The House-Senate compromise bill on overhauling regulations on banks and other financial institutions was passed today at 5:40 AM. Two years after the American economy began to collapse, lawmakers began their negotiations in front of C-Span cameras on Thursday morning, but ended them behind closed doors on Friday. So much for transparency.

Join us on Monday, June 7th at noon in front of the Treasury building to demand our $13 billion back from Goldman Sachs. First job is to get Geithner to recognize that he should have never given that particular money to that particular bank for that particular transaction. Or to come out and justify his actions. Let him step out, greet us and tell us why it was such a smart idea to pay off AIG’s side bets with Goldman.

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger

Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a plan that would have broken up the nation’s six largest banks firms into firms that could fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. Even though the defeat reinforces Wall Street’s political dominance, there is still room for a handful of other useful reforms, like banning banks from gambling with taxpayer money and protecting consumers from banker abuses. After looting our houses, banks are now pushing for the ability to bet on movie box-office receipts, and will keep trying to financialize anything they can unless Congress acts.

It’s pretty simple really with the right kind of fissile material.

If you thought “We never saw it coming” sounds like a bit of song and dance, well, as Jimmy Durante would say, You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Fussing about whether U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s financial reform legislation contains an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency is like worrying about whether you’ll lose your tool shed as a conflagration consumes your home. Preserving the economy requires limiting, regulating and exposing derivative trading. That’s because derivatives – those credit default swaps – took down Wall Street — not consumer loans.

Greek government bonds are about to turn into junk-bonds, and that would set off a godawful chain-reaction, because the forward-thinking Eurozone is about to disallow junk-bonds (rated less than A2) as loan collateral, and German banks are holding a heck of a lot of Greek sovereign debt.

That’s the Trojan Horse in Berlin.

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

In a landmark decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited funds to influence American elections, overturning a century of legal precedent. The Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC undermines the integrity of the U.S. government, as President Barack Obama emphasized at his State of the Union address. But the decision also deals a damaging blow to the U.S. economy by encouraging lawmakers to write economic rules that benefit specific companies at the expense of everyone else.

This is a story via Alexander Cockburn about how The Teamsters stopped yet another destruction of a company by “bondholders” who use credit default swaps to bet against the health of a company. The Teamsters Beat Back the Vampire Squid.

So Obama doesn’t want to spend any more tax dollars to create jobs? Well, here’s a couple of good ways to do that: enforce and strengthen trade policy and create a manufacturing strategy.