"When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in the summer of 2010, the Obama administration made happy talk about putting an end to “too big to fail” banks. Hold the champagne. The Federal Reserve Board has just created the fifth largest bank in the country despite a flood of warnings from community advocates and smaller banks. 

"Skeptics in financial markets are entitled to their skepticism. Capital One has been rapidly assembling this new behemoth, acquiring local deposits and credit-card operations in a series of mergers. Federal Reserve governors reviewed the complaints and rejected them. In banking regulation, the “new normal” so far looks a lot like the “old normal.”

"Reform groups like the National Community Reinvestment Coalition argued that the new, enlarged Capital One is a bad bet on its own terms because its business model is grounded in credit card debt with a heavy portion of so-called “subprime” credit card holders—borrowers much like the “subprime” mortgage holders now lined up for foreclosure and bankruptcy. When the credit-card bubble bursts, these critics say, the government will stick with the same bad choice—bailing out the creditors when the debtors fail. 

"Financial-market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” which will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave."

It would have bee too simple and effective to just re-instate Glass-Steagall, which the DINO Clinton administration helped the GOP repeal in the late 90's.  Instead, Rube Goldberg schemes are the order of the day for government of, by, and for the wealthy few and its agencies in order to bamboozle the masses and make them bail out the financial crooks again.

And from David Dayen at Firedoglake, "The Pentagon Papers that weren't....."

"It occurs to me that we cannot even really have a Pentagon Papers event in this country anymore. Sure, Wikileaks releases gained a decent amount of attention, but the real evidence for this comes in the past week. Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis wrote an 84-page report detailing his experiences in Afghanistan, which are at odds with the official narrative. Much like the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam, Davis’ report claims that the top military brass has been lying to the public about the state of the war, concluding with the line “How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?”

"This received a story in the New York Times last week that pretty much went nowhere. FDL’s Kevin Gosztola covered it here.  Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer, followed up with this report:

........Here is the report’s damning opening lines: “Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.” Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is “open source” – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. “If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. “It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II.”

Dayen continues:

"The fact that the report is unclassified and based on public information is perhaps the only difference with the Pentagon papers, because the conclusions are practically the same. It alleges deception on the part of military leaders – and the media, considering this was all public information – in explaining the war to Americans. It states that the reasons for the success of the surge in Iraq have been badly misunderstood, leading to a similar surge in Afghanistan. And it says flatly that “our country has squandered almost a full decade in which it might have made noteworthy advancements in its force structure, has continued pursuing a military strategy that has proven to be an abysmal failure during a time when effective outcomes might have been found, and worst of all, has cost the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of American Service Members – and reportedly deprived hundreds of thousands more of their psychological and emotional well-being.”

"..... Just like in Vietnam, the top political and military brass are so spooked by the prospect of “losing” a war that they will sacrifice lives and treasure on an ongoing mistake."

And so it goes, on and on and on.