David Kay Johnston may have retired and the NYT may have hired a slew of corporate apologists so in-the-tank they're one step removed from being paid lobbyists, but thank dawg it's still got Gretchen Morgenstern to do the heavy lifting most of the others can't be bothered with.

Gretchen apparently got curious about who all those lobbyists were who were hanging around in the House and Senate corridors just outside the chambers when the credit card regulation bill was being debated and discovered a whole crew working on keeping the derivatives that brought down the economy from being regulated.

The nine biggest participants in the derivatives market — including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America — created a lobbying organization, the CDS Dealers Consortium, on Nov. 13, a month after five of its members accepted federal bailout money.

To oversee the consortium’s push, lobbying records show, the banks hired a longtime Washington power broker who previously helped fend off derivatives regulation: Edward J. Rosen, a partner at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. A confidential memo Mr. Rosen drafted and shared with the Treasury Department and leaders on Capitol Hill has, politicians and market participants say, played a pivotal role in shaping the debate over derivatives regulation.

Shortly after that memo reached him, the regulatory plan Timmy G "shared" with the nation contained a massive protection of the derivatives racket.

There are two distinct camps in this argument. One camp, which includes legislative leaders, is pushing for trading on an open exchange — much like stocks — where value and structure are visible and easily determined. Another camp, led by the banks, prefers that some of the products be traded in privately managed clearinghouses, with less disclosure.

The Obama administration agrees that more regulation is needed. A proposal unveiled recently by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner won plaudits for trying to make derivatives trading less freewheeling and more accountable — a plan that hinges in part on using clearinghouses for the trades.

Critics in both the financial world and Congress say relying on clearinghouses would be problematic. They also say Mr. Geithner’s plan contains a major loophole, because little disclosure would be required for more complicated derivatives, like the type of customized, credit-default swaps that helped bring down A.I.G. A.I.G. sold insurance related to mortgage securities, essentially making a big bet that those mortgages would not default.

(emphasis added)

I leave it to you to figure out if Mr Rosen got the kind of regulations his bankster bosses wanted. Let's just see what Rosen's memo suggested.

Mr. Rosen’s confidential memo, dated Feb. 10 and obtained by The New York Times, recommended that the biggest participants in the derivatives market should continue to be overseen by the Federal Reserve Board. Critics say the Fed has been an overly friendly regulator, which is why big banks favor it.

Mr. Rosen’s proposal for change was similar to the Treasury Department’s recently announced plan to increase oversight. Treasury officials say that their proposal was arrived at independently and that they sought input from dozens of sources.

(emphasis added)

Of course it was. "Wall Street Timmy" Geithner allow himself to be swayed by a Wall Street lobbyist? Pish-tosh.

[M]arket participants, analysts and members of Congress who have proposed stricter reforms worry that the Treasury proposal does not go far enough to close several important regulatory gaps that allowed derivatives to play such a destructive role in the current financial crisis.

But increased transparency of derivatives trades would cut into banks’ profits — hence the banks’ opposition. Customers who trade derivatives would pay less if they knew what the prevailing market prices were.

“The banks want to go back to business as usual — and then some. And they have a lot of audacity now that everyone has bailed them out,” said Yra Harris, an independent commodities trader who was involved in an effort to regulate derivatives nine years ago. “But we have to begin with the premise that Wall Street doesn’t want transparency, because more transparency means less immediate profits.”

(emphasis added)

Are we seeing a pattern here? A sort of "Fuck-the-economy-we-want-our-$bucks$" kind of pattern?

And mind you, these are the very same banks we were just forced to rescue from bankruptcy because their derivatives trading wasn't transparent so no one knew exactly how poisonous they were or - and this is crucial - how much cheating, lying, conniving, and unethical/illegal behaviour the banks had indulged in.

Transparency doesn't just endanger profits, folks, it endangers liberty. Some of these people would be in jail right now if transparency had been the name of the game back when. Can't have that, can we? After all, we have been assured again and again that the only people who can get us out of this mess are the ones who made it. How could they do that if they were in jail for fraud? Where they belong, I might add.

Can you imagine the balls on these people? The arrogant chutzpah it takes to fight for the retention of the very illegal practices that are bringing the world economy to its knees? They must be awful sure there won't be any consequences from those mean, nasty, corporate-hatin, reg-totin' Democrats.

What?

Oh, yeah. I forgot.