Reuters noted yesterday that the Obama administration’s plan for overhauling the financial regulatory system is “bogged down in Congress,” and in particular has “no clear path forward in the Senate.” One obstacle was removed today with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who is an advocate of reforms that go even further than the administration’s, deciding to remain chairman of the Senate Banking Committee (instead of moving over to the HELP Committee). This keeps the Banking gavel out of the hands of the bank-friendly Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD), and also prevents the delays inherent in a transition of chairmen.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that Congress is faced with a “rapidly dwindling legislative calendar” already consumed with health care reform and cap-and-trade. And in the meantime, as the Wall Street Journal reported today, “companies are selling exotic financial products similar to those that felled markets and the world economy last fall. And banks’ appetite for risk has grown”:

The nation’s top five banks collectively stood to lose more than $1 billion on an average day in the second quarter of 2009 should their trading bets go sour, a record level…The $1 billion that the top five banks stood to lose on an average day in the second quarter represents an 18% increase from a year earlier and is up 75% from the $592 million in the first half of 2007, according to regulatory filings.

This illustrates an unfortunate byproduct of the approach that’s been taken towards the banks, which encouraged mergers and didn’t mandate any sort of end for “too big to fail.” “There’s no fundamental change in the way the banks are run or regulated,” said Peter J. Solomon, who runs an investment bank in New York. “There’s just fewer of them.”

As the Washington Post reported, “a series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions.” JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo now each hold “more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country.” Along with Citigroup, these banks “now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards.”

This consolidation, along with the banks returning to a pre-crisis business model, lead to the vast amount of risk that the Journal found, all of which makes getting regulatory reform through Congress — including some form of systemic risk regulator and a comprehensive resolution authority for unwinding failed financial firms — even more important. But can Congress find the time to make it happen? Or will the banks be allowed to run wild while regulatory reform languishes?

Last month, Fox News’ Glenn Beck engaged in a character assassination campaign to demonize White House environmental adviser Van Jones as “a committed revolutionary” that led to Jones’ resignation over the weekend. The conventional wisdom was that Beck took aim at Jones because a group he co-founded, Color of Change, was successfully convincing advertisers to drop Beck’s show after he claimed President Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Though Beck’s attacks became “especially pronounced” after the boycott started, he actually began his attacks against Jones before he even uttered the words that sparked the activist campaign against him.

As Adele Stan and Joe Romm have both noted, on Sunday, Phil Kerpen, the policy director for the industry front group American for Prosperity, took credit for starting the assault on Jones. Kerpen wrote that on July 10, he e-mailed an old profile of Jones to a producer for Beck’s show, saying “Please share with Glenn this article about green jobs czar Van Jones, a self-described communist who was radicalized in jail. Confirms ‘watermelon’ hypothesis.”

After that, Beck attacked Jones in 16 episodes of his Fox News show between July 23 and September 4, including five where he hosted Kerpen to help him:

– KERPEN: So, it’s kind of — Van Jones, who you mentioned, the self-described communist who is now green jobs czar, he described the Apollo Alliance mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes that ties all these things together. [Fox News, 7/28/09]

– BECK: [Van Jones] is the avowed communist. He was into social justice, which — help me out — social justice basically is just code word for.
KERPEN: …taking money from someone and giving it to somebody else. [Fox News, 8/4/09]

– KERPEN: So, it’s kind of — Van Jones, who you mentioned, the self-described communist who is now green jobs czar, he described the Apollo Alliance mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes. It ties all these things together. [Fox News, 8/21/09 -- replay of 7/28 appearance]

– KERPEN: The inside here with Apollo and Van Jones and so on is that if you raid the U.S. Treasury and you take all these money and use it to subsidize these so-called green jobs and make them union jobs, give money to the social justice street organizers and so on, you can get every one of these leftist constituencies on the same side with taxpayers on the other side. [Fox News, 8/24/09]

– KERPEN: Hey, Glenn.
BECK: I wanted to bring you here because I want to show you what’s on the other side of the board and I need you to help draw this together, because I think this is stunning. We have Van Jones. We tied yesterday — tied him together with — right directly to Obama and right directly to the Apollo Alliance. [8/25/09]

In his Fox Forum op-ed, Kerpen explained that his real mission is to put the “‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.” In his Sept. 7 podcast, Kerpen declared, “Van Jones is gone, but the ‘green jobs’ threat remains,” adding that the right-wing should “channel all of the energy” of Jones’ resignation towards “defeating the policy program that he stands for.” Listen here:

When Kerpen first contacted Beck about Jones, he said that it “confirms ‘watermelon’ hypothesis,” which Dave Weigel notes is the effort of conservatives “to paint environmental activists like Jones as anti-capitalist radicals less interested in the health of the planet than in a well-disguised radical agenda.” In fact, on the June 26 episode of Beck’s show, Kerpen and Beck discussed the idea, saying that cap and trade “is green on the outside, the thinnest green on the outside. And inside, it’s deep communist red.”

For months now, much of the right-wing has been galvanized around mocking and attacking green jobs, calling them “paper mché,” “subprime,” and “gangrene.” GOP leaders, Fox News, right-wing columnists, conservative think tanks, and Big Oil front groups have all attacked the concept by citing a paper by Exxon-funded libertarian Gabriel Calzada, which was recently eviscerated by the Department of Energy as “not supported by their work.”

One of the main criticisms opponents of health reform have been wielding is that it is simply too expensive. “The costly government-run health care plan put forth by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi is just the latest in a long line of expensive Democratic experiments,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH). Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has said that, “unfortunately, the path we are taking in Washington right now is to simply spend another trillion dollars of taxpayer money to further expand the role of the federal government.”

However, as a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) pointed out, “many of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is ‘too costly are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts,” which cost almost $2.5 trillion over the decade after they were first enacted (2001-2010). Comparably, the health care reform plan proposed by Democrats in the House costs about $1 trillion over ten years. And while the Democratic plan goes toward reforming a broken health care system, “a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits [of the Bush tax cuts] will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers.”

Both Boehner and Hatch voted for the Bush tax cuts across the board. So as CTJ put it, “their own voting record demonstrates that health care reform is not a matter of costs, but a matter of priorities.”

And those priorities seem very misplaced, considering this new analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which shows how much of the last economic expansion flowed to those at the top of the income scale:

Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. During those years, the Piketty-Saez data also show, the inflation-adjusted income of the top 1 percent of households grew more than ten times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent of households.

Plus, we’re talking about tax cuts that significantly contributed to skyrocketing deficits versus a health care bill that is required by the budget framework to be deficit neutral (through savings within the system or raising new revenues), so those supporting the former but opposing the latter because of costs are doubly hypocritical.