Articles About Senate

Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Senate in Massachusetts as a progressive Democrat, has caused controversy between the right and left with the following statement: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. “But I want to be clear. You […]

Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might find themselves merged into a single government-run entity.  Representative Gary Miller (R-CA) is set to unveil a bill that would create a utility-like entity and phase out government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The new company would buy mortgages and repackage them as government-backed securities.  The […]

A top Treasury official defended the federal government’s $700 billion bank bailout financial crisis-response program at a hearing where the effort was criticized by members of a watchdog panel insisting that it did more for Wall Street than Main Street. “The cost of TARP is likely to be no greater than the amount spent on […]

A small, weathered, blue-gray house in Denmark, ME, set off a national uproar about the foreclosure crisis when its owner, Nicolle Bradbury, lost her job and stopped paying her mortgage two years ago.  The family, which includes Bradbury’s disabled husband and two children, lives on food stamps and welfare. When the bank started to foreclose […]

A new green initiative is joining the White House’s already famous organic vegetable garden.  President Barack Obama plans to install solar panels on top of the White House’s living quarters to heat water and provide power to some of the historic mansion. The panels are scheduled to be in place by the spring of 2011, […]

President Barack Obama’s decision to name Wall Street’s archenemy Elizabeth Warren as his special advisor to direct the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau bypasses the often confrontational Senate confirmation process.  The Harvard law professor is now tasked with building a new government agency that will crack down on abusive financial practices such as […]

By 2050 – just 40 years from now — nearly 16 million Americans will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Surprisingly, there is not yet a national plan to deal with this looming crisis, although one has been proposed on Capitol Hill.  The National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA) would establish an inter-agency advisory council to address […]

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the Senate voted 96 – 0 to attach a modified version of an amendment proposed by Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-VT) to the financial regulatory bill to investigate transparency in emergency lending practices by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.  “This amendment begins the process of lifting the veil […]

Congress — wary of 2010 mid-term elections – appears to be unlikely to pass climate change legislation this year, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs in Scientific American. According to Sachs, “The fracture lines are countless, but probably the most important one runs through public opinion.  A recent poll showed only 36 percent of Americans believing that […]

A draft of President Barack Obama’s financial reform legislation has been sent to Congress.  Dubbed the Volcker Rule in honor of the former Federal Reserve chairman’s  aggressive pursuit of these regulations, the five-page proposal will ban proprietary trading and mergers that give banks more than a 10 percent market share as measured by liabilities that […]