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Jon Stewart took the members of the United States Senate Banking Committee to task after their disgusting display this week where they were fawning all over JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon. Not surprising, as Stewart pointed out, given Dimon is one of their largest campaign donors. As Stewart concluded after going through the list of reforms that these Republicans have opposed in regulating the banks:

STEWART: Must be nice to be a Republican Senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining the sh*t you just broke doesn’t work.

Here's more from TPM on this week's hearing: Senators Fawn Over JPMorgan CEO After Massive Trading Debacle:

The long-shot big hope for Wall Street reformers Wednesday was that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon would trip up before the Senate Banking Committee and expose the need for tighter rules governing big banks. His firm, after all, recently lost billions making risky bets with depositor funds on the line.

Instead, with some notable exceptions, the senators themselves turned the cross-examination into a coronation, and exposed the extent to which elected officials still feel compelled to genuflect to powerful financial interests.

“You’re obviously renowned, rightfully so I think, as being one of the most, you know, one of the best CEOs in the country for financial institutions,” crooned Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “You missed this, it’s a blip on the radar screen.”

Most of the fawning came from GOP senators who in addition to relying on Wall Street largesse remain engaged in a political campaign against President Obama’s 2010 financial reform law. But some Democrats also treated Dimon if not quite like royalty then perhaps as a trusted confidant. [...]

His exchanges with GOP senators were even more saccharine. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — a tea party hero — gave Dimon a full pardon. “I really appreciate you voluntarily coming in to talk with us,” he said. “It is important that we talk about things happening in the industry. It helps us as we look forward and, hopefully, it will contribute to best practice scenarios in industry. I appreciate your emphasis on continuous quality improvement. We can hardly sit in judgment of your losing $2 billion. We lose twice that every day in Washington.”

Stewart went after DeMint for that ridiculous remark, asking if he thought spending money was the same as losing money.

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Tea party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on Wednesday asked JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently announced that his company had lost at least $2 billion in the derivative market, to "guide" Congress in creating friendly banking regulations.

During a U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing, DeMint told Dimon that lawmakers had no right to judge JPMorgan for their massive losses.

"We can hardly sit in judgement of your losing $2 billion," the junior senator from South Carolina explained. "We lose twice that every day here in Washington and plan to continue to do that every day. It's comforting to know that even with a $2 billion loss in a trade last year, your company still, I think, had a $19 billion profit. During that same period, we lost over a trillion dollars."

"As you can tell, there's a temptation here. Every time something goes amiss, we want to add a regulation, and we've surrounded the banking industry with so many regulations and we still seem to have problems here and there," DeMint added. "I think we do need to recognize that you are a very big bank, the biggest in the world. You've got very big profits. Periodically you're going to have big losses and we need to look at that as part of doing business."

The senator continued by asking Dimon "for some ideas of what you think we need to do ... to allow the industry to operate better."

"I believe in strong regulation, not always more," the CEO replied. "I would prefer a simple, clean, strong regulatory system with real intelligent design. And that's not what we did. We created a really complex, hard to figure out who's responsible, no one could adjudicate between all the various regulatory agencies."

"Obviously as we've seen, the laws and regulations are not necessarily improving things," DeMint agreed. "Some of the things you've done voluntarily -- and other banks -- like capital requirements. I think a best practice -- if we could do anything to encourage the industry to develop a lot of its own voluntary rules, that would guide us a lot better."

"So I guess if I could just leave you with any one thing, if you could come back this time next year and talk about how the industry has put together large-scale, best-practice committees, that would help us keep banking as a private enterprise rather than as a government institution."

Dimon announced in May that his firm had lost $2 billion gambling on derivatives, but only days later, experts said the losses had surged to at least $3 billion.

From this year's Netroots Nation, here's Elizabeth Warren from this Friday evening: Elizabeth Warren On Why Corporations Are Not People: ‘People Have Hearts’:

But she sounded a confident — though raspy — note during her address to thousands of Netroots Nation progressives here Friday. “It was not the convention that did it to me, it was the parties,” Warren said of her hoarse voice. Warren on June 2 avoided a Democratic primary at the state party convention, winning a historic 96 percent of the delegates.

Progressives who have any doubt where Mitt Romney, Brown and their supporters stand, Warren said at Netroots, should consider: Romney wants to repeal financial reform, says that people who are concerned about income inequality are envious and claims that corporations are people.

“No, Mitt, corporations are not people,” Warren said, to applause. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference.”

Warren, who helped conceive and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said financial markets need one set of rules to ensure a level playing field. “Progressives understand that markets are like football,” she said. “Every game needs rules, a referee with a whistle to enforce those rules. Without rules and a ref, it isn’t football, it’s a mugging.”

Warren later rejected the notion that the climate in Washington can prevent any actual reform — and jabbed her Republican opponent for reportedly shielding banks after voting for a Wall Street overhaul in 2010.

“That has now come to light, and it’s time for the American people to re-engage on this and say, ‘No more,’” Warren told TPM. “I don’t see this as a climate in Washington. I see this as a climate in the whole country.”

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Looks like Red State's Erick Erickson has a book to peddle, since he showed up on MSNBC's Morning Joe instead of his usual gig with the poorly named "best political team on television." When talking about the fact that conservatives didn't stick to many of their so-called "principles" during the years that George W. Bush was in office, Erickson agrees and thinks that they should be allowing the "free market" to do its job. When asked by Dylan Ratigan if he thinks that after allowing the finance companies to get "too big to fail" the government should have allowed them to go down -- even if it meant God knows how many retirees losing their pensions -- Erickson replies, in no uncertain terms: "Yes."

I wasn't wild about the bailouts but I understood why they did them. They were worried about setting off a death spiral where the entire world's economy collapsed and we had a worldwide great depression. Apparently that's something Erickson thinks we should have risked happening. Of course, his ilk doesn't want any regulations either that might have prevented that sort of collapse in the first place.

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Chris Wallace asks Bill Kristol if it’s bad news for the GOP if the Democrats are pushing to crack down on Wall Street and the Republicans are blocking it. To the surprise of everyone on the panel, after attacking President Obama for treating the American public like they’re stupid, Kristol actually suggests that the Republicans should “think about breaking up the banks”. I await Kristol trying to pretend he didn’t actually say this in about a week.

Kristol: If one has a view of the voters that they’re really simple minded and they… the Democrats get to say over and over again as President Obama says over and over again, Wall Street bad, this bill anti-Wall Street, you should be for this bill. That’s sort of the level of the rhetoric the President’s engaging in and it’s the same view of the voters that we talked about in the last session with the tea partiers. Hey, you guys got a little tax benefit there. You should be grateful to me. Hey, Wall Street bad, you should support me.

Let’s have a serious debate on the bill. It’s quite complicated. The fact is a serious critique of the bill is, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, the five big banks, all too big to fail. This bill does nothing about that. It makes none of them too big to fail. There are some good things in the bill. There’s some bad things in the bill.

It doesn’t address the problem that led to the financial meltdown and that problem can be addressed I think in conservative ways, through bankruptcy law and possibly through breaking up the banks. I think Republicans do need to be a little radical on their side in thinking through what the right solution is, but I’m not so convinced as everyone else that President Obama just gets to say Goldman Sachs bad, this bill anti-Wall Street. Everyone support this bill.

Liasson: Republicans are for breaking up the big banks?

Kristol: They should think about breaking up the banks.

Liasson: That would be a truly… then they would join with Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Kristol: Yeah. You’ve got to be imaginative sometimes, huh?

Williams: Well, let me just say that I don’t think Americans are simple minded when 80 plus percent of Americans think that Wall Street is greedy and that they contributed to the financial collapse that we are experiencing as a country and they want some reform. And in fact what’s serious to me is in addition to the fact that they think that we may have another collapse because of Wall Street’s excesses within the next three years is that they really want reform without even looking at the content. Americans are so concerned about what’s going on on Wall Street, they want some reform. They don’t care what the content is.

Kristol: That’s the beauty of the American public. They don’t care about the content. Throw anything in…

Williams: That’s not simple minded.

Kristol: $50 billion bailout fund, don’t address too big to fail, but hey American public will just go along like sheep because the President says it’s reform.

No Bill, that's what Republicans do. Repeat the same talking points over and over with no regard to whether there's an ounce of truth to them, just like you did here.

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Chris Wallace apparently thinks the man who was part of the Keating Five, and who as Jason Linkins pointed out "thinks Fannie and Freddie were a major catalyst in the financial collapse", should be allowed to weigh in on what we need to do to reform our financial systems. John McCain has absolutely no credibility on this issue, but then, you could say the same when it comes to a lot of other issues as well. PolitiFact debunked McCain's claims about Fannie and Freddie back in 2008. You can read their lengthy analysis here which I'm not going to rehash but earned him a rating of "barely true": McCain's 'warning' on Fannie & Freddie.

McCain: There’s a number of aspects of this proposal that are disturbing to me and by the way I believe the White House is right, do we need to spend more billions of dollars to bail out institutions? I thought the object was to make institutions too big to fail…ah, do away with them being too big to fail, so therefore the taxpayer’s dollars wouldn’t have to be used. So I agree with the White House. Hurray. But on this business of leaving…

Wallace: So what’s the hold up?

McCain: Leaving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of it. Fannie and Freddie were the, two of the major catalysts in this whole meltdown, this indiscriminate lending of money to buy homes from people that could never pay it back, the pressures of the Community Reinvestment Act to lend these loans to people who were never going to be able make their mortgage payments. So Fannie and Freddie being left completely out of it and the fact is we have to look at a number of other aspects of this which increase the roll of unelected, unaccountable officials and I think a greater role of the Congress of the United States.

Our own Nicole rebutted the right wing's attacks on the Comminity Reinvestment Act back when Lou Dobbs was going after them on his show. Lou Dobbs Blames Financial Crisis On Left Wing Groups Like ACORN and the CRA.

Here's another problem with McCain's attack on Fannie and Freddie. As Mother Jones pointed out, his former campaign staffers were high paid lobbyists for those very institutions.

McCain's Fannie and Freddie Connections:

John McCain railed against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the campaign trail today, saying that the CEOs that led the lenders to ruin "deserve nothing" and should have to pay back their severance packages. In an Wall Street Journal op-ed co-bylined by his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, McCain suggested bold reforms for Fannie and Freddie that would "terminate future lobbying, which was one of the primary contributors to this great debacle."

If that's the case, McCain should look first to his campaign staffers as the cause of that debacle. One of them was Fannie Mae's head of lobbying, and spread tens of millions of dollars around Washington in the form of lobbying contracts. A number of McCain staffers were on the receiving end of those contracts, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each from the lenders to rep their interests. And McCain's campaign manager served as president of a lobbying association that fought to protect Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from the sort of regulation that McCain is now proposing. Read on...

And as Jason Linkins pointed out "Interestingly, here he calls for a lot of government involvement and a lot of Federal oversight and basically seems to edge right up to reinstating Glass-Steagall?"

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Alan Greenspan gives us one more example of why the man who's been wrong about everything should not be given any time to weigh in on the mess with our banking system and Wall Street that he helped to create. Apparently Greenspan doesn't think we will be able to separate the Wall Street casinos that got mixed into the formerly trusted banking industry and to do as Paul Volcker has recommended because it will be too hard to "segregate the types of transactions which are helping customers and those which are strictly proprietary". I'd love for someone to explain to me what that bit of mumbo-jumbo means since I don't know how to interpret economics 101-Doublespeak. For some clarity, here's what he's against.

Volcker Optimistic Financial Overhaul Will Include His Rule:

Paul Volcker, a top adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, Tuesday expressed optimism that a financial overhaul containing a version of his proposal to limit bank risk would pass in Congress.

The former Federal Reserve chairman defended his proposal to give regulators the power to force banks to get rid of divisions that make risky bets with their capital, in order to help prevent another financial crisis.

“We have a promising possibility of getting agreement here” for a “reasonably good bill,” Volcker said, adding he was more optimistic than a month ago. He was speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Senate Democrats on March 15 proposed a financial overhaul that would hurt big Wall Street banks by reining in their profits and requiring them to hold more capital. The proposal includes a version of what Obama has dubbed the “Volcker rule.”

Volcker wants to prevent commercial banks with federally insured deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading,” or doing speculative trading with the company’s money. The Senate bill wouldn’t prohibit certain forms of bank speculation outright, but it would give regulators leeway to enforce limits on a case-by-case basis.

“Let commercial banks be commercial banks,” Volcker said. Although it may be a step back compared to developments in the financial industry over the past decades, it would be a step to a “safer and more productive future.” Read on...

Amazingly that made some sense to me, unlike this nonsense that Greenspan was spouting. Maybe anyone that speaks Ayn Randsism can interpret for me. It's really pathetic that this man is allowed to claim that the country "had no experience of the type of risks that arose following the default of Lehman Brothers in September 2008". Really? What the hell does he think caused the Great Depression, or the Savings and Loan Crisis? Couldn't be some pesky thing called deregulation could it? Couldn't be undoing everything FDR put in place to keep us from having another Great Depression, could it?

For anyone that needs a reminder of this man's hubris and why no one should be interviewing him for advice on how to fix our economic problems now, go check out my post here on the Frontline documentary The Warning--One Lone Regulator Warned About Derivatives' Dangers. It's really shameless that ABC thought we should be hearing from this man that helped create the environment for our economic meltdown to occur to come out and give advice on how to fix it.

Transcript via ABC News below the fold.

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Just as John predicted, Bob Corker has said he can't vote for the financial reform bill he helped to craft.

Corker says he can't support financial reform bill:

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) signaled Wednesday that he won't support the financial regulation reform bill he helped craft.

Corker told the Wall Street Journal that he "absolutely cannot support" the financial reform bill in its current form.

"I couldn't support the bill in its current form," Corker told the Journal.

But the Tennessee Republican vowed to try to continue to work for a bipartisan solution on financial reform.

Rep. Barney Frank joined Keith Olbermann to talk about the Republican obstruction in the Senate and said if the Republicans want to try to stop financial reform from going through, he's more than willing to have the conference committee in public. They were demanding it for the health care bill. We'll see how quickly they flip flop on this one.

Transcript via MSNBC below the fold.

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From The Daily Show March 16, 2010:

Chris Dodd introduces financial reform legislation, and Jon pretends he has the same rights as a corporation.

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Bill Maher talks to Michael Moore about his movie, Capitalism a Love Story not being nominated for the Oscars this year, the lack of any regulation being passed since we bailed out the banks and health care reform.

(Warning, slightly nsfw.)