And tell Wall Street change is coming whether they like it or not.

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Too Big To Fail - 04/23/2010

Around the Web: Rookie Senator Fumbles Financial Reform

The news media / blogosphere have been having too much fun at the expense of the former Cosmo model who could be the key 41st vote if Republicans decide to kill financial reform.

It’s no shock Sen. Scott Brown would oppose it, given the enthusiastic support he got from Wall Street in his recent election, taking the Massachusetts seat long held by Ted Kennedy.

But Brown apparently got a little flustered when a reporter asked him to explain what exactly he was opposed to. It was one of those trick questions: What areas in the bill would Brown like to see fixed?

Brown responded by asking what the reporter thought. “Well, what areas do you think should be fixed?” Brown said. “I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.’’

Eat the Press’s Jason Linkins snorted on Huffington Post: “Yes. Some reporter may want to point out the epic collapse of the derivatives market to Scott Brown, and he will assemble a team of... I don't know...sled dogs? To fix it? Is that good? Will that work?”

Brown told the Globe he opposed a consumer financial protection agency because it would add another layer of regulation.

“Which is, of course, true,” pointed out Washington Monthly’s Political Animal Steven Benen. “ That's the point of the legislation. The financial industry went unchecked and nearly destroyed the global economy. That's why the legislation is being considered – to bring oversight and accountability through regulation.”

Brown also faces some hard second-guessing on a novel argument he made against financial reform on Face the Nation last week: it’s a jobs killer. He asserted that it would cost his state 35,000 jobs – about 17 percent of the state’s financial sector workforce.

When the Globe followed up to nail down Brown’s source for that statement, his staff told the newspaper he got the figures from MassMutual, an insurance company based in the state that has opposed financial reform.

But company officials said Brown had misunderstood them; they were talking about job losses the state had already suffered. Even those figures were grossly inflated, the Globe found. According to the state’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, the state has lost about 19,000 jobs in the financial sector, which includes the insurance industry, and also at banks, securities firms, investment management companies, and real estate businesses.

A MassMutual official insisted the company agreed with Brown anyway; similar losses could result from financial reform, he insisted. Sen. Brown stood by his earlier statements.

Whatever. A Globe columnist found Brown’s projections, as well as MassMutual’s, preposterous. “The idea that anything in the Senate bill could create additional job losses on a similar scale as the damage caused by the earthquake in the real estate and brokerage industries is simply nuts,” Globe columnist Steven Syre wrote.

Perhaps sensing an opportunity in Brown’s confusion, President Obama put in phone call to Brown from Air Force One.

The president probably didn’t bring up the question posed by Washington Monthly’s Benen: “Do you ever get the feeling that maybe Scott Brown isn't quite ready for prime-time, and that his service in the Senate is more humiliating than it should be?”

Around the Web / Martin Column - 04/21/2010