Congressman DeFazio said yesterday: We think it is time, maybe, that we turn our focus to Main Street ... Unfortunately, the President has an adviser from Wall Street, Larry Summers, and a Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Timmy Geithner, who don't like that idea. They want to keep the TARP money either to continue to bail out Wall Street...or to pay down the deficit. That's absurd... "[Obama] is being failed by his economic team ... We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans.

Reforming Wall Street is a hot topic on Capitol Hill these days. Congress is currently weighing two financial reform bills that would, to varying degrees, reshape the way the financial system is regulated. Still, Wall Street's influence in Washington appears to be as strong as ever. After all, it was just last spring that Senator Dick Durbin, frustrated by pushback on bankruptcy reform, denounced the financial sector's influence on the Senate: the banks, he said, "they frankly own the place." The Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks money in politics, reports that financial industries -- the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, specifically -- have been one of the biggest benefactors to Congress over the past two decades: ---[Check out the kaleidoscope in the article.]

As part of msnbc.com's coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, we asked readers to reveal how they obtained pieces of the barrier. Here are some responses.

During an episode of Sesame Street that was originally broadcast two years ago, a character tells Oscar the Grouch, who happens to be reporting for “GNN” (Grouchy News Network), that she is switching her news viewing loyalties to “Pox News,” adding, “Now there is a trashy news show.”Right winger Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood” blog took on the Sesame Street menace this week proclaiming: “Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch”:"If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. Media Matters’ Simon Maloy notes, “It looks like Andrew Breitbart’s BigHollywood.com is looking to dethrone NewsBusters as the premiere source for asinine right-wing media criticism” by documenting “the absurd liberal bias in an episode of Sesame Street that aired two years ago. Just let that sink in for a moment…”

Wall Street bankers are really mad these days -- in both senses of that word! You'd think these whizzes of speculative finance would be ecstatically happy and filled with gratitude, not anger. After all, having crashed our economy, they were allowed to keep their cushy jobs, get bailed out with trillions of our tax dollars, and permitted to go right back to playing the same old casino games that had previously enriched them at our expense. Once again, such powerhouse outfits as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are raking-in tons of money -- and, as in the gilded days before Wall Street plunged Main Street into deep recession, bankers have promptly reverted to the selfish ethic of lavishing multimillion-dollar bonuses on themselves. Goldman, for example, has already set aside more than $16 billion to dole out as end-of-year bonuses for its bankers. That's a pace of self-enrichment that will siphon off nearly half of all the money that Goldman takes in this year! So, why are they mad? Because you and I are not showing them any love. Believe it or not, Wall Streeters actually expected that their return to grandiose banker bonuses would be greeted with huzzahs and "you the man" cheers from an admiring public, rather than another coast-to-coast explosion of anger.

Wall Street and market ideology has been at war with any part of our economy that benefits customers or workers.

The crime and corruption continues in the third part of this interview with Greg Gordon. "Inside investment circular were the details of a secret $2 billion deal channeled through a tax haven."

People who are aware of the financial coup need to sound the alarm; the time to act is now! Declare yourself.

Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in. President Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan has so far failed to halt the growth of unemployment: 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus plan began. California has lost 336,400 jobs. Arizona has lost 77,300. Michigan has lost 137,300. A total of 49 states and the District of Columbia have all reported net job losses. In this dark firmament, however, one bright star shines. The sole state to actually gain jobs is an unlikely candidate for the distinction: North Dakota. North Dakota is also one of only two states expected to meet their budgets in 2010. (The other is Montana.) North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000 people, largely located in cold and isolated farming communities. Yet, since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56 percent, personal income has grown 43 percent and wages have grown 34 percent. The state not only has no funding problems, but this year it has a budget surplus of $1.3 billion, the largest it has ever had.

The area around K Street in Washington, D.C., abounds with lobbyists, many of whom represent foreign governments or entities. Although some major foreign governments continue to work mainly through their embassies in Washington, nearly one hundred countries rely on lobbyists to protect and promote their interests. The subculture of public relations and law firms that do this kind of work reflects a steady decline and privatization of diplomacy -- with an increasing impact on how the United States conducts its own foreign policy.

And now there are five -- five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called"talent," and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn't know then that they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Now they do. And like a giant, gawking adolescent who's just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can't say no, the biggies will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks. What to do? Two ideas are floating around Washington, but only one is supported by the Treasury and the White House. Unfortunately, it's the wrong one. The right idea is to break up the giant banks. I don't often agree with Alan Greenspan but he was right when he said last week that "[i]f they're too big to fail, they're too big." Greenspan noted that the government broke up Standard Oil in 1911, and what happened? "The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we need to do." (Historic footnote: Had Greenspan not supported in 1999 Congress's repeal of the Glass Stagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking, we wouldn't be in the soup we're in to begin with.)

These men ‘presided over the largest transfer of wealth in history, from the working class to the flamboyant super rich.’ What these men have done is obscene. After crashing the economy, trillions, literally trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a select few, in secrecy, while billions of people suffer in poverty, billions suffer to survive. This small tight-knit Wall Street cadre has committed a crime against humanity.

StandWithUs - an "organization that ensures that Israel's side of the story is told" - has become increasingly aggressive in challenging the "pro-Israel" credentials of moderate Jewish-American groups, going so far as to suggest that receiving money from Arab donors and supporters of Human Rights Watch undermines a group's commitment to Israel and peace. J Street - the "Pro-Israel and Pro-Peace" advocacy group - faced criticism last week for accepting contributions from donors who have been critical of Israeli government actions. But an IPS investigation into the tax records of the donors to StandWithUs, which professes to be ideologically neutral, found a web of funders who support organisations that have been accused of anti-Muslim propaganda and encouraging a militant Israeli and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Some of these organisations have tied the origins of Palestinian nationalism to Nazi ideology, and suggested that a vast Muslim conspiracy - in a similar vein to the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is mobilising to undermine the U.S. constitution and impose Sharia law.

At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said.---Today, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street. What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for ten months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now. Second, the banks keep paying off Congress.

President Obama raised between $2 million and $3 million for Democrats during a swing through Manhattan on Tuesday night, easing some qualms that the economic downturn might spook major donors at a time when the financial industry is aggravated by the administration's populist tone but also under pressure to avoid the appearance of excessive giving. Overall, Democrats appear to be faring better than Republicans in fundraising totals. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $33 million through September, $4 million more than its Republican counterpart. There is a larger disparity on the House side, where the Democratic committee has raised $44 million and the Republican committee has raised $27 million.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The lucky few garnered most of the headlines, even as the rest of America continues to bleed jobs. Banks that are actually in the business of lending are still in trouble — most notably, Citigroup and Bank of America. “Last week both Citi and BofA announced losses in the third quarter. What happened? Part of the answer is that those earlier profits were in part a figment of the accountants’ imaginations. More broadly, however, we’re looking at payback from the real economy. The main thing for the time being is probably to do as much as possible to support job growth. With luck, this will produce a virtuous circle in which an improving economy strengthens the banks, which then become more willing to lend. Beyond that, we desperately need to pass effective financial reform. For if we don’t, bankers will soon be taking even bigger risks than they did in the run-up to this crisis. After all, the lesson from the last few months has been very clear: When bankers gamble with other people’s money, it’s heads they win, tails the rest of us lose.

The past few days have been very revealing when it comes to the financial coup that has occurred here in the US. Here's a special report we have compiled which features the most recent information available concerning the takeover.

How did the Dow break 10,000 when the rest of the economy is in the toilet?

The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945. The number, while lower than forecast a few months ago, underscored the challenges ahead in shrinking the deficit even as the White House and Congress are considering more steps to stimulate an economy that is making a slow recovery. The political hurdles to finding a solution were evident on Friday as each political party immediately blamed the other for the growth of the deficit.

In one of these economies, employees on Wall Street are pulling in record salaries that average around $1 million. In the other economy, workers’ wages are falling. “Pay cuts are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression,” writes Louis Uchitelle of The New York Times. In the one economy, J.P. Morgan Chase is reporting a quarterly profit of $3.59 billion. In the other economy, foreclosures are going through the roof. In the one economy, the stock market flirts with the 10,000 mark. In the other economy, 9.8 percent of Americans are officially out of work, and the actual number is almost twice that many, especially when you count the underemployed. One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class. The other economy is for everybody else.