One of the most important pieces of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law is the Volcker Rule, aimed at preventing federally-insured banks from engaging in risky proprietary bets and counting on taxpayers to bail them out if those bets go wrong. The deadline for regulatory comment on the rule was Monday night, and it didn’t go quietly. Outside groups submitted 170,000 words worth of comments, most of them (though not all) aimed at weakening the rule before it takes effect in July.

The industry threw “one last roundhouse punch at the law,” and most of the letters from across the financial industry were negative. Among the rule’s most vocal opponents: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jaime Dimon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Opponents minced few words. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said the proposed rule “appears to take the view that banking entities, their customers, and the economy must pay almost any price in order to ensure absolute certainty that there can never be an instance of prohibited proprietary trading.” [...]

“In short, the American engine of economic growth will be deprived of the fuel needed to operate,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote.

What the industry doesn’t mention in its effort to weaken the rule is just how successful it has been in watering it down already. With the help of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R), the industry weakened the rule even before it became law, and it has spent the last year lobbying to make it even weaker. By the time it was unveiled, it was so weak that former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, for whom it is named, said he didn’t like it.

And while opponents of the law continue to argue that it will cost the nation’s largest banks substantial sums of money, that is precisely how the law aims to create the long-term economic stability that didn’t exist prior to the financial crisis. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon wrote today, the proprietary trading prohibited by a strong Volcker rule “doesn’t just disappear.” Instead, it moves to hedge funds, brokers, and other “small-enough-to-fail institutions” that aren’t backed by taxpayers:

In other words, there is a list of institutions which will be harmed by the Volcker Rule. Here it is: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. These institutions should get smaller. These institutions should be less profitable. There’s no reason to believe that when that happens, the economy as a whole will suffer.

Like with the Dodd-Frank law as a whole, banks and their lobbyists aren’t satisfied with watering down the Volcker rule before it passed. The industry continues to push back against regulations aimed at preventing the sort of crisis that drove the country into a deep recession four years ago, all under the false premise that what is bad for Wall Street’s balance sheet has to be bad for the American economy as a whole.

Helen Bailey, the 78 year-old former civil rights activist who was threatened with foreclosure by J.P Morgan Chase while the company trumpeted its efforts to uphold Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, will be able to remain in her home until she passes away after a successful campaign by Occupy Nashville:

“I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” Bailey said. “I love my home and my community and I am so blessed to be able to stay here. I am thankful for the support of my neighbors and the nation.”

The terms of the agreement from her mortgage-holder, JPMorgan Chase, are sealed, but previous settlement attempts involved a reverse mortgage that would let the new lender sell her home when she dies.

Occupy Nashville took up Bailey’s cause last month and received national attention for their efforts. Bailey was seeking to refinance her mortgage with JP Morgan Chase which would have allowed her to remain in her home for free until she dies, but the bank initially refused.

A petition at Change.org collected over 80,000 signatures, and prominent civil rights activists like Cornel West and Gary Flowers, the Executive Director of the Black Leadership Forum voiced their support for Bailey as well.

Since the 99 Percent Movement began last fall, activists have pushed consumers to transfer their money from big banks that were at the center of the financial crisis to smaller community banks and credit unions. Thus far, their efforts have been successful. Around 200,000 moved their accounts on “Bank Transfer Day” in November (early estimates of 600,000 were revised down), and in the last 90 days, more than 5.6 million moved their accounts, with more than 600,000 citing Bank Transfer Day as the reason.

Today, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, activists in New York City will target Bank of America, citing the bank’s shoddy consumer record regarding its mortgage lending practices and its support for hazardous environmental practices like mountaintop removal coal mining, according to a press release published at the Paramus Post:

Bank of America loves profits more than people. We, the 99%, want out of this abusive relationship. Bank of America has foreclosed on more homes than any other bank in the United States. On February 14th, Valentine’s Day, housing and environmental activists will break up with Bank of America.

According to the release, activists organized by Mountain Justice, an environmental group, and various groups associated with Occupy Wall Street will gather at New York’s Washington Square this afternoon before marching to a local Bank of America branch and delivering thousands of blue valentines. Bank of America is a “grave threat to US financial stability,” the release says, and it also has “an ugly relationship with the planet: bankrupting the ecosystem with their investments in the coal industry–lending billions of dollars to companies seeking to build new coal-fired power plants.”

Bank of America has been the target of protests over its financial and foreclosure practices, ranging from charging customers fees to withdraw unemployment benefits, foreclosing on homes because of clerical errors, and perpetuating fraudulent foreclosure practices. The bank, meanwhile, has been targeted repeatedly by environmental activists for its connections to Big Coal.

According to one consulting firm, Bank of America is the most susceptible bank to bank transfer protests and could lose up to 10 percent of its customers and $42 billion in customer deposits.

Two weeks from today, voters in Michigan will hit the polls for the state’s Republican presidential primary, where native son and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — once thought of as the GOP’s inevitable nominee — is now trailing former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Romney’s father, George Romney, is a former governor of Michigan and was the CEO of the now-defunct American Motor Company, a Detroit-based automaker that was once one of the biggest in the world.

Romney has often played up those ties on the campaign trail — he won Michigan’s primary in 2008 — and attempted to use them to his advantage three years ago when he penned a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The editorial was a response to President Obama’s plan to rescue the American auto industry, and as evidence has emerged that Obama’s rescue plan worked, Romney had attempted to claim that he came up with the idea first.

Ahead of the primary, though, Romney published another editorial on the rescue, this time in the Detroit News, in which he renewed the “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” call he first made in 2009:

My view at the time — and I set it out plainly in an op-ed in the New York Times — was that “the American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. Instead of a bailout, I favored “managed bankruptcy” as the way forward.

Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation. [...]

By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.

In the editorial, Romney, whose former company profited from a government bailout, called on the government to sell its shares in GM and return the profits to taxpayers. In other words, Romney is fine with destroying the company when it isn’t succeeding, but then wants to seize its profits if it turns around.

Meanwhile, he continues to ignore the success of the rescue plan he criticizes. Chrysler posted its first profit more than a decade in last year and expects those profits to continue growing in 2012. It has added 9,400 jobs since its rescue and plans to add 1,600 more at a plant in Illinois this year, and the success of Chrysler and General Motors has helped American automakers control more than half of the industry’s market share. The industry has hired enough workers to make up for all those laid off during the recession, and American and foreign automakers plan to add 167,000 jobs at American plants this year.

Romney isn’t just ignoring facts — he’s also ignoring a Republican who is close to the situation. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has warned candidates against criticizing the bailout and touted its success. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

The trustee charged with liquidating the firm of convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff has filed a lawsuit against a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc. — the massive energy, oil, chemical, fertilizer, and finance conglomerate owned by Charles and David Koch. Though the suit alleges no wrongdoing on the part of the subsidiary, it seeks the return of $21.5 million on the grounds that it was not legitimately an investment return, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A Koch spokeswoman disputed the demand, arguing, “The Koch entity involved made an investment in an entirely separate fund. That Koch entity no longer exists and its investment was redeemed in 2005, long before anyone knew of Madoff’s fraud.”

Even the Rupert Murdoch-owned WSJ noted the amusing irony in their lead:

Koch Industries Inc., whose billionaire owners are funding an ad campaign (via an advocacy group they support) criticizing the Obama administration’s support of bankrupt solar company Solyndra LLC, faces a call to give back money received from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Even if the Kochs lose this case though, $21.5 million would hardly make a dent in the billionaires’ empire or, one imagines, their extensive giving to right-wing Republican causes.

It isn’t often that legislation passes through the Senate free of controversy, but a bipartisan transportation bill was on a course to do just that — until yesterday. The bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer (CA) and Republican Sen. James Inhofe (OK), easily passed a procedural vote last week and, with President Obama’s support behind it, seemed ready to pass a final vote too.

Then, yesterday, three Republican senators ignored Inhofe and Boxer’s calls to keep the bill free from controversy and attempted to attach an amendment mandating the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which Democrats warned could “kill the bill.” Now, Sen. Rand Paul (R) has put a hold on the bill until leadership promises him a vote on an amendment that would suspend foreign aid to Egypt, Politico reports:

Paul wants to offer an amendment to the Senate transportation bill that would cut off aid to Egypt if nongovernmental employees working with the U.S. government are detained or held in the country, as Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s son, Sam, currently is. And unless the senator decides to offer consent to move forward to the transportation bill, the Senate would be stuck in a 30-hour holding pattern.

“We’re not going to grant back our 30 hours unless we get a discussion on Egypt. We’re not asking for a lot of time; we just want a discussion and a vote on whether or not we should continue sending money to Egypt,” Paul told POLITICO.

Paul said he is taking action now because he fears his amendment won’t be allowed if he waits until debate on the transportation bill begins.

Noting the urgency of the transportation bill, Boxer and Inhofe agreed not to attach amendments or provisions that could be controversial. It contains no taxes and none of the other traditionally controversial measures included in such bills.

“2.8 million jobs hang in the balance” of the bill’s passage before the current transportation package expires, Boxer told Politico. “And we have obstruction from our friends on the Republican side.”