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Good for Byron Dorgan. He talked to Dylan Ratigan about why these naked credit default swaps are so bad. According to TPM, he's willing to filibuster over the issue.

Dorgan Threatens Filibuster:

North Dakota's Byron Dorgan is retiring after this year. He doesn't have much to lose. Financial reform has been one of his pet projects for years. He's not shy about pointing out that he predicted the financial crisis in a 1994 Washington Monthly cover story warning of the hazards of derivatives.

Still, Dorgan had been relatively muted in his criticism of the financial reform bill cobbled together by Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is also retiring this year and who sees financial reform as his crowning achievement. But things had been bubbling behind the scenes. Dorgan was especially upset that his proposed amendment to the financial reform bill wouldn't even get a vote. His amendment would prohibit naked credit default swaps, which Dorgan views as little more than pure gambling by the big banks, not a way to hedge their financial risks, but merely placing bets on other people's bets.

Dorgan took to the Senate floor yesterday with a floor speech that ripped the financial reform bill as not real reform (video).

In the Senate Democratic Caucus meeting today, Dorgan and other progressive senators pressed the leadership to allow their amendments to strengthen the bill to come to a vote. According to Dorgan, the leadership relented and said his amendment would be one of the ones to come to a vote.

But tonight, as Brian Beutler reports, when the list of amendments to be voted on was released, Dorgan's was not among them. A frustrated Dorgan approached Dodd and Majority Leader Harry Reid on the floor this evening and told them he would filibuster financial reform if his amendment doesn't get a vote. "I understand everybody thinks their amendment's important, but the question of the unbelievable speculation in credit default swaps that have no insurable interest -- if we can't vote on something like that, given what we've seen in recent years, then it's not really financial reform," Dorgan told us.

TPM doesn't think most of the progressives' amendments will get passed and their probably right. As they noted though Dorgan threatening a filibuster has just upped the ante, in a welcomed way I'd say.

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Dylan Ratigan talks about the decision by Tim Geithner to keep details of the AIG bailout secret. More from Reuters--New emails show AIG mulled bank payment disclosures:

The New York Federal Reserve Bank actively worked with bailed out insurer AIG to build a case against disclosing details of AIG's payments to banks just days after the insurer considered making them public, documents released late on Saturday showed.

Lawyers for the Fed bank, which had taken over a pool of AIG assets as part of a $180 billion government bailout of the insurer in 2008, advised that AIG maintain a "confidential treatment request" from the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to emails provided by Rep. Darrell Issa, a U.S. lawmaker probing the matter.

A separate batch of emails made public earlier this month showed that New York Fed had advised AIG not to disclose the payments in a securities filing in late 2008.

The email traffic has raised questions about the role of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who ran the New York Fed at the time of the AIG bailout and the insurer's payment of some $62.1 billion to banks to liquidate credit default swaps it had sold to them.

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Michael Moore joined the set of the Larry King Live for the full hour. Here's part of the first segment where Michael talks about how much richer the upper one percent have gotten, how much Wall Street loves corporate welfare when they get into trouble and why Wall Street and large corporations are happy when they lay off workers in the United States.

KING: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?

MOORE: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don't have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it's failed. All the basic tenets of what we've talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout -- for welfare, for socialism. And it -- it -- I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it's about a -- it's a sink or swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don't run their business the right way, then they don't do well.

And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?

I understand -- I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people's money -- people's pension funds, people's 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance -- the credit default swaps.

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