The Republican-led House of Representatives is poised to pass, as early as Wednesday, a sweeping spending bill that would slash funding for the regulatory agency responsible for policing against excessive speculation and price manipulation in oil markets.
House members are expected to approve an agriculture spending bill that would deeply cut the annual bill that funds the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates trading in oil, grains and other commodities.
The CFTC got some new power as part of the Dodd-Frank bill, so this is another attempt to soft-repeal that law.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Anything to help those poor, long-suffering oil companies from the brutal heel of gov’t regulation.
Zifnab
I can’t wait to hear how many jobs this creates.
Suffern ACE
If only Dodd Frank was stronger. Somehow it would be harder to defund if only it had been a stronger law with more penalties.
Suffern ACE
If only Dodd Frank was stronger. Somehow it would be harder to defund if only it had been a stronger law with more penalties.
TheMightyTrowel
I feel like I’m in a comic book, the supervillains have taken over the country and the mutant superheroes have all gone galt.
[ETA: but then again, I live in the UK now, in part because i refuse to live in a country where I have to pay for birth control, so I guess I went galt too]
Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory
Fuck. Given what’s been happening with commodities speculation over the last five years, and how badly we, as consumers, are getting assraped by such speculation, I’d have thought that control of such prices would be any politician’s number one priority.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA. That was a joke. America, The Scam lurches onwards, bleeding to death from a thousand cuts.
Ash Can
Well, naturally the Republican corporate slaves will be doing all they can to gut regulation for their masters. That’s a foregone conclusion. The only question is of whether any House Democrats will vote for this bill, and if so, who they are.
kindness
McClatchy is one of the few MSM providers which try to give a balance perspective without resorting to lying imho. Sadly, the bulk of the MSM will portray this a the Republicans furthering the cause of freedom vs. the socialist job killing Democrats/liberals. I’m tellin’ ya, there is going to be another civil war here in these United States & it won’t be states against states. It’ll be peoples against peoples.
LGRooney
Wrong Lesson
NotLearnedFixed it for you. For obvious reasons, they don’t think failure to regulate WAS the problem and now they think too much regulation IS the problem. Their paymasters know they have a short window to steal everything possible so they can buy safe houses for their children in isolated Swiss villages protected from the rabble before the backlash shitstorm arrives. They produce the propaganda that the gullible nitwits actually believe.
Frankensteinbeck
…do we care? The House is going to pass every crazy ass bill they can think of, including multiple contradictory budgets. They’ve already passed a bill repealing the ACA. Quite a number of them don’t realize they are only one half of one branch of government.
If we panic over every lunatic bill the House passes until they’re kicked out we’ll be too exhausted to pay attention to the negotiations on the few budgets that actually MUST pass.
So far they’ve defunded neither the ACA nor finreg. Of course they want to and will pass symbolic bills saying they have. They’ve been doing that! Those bills haven’t gone anywhere and aren’t going anywhere.
Zifnab
Watching Republicans pass legislation like this is like watching a poker match where one guy at the table screams “ONE MILLION DOLLARS!” and dumps all his chips into the pot.
No, more money on the table doesn’t increase the odds of winning a hand. But it does raise the stakes. And the Republicans are perpetually flush with capital, because they have built themselves a crazy base and networked with a bunch of crazy billionaires. So they can keep screaming and throwing money on the table, even when a normal person would have gone bust.
Republicans can lose, but they’ve never lost. After ’06 and ’08, I thought we’d hit a tipping point. But ’10 seems to prove these fuckers just won’t die.
Zifnab
My post has been sent to moderation hell and I don’t know why.
Zifnab
Watching Republicans pass legislation like this is like watching a poker match where one guy at the table screams “One Million Dollars” and dumps all his chips into the pot.
No, more money on the table doesn’t increase the odds of winning a hand. But it does raise the stakes. And the Republicans are perpetually flush with capital, because they have built themselves a crazy base and networked with a bunch of crazy billionaires. So they can keep screaming and throwing money on the table, even when a normal person would have gone bust.
Republicans can lose, but they’ve never lost. After ’06 and ’08, I thought we’d hit a tipping point. But ’10 seems to prove these fuckers just won’t die.
RalfW
Just like in WI where they’re going to resort to insane hyper-speed destruction ahead of the recall that will end the nonsense, the GOP’s paymasters know the window of opportunity is short.
The time it took for the oligarchs to rip off the unraveling USSR and turn it into Russia — a nation now with stunning, very concentrated wealth and massive, massive ranks of poor people — was quite short.
Same is true here. They know the pitchforks are coming. So they will loot, and pass as many laws like WI as possible so that the people have no recourse.
It really is the fall of empire. Before our eyes. Add a few drops of global climate change, and the Blade Runner dystopia (minus replicants) is our future.
Frankensteinbeck
@RalfW:
Rumors of the death of the Republic are greatly exaggerated. The insane garbage the Republicans are trying to throw out would set us back a hundred years… if it ALL passed and NONE of it were immediately repealed. Notice that the Republic survived just fine a hundred years ago. We have been through corruption, we have been through ridiculous pro-business deregulation and the economic disasters it’s caused, and we’ve been through political parties going batshit insane. There is nothing new under the sun.
And not much of it is going to pass. They’re putting the screws to a few states as a backlash because several massive liberal reforms were accomplished. Even in those states it looks like they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face. It disgusts me that they’re achieving any of this regressive, soulless life-destroying agenda anywhere, but they’re not winning the war. They’re losing it, and that’s why they’re constantly becoming more desperate and insane.
The ONLY thing they’re not consistently losing on is that since Reagan they’ve done a good job of funneling more money to the rich while putting everyone else in stasis. And if the massive electoral chickens they’ve created come home to roost, even that will be a bump in the road.
jinxtigr
You can poke Tunch, you can poke ‘her’, but there’s one sort of poke you can’t do around here without being automoderated ;)
It’s just like the boehner pills, the version of WordPress John’s using (specifically, one of the plugins) just nukes you if you talk about gambling places or hardon medications. I’m not sure specifically which one, but I suppose it’s worthwhile as we never see outright spammers- seems like everything they could possibly want to spam is covered.
Marc McKenzie
@Frankensteinbeck:
“…do we care? The House is going to pass every crazy ass bill they can think of, including multiple contradictory budgets. They’ve already passed a bill repealing the ACA. Quite a number of them don’t realize they are only one half of one branch of government.”
This.
But then again, we shouldn’t be surprised. They all but put up neon signs detailing that they were going to go bat-s**t crazy, but…hey, some of us had to “sit it out” because we didn’t get our ponies, right?
Damn…sorry about the last line. But the point is, we should not be surprised by what they are doing.
These Repubs who took over the House are the true radicals. They are absolutists. They have no goddamned clue about the Constitution, bipartisanship, nothing. All they care about is making sure that the black dude in the White House gets nothing done and is defeated next year.
(And to think that some of us on the Progressive side want the same thing too…shudder.)
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
WordPress hates card games that you win money playing.