Regarding the recently announced “financial reform,” Dylan Ratigan asks us to consider what has not been fixed.

– The Cops (regulators and ratings agencies) working for the crooks.

– Banks still Too Big To Fail.

– Banks gambling with your deposits.

– Banks allowed to “mark to myth” and use off-balance sheet accounting to bonus themselves into the atmosphere, with the taxpayer taking the fall.

– Banks getting trillions from the Fed, Fannie and Freddie — AKA you, the future and present taxpayer.

What does it mean for us?

It means that the same people who brought you these horrible changes — rising wealth discrepancy, massive unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure — have now further institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place.

This is Orwellian, indeed, yet the Democrats are celebrating. What’s going on? Kevin Baker takes a crack at it in a Harper‘s article titled “The Vanishing Liberal: How the Left Learned to be Helpless.”

Coming to power when he did, with the political skills and the majorities he possesses, Barack Obama squandered an almost unprecedented opportunity But it is increasingly clear that he never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated. With the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations are, once more, people, American democracy has snapped shut again–the great, forced opening of the past 130 years has ended. There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in or politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it. The work will have to be done from the ground up, and it will have to be done by us.