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King’s final crusade: The radical push for a new America

(CNN) — The Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr. was resting at his Chicago, Illinois, home one autumn weekend in 1967 when the phone rang. The caller didn’t identify himself, but LaFayette immediately recognized the baritone voice.

Bernard, I need you, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said. This may be my last campaign. We’re going for broke.

Most Americans think of King as the I Have a Dream preacher at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. But the man who made his final trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968 had become radical, scholars and activists say. King was gambling his legacy on a final crusade that was so revolutionary, it alarmed many of his closest advisers. Some became concerned about his emotional stability.

King called his crusade the Poor People’s Campaign. He planned to march on Washington with a multiracial army of poor people who would build shantytowns at the Lincoln Memorial — and paralyze the nation’s capital if they had to.

The campaign’s goal: force the federal government to withdraw funding for the Vietnam War and commit instead to abolishing poverty.

What King was saying by this time was even more provocative than what he planned. In his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he said the movement should address the question of restructuring the whole of American society.

He called for a guaranteed annual wage for all able-bodied people, he urged the nationalization of some industries, and he told people to question the capitalistic economy.

It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters … but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power, King said during a trip to Mississippi in February 1968.

The campaign was so risky that King told LaFayette, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader, during their phone call that he was going to appoint a new layer of executives to the civil rights group he co-founded.

He was anticipating that we might be hit with some assassinations, so he wanted somebody left to assume responsibilities to keep it going, said LaFayette, who was appointed director of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, said King didn’t expect the crowds in Washington to embrace his vision of economic equality. He expected violent reprisals from troops. He might die. Yet King hoped that the sacrifice would lead to an economic bill of rights for poor people.

When he did the Poor People’s Campaign, he knew it wasn’t likely to win, Branch said. It was a witness.

But it was a witness that few people were prepared to hear, said Roger Wilkins, a U.S. Justice Department official designated as the liaison between King’s final campaign and the federal government.

By 1968, a lot of white people had gotten tired of civil rights and thinking of race, Wilkins said. The picture of docile black people holding hands and singing freedom songs had been replaced by images of poor blacks rampaging through cities, looting and burning.

King had also lost the ear of his most important ally, President Lyndon Johnson. On April 4, 1967, exactly a year before he was assassinated, King delivered a highly publicized speech against the Vietnam War.

Johnson was outraged, Wilkins said. He turned sour toward King and the movement. He felt that Martin had rejected him.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s own organization, withdrew support from him. The group’s board of directors voted against publicly backing King’s opposition to Vietnam. Other black civil rights leaders criticized King as well.

There were some black preachers telling him he was out of his element, LaFayette said.

King became depressed at times, Branch said. One night, King — alone with a whiskey — awakened friends in adjoining hotel rooms with his shouting: I don’t want to do this anymore! I want to go back to my little church!

The shameful truth is that very few people were paying attention to him, Branch said.

King mused about getting out of the civil rights business. He considered the idea of becoming dean of the chapel at Boston University, his alma mater, Branch said.

He was constantly saying, ‘Oh, I wish I could do this,’ but he could never do it, Branch said. He was just possessed by the movement.

Yet King’s evolution opened alliances with new supporters such as anti-war activists, said the Rev. Vincent Harding, an author and friend of King’s who helped write his 1967 speech denouncing the Vietnam War.

Some people were backing off at the same moment that there were other kinds of people who now recognized that King was not there for black people but for a new American society, Harding said. Those who wanted to work for this new society were seeing him as a hero.

What this new American society could have looked like under King’s leadership is unclear. He never got the chance to lead his final crusade.

He was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, while helping lead sanitation workers on strike.

The Poor People’s Campaign has faded from historical memory. It remains the most overlooked part of King’s legacy, Wilkins said.

It remains in the shadows because King rewrote the traditional civil rights script, Wilkins said. As long as he fed Americans images of bigoted Southern sheriffs clubbing demonstrators, people could remain comfortable. But the Poor People’s Campaign gave Americans a new cast of villains: themselves. Americans didn’t want to look at the face of poverty, but King was going to force them, he said.

When the movement was just about the South, you weren’t rattling the status quo, Wilkins said. ‘You were doing things that made Northerners feel morally superior to the South.

LaFayette last saw King on the day he was assassinated. At the time, King was still thinking big. He told LaFayette that he wanted to globalize nonviolent protests.

King may have been isolated and dejected during those last days, but that’s not the man LaFayette remembers. He takes comfort from one of King’s final moments: the mountaintop sermon King gave the night before he was assassinated.

You could see it in his eyes; he was consumed with passion, LaFayette said. He was prepared. They didn’t take his life. He gave it up. They didn’t have to run him down and try to catch him. He was standing tall despite the threats.

You can’t take a person’s life who’s already given it up.
found here.

Top 10 April Fools’ work pranks

Does April Fools’ Day (or the mere thought of it) strike fear in your heart? Do memories of walking into your aluminum foil-covered office still haunt you at the end of every March?

Or, do you spend 364 days of the year plotting the mother of all pranks against your co-workers?

Whichever side you fall on, 32 percent of workers say they have either initiated or been on the receiving end of an April Fools’ Day prank at work, according to CareerBuilder.com’s annual April Fools’ Day survey.

Pranking at work can be risky business, says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder.com.

When determining whether a prank is a good idea on April Fools’ Day, employees should consider the worst case scenario of their joke. Will his or her joke simply result in a laugh from fellow co-workers? Or could anybody, including you, lose their job?

While faking a resignation, gluing office supplies to the desk and covering someone’s cube in aluminum foil are among the most common office pranks, here are 10 of the most memorable pranks from this year’s survey:

1. Placed a pair of pants and shoes inside the only toilet stall in a men’s room to make it appear someone was using the stall. It sat there for hours until someone called security to check if the person had died.

2. Sent a fake love note to a co-worker from another co-worker.

3. All the women in office individually spoke to the president, confiding that she is pregnant. By noon, he ‘knew’ that all of his female workers were pregnant and he could not tell anyone because each asked for confidentially.

4. Called the electric company, used a co-worker’s name and told them he was moving so the electricity got turned off at the co-worker’s house.

5. Filled the vending soda machine with cans of beer.

6. Rigged the boss’ chair to drop suddenly during a staff meeting.

7. Placed a sign on the restroom door that read, The company ran out of toilet tissue; please use your own resources.

8. Paged a co-worker over the loud speaker claiming the CEO was looking for him. The worker went into the CEOs office and the CEO didn’t know who he was or why he was there.

9. Shrink-wrapped everything in a co-worker’s cubicle.

10. Put a ‘house for sale‘ ad in the newspaper regarding a co-worker’s home. E-mail to a friend

found here.

Overhaul puts Fed in charge of stability

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.

Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.

The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling — in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere — to implement all the changes envisioned.

Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.

Asked if President Bush’s goal was to get the revamp approved before he leaves office, press secretary Dana Perino acknowledged the enormity of the plan. We’ll have to see. It is a big attempt, she said.

Democrats in Congress said the administration should be focusing its efforts on easing the country’s current woes, including providing more relief for millions of distressed homeowners clobbered by the housing collapse and credit crunch. Foreclosures have hit record highs.

We must take steps now to provide help to families who are hurting, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called the administration’s proposal a wild pitch.

It’s not even close to the strike zone, Dodd said. This is a very legitimate issue, but why bring this up today when really this had nothing to do with the current problems we’re facing?

Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton was even more emphatic: No amount of rearranging the deck chairs can hide the fact that our housing and credit markets are in crisis and they are sinking deeper every day.

The plan would greatly expand the role of the Fed, created in 1913 after a series of bank panics, to oversee the stability of the entire financial system including commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, private-equity firms and others.

Rather than checking on the health of a particular organization, the Fed’s focus would be on whether a firm’s or industry’s practices pose a danger to overall financial stability, said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former head of investment giant Goldman Sachs whom Bush put in charge of the plan.

It will have broad powers and the necessary corrective authorities to deal with deficiencies, Paulson said.

Lyle Gramley, former Fed official and now senior economic adviser at the Stanford Washington Research Group, believes the plan isn’t clear about the Fed’s such corrective powers. If you create a police force and don’t give them any weapons, it is going to be useless, Gramley warned.

Others expressed concern about concentrating too much power at the Fed while also streamlining or consolidating the duties of other regulators. They feared that a safety net of checks and balances could be lost.

The cataclysmic mistake is that if you eliminate so many ‘eyes’ that monitor the markets, and the single eye, no matter how super, misses something, then catastrophe, said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John’s University.

For similar reasons, Howard Chernick, economics professor at Hunter College, said, I would prefer not putting all my eggs in the Fed’s regulatory basket.

The Consumer Federation of America accused the Fed of failing to heed warnings about risky mortgages that triggered the meltdown in credit markets in the first place and questioned expanding its scope. Giving the Fed new responsibility to monitor market risks will do nothing if it is not accompanied by much broader authority for the Federal Reserve to act than this proposal provides, and even more important, by a willingness for the Federal Reserve to use the authority it has.

At the same time, the Fed would lose daily supervision of big banks, something the Fed probably would fight to keep intact, Gramley said. Taking away that supervision is a problem because the Fed is also the lender of last resort for commercial banks, he said.

In the biggest expansion of its credit authority since the 1930s, the Fed in mid-March temporarily granted that emergency lending privilege to big investment houses. It came after the crash of the once-mighty Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment firm, stoked fears others could be in jeopardy.

Day-to-day banking supervision would be consolidated into one agency, compared with the current five. The Office of Thrift Supervision, which oversees savings and loans, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the trading of gas, oil and other commodities, would be eliminated, with their functions merged into other agencies.

I think it is a mistake to discard some federal agencies because protective checks and balances could be lost, Chernick said. A paper reorganization that is going to help must have the legal teeth and the staff behind it to regulate the industries, he said.

Walt Lukken, acting chairman of the CFTC, warned that his agency’s expertise may be jeopardized with the creation of a larger regulatory bureaucracy.

The Bush administration’s creation of the Homeland Security Department, which merged 20 or so federal agencies into the new Cabinet level office, stirred turf battles, culture clashes and mission-identity crises. The new agency’s effectiveness was hobbled, critics say.

While some regulators no doubt will be fearful of losing powers, those regulated had their own concerns.

Dismantling the thrift charter and crippling state banking charters will weaken banking in America, said Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.

The plan, which would require congressional approval for its biggest changes, such as the Fed’s expanded authority, would alter how the government regulates thousands of businesses from the nation’s biggest banks and investment houses down to the local insurance agent and mortgage broker. It aims to overhaul a patchwork collection of sometimes overlapping regulatory jurisdictions and build a new structure that better suits the needs of the modern financial world.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wanted even more regulatory consolidation, saying a single regulator may be a better approach.

It would create one super agency in charge of business conduct and consumer protection, performing many of the functions of the current Securities and Exchange Commission.

The plan also would ask Congress to establish a federal Mortgage Origination Commission to set recommended minimum licensing standards for mortgage brokers, many of whom now operate outside of federal regulation. And, the plan would also take a first step toward federal regulation of the insurance industry by asking Congress to establish an Office of Insurance Oversight inside the Treasury Department.

Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin blasted Paulson’s approach as a disastrous backward step that would put the investor in jeopardy because it would pre-empt state regulation of securities and insurance.

Paulson acknowledged that most of the changes will not occur until after a lengthy debate in Congress, leaving it to the next administration to deal with the biggest changes proposed by the report.

Tearing down the existing regulatory structure and rebuilding it is an extraordinarily difficult task, involves a tremendous amount of turf battles in Washington and will be awfully difficult to solve, Gramley said. Proceeding in this direction will happen very, very slowly.
found here.

Overhaul puts Fed in charge of stability

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.

Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.

The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling — in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere — to implement all the changes envisioned.

Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.

Asked if President Bush’s goal was to get the revamp approved before he leaves office, press secretary Dana Perino acknowledged the enormity of the plan. We’ll have to see. It is a big attempt, she said.

Democrats in Congress said the administration should be focusing its efforts on easing the country’s current woes, including providing more relief for millions of distressed homeowners clobbered by the housing collapse and credit crunch. Foreclosures have hit record highs.

We must take steps now to provide help to families who are hurting, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called the administration’s proposal a wild pitch.

It’s not even close to the strike zone, Dodd said. This is a very legitimate issue, but why bring this up today when really this had nothing to do with the current problems we’re facing?

Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton was even more emphatic: No amount of rearranging the deck chairs can hide the fact that our housing and credit markets are in crisis and they are sinking deeper every day.

The plan would greatly expand the role of the Fed, created in 1913 after a series of bank panics, to oversee the stability of the entire financial system including commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, private-equity firms and others.

Rather than checking on the health of a particular organization, the Fed’s focus would be on whether a firm’s or industry’s practices pose a danger to overall financial stability, said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former head of investment giant Goldman Sachs whom Bush put in charge of the plan.

It will have broad powers and the necessary corrective authorities to deal with deficiencies, Paulson said.

Lyle Gramley, former Fed official and now senior economic adviser at the Stanford Washington Research Group, believes the plan isn’t clear about the Fed’s such corrective powers. If you create a police force and don’t give them any weapons, it is going to be useless, Gramley warned.

Others expressed concern about concentrating too much power at the Fed while also streamlining or consolidating the duties of other regulators. They feared that a safety net of checks and balances could be lost.

The cataclysmic mistake is that if you eliminate so many ‘eyes’ that monitor the markets, and the single eye, no matter how super, misses something, then catastrophe, said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John’s University.

For similar reasons, Howard Chernick, economics professor at Hunter College, said, I would prefer not putting all my eggs in the Fed’s regulatory basket.

The Consumer Federation of America accused the Fed of failing to heed warnings about risky mortgages that triggered the meltdown in credit markets in the first place and questioned expanding its scope. Giving the Fed new responsibility to monitor market risks will do nothing if it is not accompanied by much broader authority for the Federal Reserve to act than this proposal provides, and even more important, by a willingness for the Federal Reserve to use the authority it has.

At the same time, the Fed would lose daily supervision of big banks, something the Fed probably would fight to keep intact, Gramley said. Taking away that supervision is a problem because the Fed is also the lender of last resort for commercial banks, he said.

In the biggest expansion of its credit authority since the 1930s, the Fed in mid-March temporarily granted that emergency lending privilege to big investment houses. It came after the crash of the once-mighty Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment firm, stoked fears others could be in jeopardy.

Day-to-day banking supervision would be consolidated into one agency, compared with the current five. The Office of Thrift Supervision, which oversees savings and loans, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the trading of gas, oil and other commodities, would be eliminated, with their functions merged into other agencies.

I think it is a mistake to discard some federal agencies because protective checks and balances could be lost, Chernick said. A paper reorganization that is going to help must have the legal teeth and the staff behind it to regulate the industries, he said.

Walt Lukken, acting chairman of the CFTC, warned that his agency’s expertise may be jeopardized with the creation of a larger regulatory bureaucracy.

The Bush administration’s creation of the Homeland Security Department, which merged 20 or so federal agencies into the new Cabinet level office, stirred turf battles, culture clashes and mission-identity crises. The new agency’s effectiveness was hobbled, critics say.

While some regulators no doubt will be fearful of losing powers, those regulated had their own concerns.

Dismantling the thrift charter and crippling state banking charters will weaken banking in America, said Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.

The plan, which would require congressional approval for its biggest changes, such as the Fed’s expanded authority, would alter how the government regulates thousands of businesses from the nation’s biggest banks and investment houses down to the local insurance agent and mortgage broker. It aims to overhaul a patchwork collection of sometimes overlapping regulatory jurisdictions and build a new structure that better suits the needs of the modern financial world.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wanted even more regulatory consolidation, saying a single regulator may be a better approach.

It would create one super agency in charge of business conduct and consumer protection, performing many of the functions of the current Securities and Exchange Commission.

The plan also would ask Congress to establish a federal Mortgage Origination Commission to set recommended minimum licensing standards for mortgage brokers, many of whom now operate outside of federal regulation. And, the plan would also take a first step toward federal regulation of the insurance industry by asking Congress to establish an Office of Insurance Oversight inside the Treasury Department.

Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin blasted Paulson’s approach as a disastrous backward step that would put the investor in jeopardy because it would pre-empt state regulation of securities and insurance.

Paulson acknowledged that most of the changes will not occur until after a lengthy debate in Congress, leaving it to the next administration to deal with the biggest changes proposed by the report.

Tearing down the existing regulatory structure and rebuilding it is an extraordinarily difficult task, involves a tremendous amount of turf battles in Washington and will be awfully difficult to solve, Gramley said. Proceeding in this direction will happen very, very slowly.
found here.

Overhaul puts Fed in charge of stability

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.

Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.

The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling — in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere — to implement all the changes envisioned.

Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.

Asked if President Bush’s goal was to get the revamp approved before he leaves office, press secretary Dana Perino acknowledged the enormity of the plan. We’ll have to see. It is a big attempt, she said.

Democrats in Congress said the administration should be focusing its efforts on easing the country’s current woes, including providing more relief for millions of distressed homeowners clobbered by the housing collapse and credit crunch. Foreclosures have hit record highs.

We must take steps now to provide help to families who are hurting, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called the administration’s proposal a wild pitch.

It’s not even close to the strike zone, Dodd said. This is a very legitimate issue, but why bring this up today when really this had nothing to do with the current problems we’re facing?

Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton was even more emphatic: No amount of rearranging the deck chairs can hide the fact that our housing and credit markets are in crisis and they are sinking deeper every day.

The plan would greatly expand the role of the Fed, created in 1913 after a series of bank panics, to oversee the stability of the entire financial system including commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, private-equity firms and others.

Rather than checking on the health of a particular organization, the Fed’s focus would be on whether a firm’s or industry’s practices pose a danger to overall financial stability, said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former head of investment giant Goldman Sachs whom Bush put in charge of the plan.

It will have broad powers and the necessary corrective authorities to deal with deficiencies, Paulson said.

Lyle Gramley, former Fed official and now senior economic adviser at the Stanford Washington Research Group, believes the plan isn’t clear about the Fed’s such corrective powers. If you create a police force and don’t give them any weapons, it is going to be useless, Gramley warned.

Others expressed concern about concentrating too much power at the Fed while also streamlining or consolidating the duties of other regulators. They feared that a safety net of checks and balances could be lost.

The cataclysmic mistake is that if you eliminate so many ‘eyes’ that monitor the markets, and the single eye, no matter how super, misses something, then catastrophe, said Anthony Sabino, a professor of law and business at St. John’s University.

For similar reasons, Howard Chernick, economics professor at Hunter College, said, I would prefer not putting all my eggs in the Fed’s regulatory basket.

The Consumer Federation of America accused the Fed of failing to heed warnings about risky mortgages that triggered the meltdown in credit markets in the first place and questioned expanding its scope. Giving the Fed new responsibility to monitor market risks will do nothing if it is not accompanied by much broader authority for the Federal Reserve to act than this proposal provides, and even more important, by a willingness for the Federal Reserve to use the authority it has.

At the same time, the Fed would lose daily supervision of big banks, something the Fed probably would fight to keep intact, Gramley said. Taking away that supervision is a problem because the Fed is also the lender of last resort for commercial banks, he said.

In the biggest expansion of its credit authority since the 1930s, the Fed in mid-March temporarily granted that emergency lending privilege to big investment houses. It came after the crash of the once-mighty Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment firm, stoked fears others could be in jeopardy.

Day-to-day banking supervision would be consolidated into one agency, compared with the current five. The Office of Thrift Supervision, which oversees savings and loans, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the trading of gas, oil and other commodities, would be eliminated, with their functions merged into other agencies.

I think it is a mistake to discard some federal agencies because protective checks and balances could be lost, Chernick said. A paper reorganization that is going to help must have the legal teeth and the staff behind it to regulate the industries, he said.

Walt Lukken, acting chairman of the CFTC, warned that his agency’s expertise may be jeopardized with the creation of a larger regulatory bureaucracy.

The Bush administration’s creation of the Homeland Security Department, which merged 20 or so federal agencies into the new Cabinet level office, stirred turf battles, culture clashes and mission-identity crises. The new agency’s effectiveness was hobbled, critics say.

While some regulators no doubt will be fearful of losing powers, those regulated had their own concerns.

Dismantling the thrift charter and crippling state banking charters will weaken banking in America, said Edward Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association.

The plan, which would require congressional approval for its biggest changes, such as the Fed’s expanded authority, would alter how the government regulates thousands of businesses from the nation’s biggest banks and investment houses down to the local insurance agent and mortgage broker. It aims to overhaul a patchwork collection of sometimes overlapping regulatory jurisdictions and build a new structure that better suits the needs of the modern financial world.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wanted even more regulatory consolidation, saying a single regulator may be a better approach.

It would create one super agency in charge of business conduct and consumer protection, performing many of the functions of the current Securities and Exchange Commission.

The plan also would ask Congress to establish a federal Mortgage Origination Commission to set recommended minimum licensing standards for mortgage brokers, many of whom now operate outside of federal regulation. And, the plan would also take a first step toward federal regulation of the insurance industry by asking Congress to establish an Office of Insurance Oversight inside the Treasury Department.

Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin blasted Paulson’s approach as a disastrous backward step that would put the investor in jeopardy because it would pre-empt state regulation of securities and insurance.

Paulson acknowledged that most of the changes will not occur until after a lengthy debate in Congress, leaving it to the next administration to deal with the biggest changes proposed by the report.

Tearing down the existing regulatory structure and rebuilding it is an extraordinarily difficult task, involves a tremendous amount of turf battles in Washington and will be awfully difficult to solve, Gramley said. Proceeding in this direction will happen very, very slowly.
found here.