As we explore the influence of interest groups on government, we should look at the glacial pace the reforms aimed at Wall Street have taken in the past year since the financial melt-down happened.
From NPR:
In the immediate wake of the stock market crash and soaring unemployment, there were loud cries for tighter new financial regulations to prevent a repeat of such a painful episode.
Today, the energy behind such a push seems to have dissipated. The economy has not recovered yet, but it's no longer in free fall. The stock market has risen from the depths of earlier this year.
"While this recession is comparable to the 1930s in some respects, the deprivation and poverty is less visible than it was in the '30s," says Geoffrey Hodgson, a research professor in business studies at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.
"There's a complacency amongst the public at large and among politicians."
One reason may be the difficulty in organizing the grassroots forces that may wish to rally for change versus the relative ease that anti-reform forces have in organizing on their side.
Heather Booth hopes that is not the case. She run Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group with nearly 200 members, including AARP and the AFL-CIO. As her group works to organize a push for widespread financial reforms, she expects a growing grass-roots call for change.
"We think people have been operating out of not just frustration, but fear," Booth says. "If that fear turns to hope for a real solution, and also, as fear changes to anger towards those who created this, we think there will be mobilization for change."
But mobilizing a mass movement is difficult under any circumstances, and the causes of this economic crisis are particularly complex and ill-understood by the American public.
The financial sector remains one of the most powerful interests in Washington. Here is a link to a page from the Center for Responsible Politics that shows the increase in the amount of money securities firms have donated to campaigns in the past electoral cycles. They do expect a return on their investment.
