Will Obama make bad bill better w-tough regulators?

That’s the hope of WaPost financial columnist Steve Pearlstein, who like Joe Nocera and many others, laments the gutlessness of Obama’s financial “reform” bill.

But, as for Pearlstein’s hope:

The good news is that, at the end of the day, it will matter less how the boxes are moved around the regulatory org chart than the quality of the people put in them. It is no coincidence that this crisis developed while the Fed, the Treasury and other agencies were headed by people who were responsive to Wall Street and believed deeply that markets should never be second-guessed by government bureaucrats.

The best way for Obama to change that and avoid the next crisis is to appoint tough and independent regulators who understand that their role is to protect markets from their own excesses while protecting their agencies from being captured by the companies they are meant to oversee.

It’s highly forlorn, as I told him in an e-mail.

Obama’s hand-picked Secretary of the Treasury, whom he stood by through tax issues of a fairly serious nature, slept at the wheel while his banking BFFs threw the matches to cause Wall Street to burn while he was NYFed head.

His inherited Federal Reserve chair had enough separation time from Greenspan to do in private, at least, more than he actually did.

His fiscal czar pushed Congressional Dems to agree to sign off on the deregulatoin bill that led to this mess 11 yrs ago.

We’ve already seen whom Obama will appoint, which makes his bill all the more worrisome.

And THAT is the bottom line.

Well, no, the bottom line is interest-group e-petition drafters need to give it up, and start Green Party activism and awareness e-mails ASAP, instead of continuing to enable the left-hand side of the two-party duopoly.