STEP 2: SUE, SUE, SUE
While death and taxes may be only relative certainties in today's economy – failing megabanks neither die nor pay taxes anymore – one thing that was always absolutely certain from the start was that Wall Street was going to sue the living hell out of Washington before the ink was even dry on Dodd-Frank. It took a little while, but the banks very quickly found a tried-and-true method of tying up the reforms in court.
Wall Street's first big win involved a small-but-important change known as the "proxy access" rule, which made it easier for people who own stakes in a company to remove directors from the board – giving shareholders more power to rein in corrupt or overpaid company executives. More democracy in business sounded like a good idea to almost everyone. But Wall Street has a dependable playbook for getting rid of any reform, no matter how small, that leads to greater accountability. "First, they hire a shit-ton of lobbyists to go to the regulators," says Jim Collura, spokesman for the Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition. "Then, they beat the crap out of them during the rulemaking process. And then, when that's over, they litigate the hell out of them."
Matt Taibbi
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