Meanwhile, North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan, one of the few senators who opposed financial deregulation, says the Wall Street wheeler-dealers who caused the current crisis still have not been forced to clean up their act.

Americans for Financial Reform, a 200-member coalition that includes the AFL-CIO and many major unions, strongly backs a financial reform package unveiled earlier this year by Democratic President Barack Obama, in the wake of last September’s financial crash, which deepened the then-9-month-old recession. The package is designed to curb the excesses that led to the crash.

One key section of that package would establish a new Consumer Finance Protection Agency to ride herd on the bankers, brokers, derivative traders and others whose financial finagling pushed the economy of both the nation and the world into the tank, throwing millions out of work, into foreclosure, or both.

The agency is strongly opposed by the banking and securities lobby, but public opinion overwhelmingly supports more and tougher regulation of the financiers and their pieces of paper, such as derivatives and credit default swaps, said Heather Booth, director of Americans for Financial Reform.

“We can begin to address the irresponsible practices of the banks and the others that led to the financial collapse,” Booth said in a telephone interview. “Voices for new transparency and regulation have strong support among the American public. They want their representatives in Washington to stand up to the big banks.”

The coalition plans to demonstrate for financial reform at the American Bankers Association annual convention this week in Chicago.

One of the few lawmakers who stood up to the bankers a decade ago -- when a bipartisan consensus steamrolled financial deregulation through a then-GOP-run Congress -- said on Oct.15 that the financiers are repeating their excesses.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., forecast the financial disaster from derivatives and other such pieces of paper in a 1994 magazine article. He was one of only eight senators to oppose deregulation in 1999. He told the New America Foundation the bankers, brokers and traders are committing the same sins all over again.

“We’ve extended something like $11 trillion or $12 trillion of taxpayer dollars to right Wall Street” since last September’s collapse, he said. The money “prevented the system from collapse,” he admitted. But the culture that produced the crash must be changed, reined in or both, Dorgan declared.

“Business is not what it used to be and the financial wreckage has put us in great peril,” he said of the 1999 law -- passed by the GOP but strongly pushed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and top Treasury official Larry Summers. Summers is now a White House economic adviser to Obama.

Dorgan also said there were many warning signals of the crash, starting in the collapse of sub-prime mortgage market that led to the rest of the financial dominoes falling. They included ads from sub-prime mortgage lenders that trumpeted such slogans as “Even if your credit’s in the tank, we specialize in money for you in the bank.”

Regulators at the Federal Reserve and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- agencies which could have cracked down on the burgeoning glut of securities backed only by other pieces of paper -- deliberately looked the other way, he said. He added that’s why the new agency is needed, since the Fed and CFTC failed.

Dorgan challenged conventional wisdom about fixing the mess. He said the Obama administration, like its predecessors, is taking no action against institutions deemed “too big to fail,” since they could take the U.S. and world economies down with them. Those institutions include JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank -- all recipients of the federal bailout funds last September. Those institutions and others just announced a record $140 billion in bonuses, Dorgan said, adding “Some of it, I’m sure, went to people who got us into this mess.”

He also advocated again separating ordinary retail banking from the investment banking business. That separation lasted from the New Deal until 1999. The retail bankers, most of them small, are relatively safe, he pointed out. Investment bankers got us in the soup.

“The collapse was the result of unbelievable ignorance and greed,” he said. And trades involving derivatives and all other financial instruments must be “open and transparent,” as stock trading is supposed to be, he added.

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.