Section 953 of the Dodd-Frank bill deals with disclosures relating to executive compensation, not only at banks but at all publicly traded companies. One of the ways it seeks to rein in out-of-control CEO pay is by requiring firms to reveal how the amount paid to the head of the company compares to that received by the typical employee. The theory is that having this information made public would give pause to grasping CEOs and soft-touch board compensation committees.

The total compensation of chief executives (along with that of the four other highest paid executives) is already disclosed through the annual proxy statements companies have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (which makes them public through the EDGAR online system, where the documents are designated as DEF 14A). Yet there have been no requirements relating to the disclosure of how much is paid to the CEO’s underlings.

Section 953 fills this gap by instructing companies to include in their future proxies the median of the annual total compensation paid to all employees apart from the CEO. They also have to calculate the ratio of that median to the CEO’s total bounty.

Those ratios will be fascinating to see, but just as interesting will be the figures on non-CEO pay themselves. For the first time, we will be able to make direct comparisons of the broad compensation practices of different companies within given industries or across sectors. Getting official data from the companies themselves will be an improvement on the selective information that now gets posted on websites such as Glass Door.

There will be limitations, of course. Congress should have required the disclosure of data specifically on hourly workers rather than lumping them in with higher-paid professionals and executives. It would also be preferable to have separate numbers on domestic and foreign employees. And it is likely that companies will exclude low-paid temps and (often misclassified) independent contractors in making their calculations.

Yet this information could still be put to good use. Having clear, company-specific data could help stimulate a much-needed movement to address the problem of wage stagnation in the United States. The reality of that stagnation is quite evident from overall labor market data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but it would be much more effective to point the finger at individual companies with low medians and seek to shame them for failing to provide adequate compensation to their workers.

The ability of employers to keep wages low stems from two classic sources: low unionization and high unemployment. We know all too well the story of how anti-union animus on the part of employers has pushed the percentage of private sector workers with collective bargaining protections to historic postwar lows. To the extent they are able, unions target individual companies such as Wal-Mart, T-Mobile and (until it was finally organized) Smithfield Foods for denying their workers the right to representation.

Unions and other advocacy groups also criticize specific companies that engage in mass layoffs, especially when they seem to be undertaken mainly to impress Wall Street.

Yet we rarely hear criticisms of particular companies for failing to hire new workers when conditions seem to warrant it. The “economy” is assumed to be to blame for the high levels of joblessness afflicting us, not deliberate decisions by corporations to keep their payrolls artificially lean. Recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the absurd argument that overregulation is responsible for the anemic hiring situation. The Obama Administration responded by saying that weak consumer demand is the cause. Absent is the idea that corporations are failing in their responsibilities.

The unwillingness to chastise corporations is all the more bewildering in the face of growing evidence that business is hoarding cash instead of investing in job-creating ways. A front-page story in the Washington Post headlined COMPANIES PILE UP CASH BUT REMAIN HESITANT TO ADD JOBS notes that U.S. nonfinancial companies, buoyed by rising profits, are now sitting on $1.8 trillion in liquid reserves.

Why is there not more of an outcry about this behavior? Here’s an idea: pick companies with the most egregious combinations of rising profits and falling payrolls and press them to justify their boycott of U.S. workers. Once the new disclosure requirement kicks in, they could also be pushed to explain their low compensation levels. Business needs a strong reminder that it also exists to provide opportunities for people to earn a living.

Seeing KKR featured on the business pages sparks flashbacks to the 1980s, when the firm was at the center of the largest transformation of corporate America since the days of the robber barons. Yet KKR is of interest not only for historical reasons. Its financial maneuvers harmed the American economy in ways that are still being felt today.

Fortune once called KKR founder Jerome Kohlberg Jr. “the spiritual father of the entire LBO industry,” LBO being short for leveraged buyouts – the process of buying control of a company using its own borrowing capacity. Frequently working with top executives who wanted to share in the windfall, KKR took over companies with the intention of restructuring them and later taking them public again at a fat profit. Workers were usually the ones who paid the price, through layoffs or intensified work.

Led by Henry Kravis and George Roberts (Kohlberg was pushed out), KKR used a series of such buyouts to became the country’s second largest conglomerate (after General Electric), with control of corporate trophies such as Beatrice, Safeway Stores and Owens-Illinois. A Business Week cover story dubbed Kravis “King Henry,” while Fortune dubbed him and his partner “Masters of the Buyout Game.”

The greed and reckless speculation of LBOs reached its apotheosis in 1988 in the battle for RJR Nabisco. KKR emerged victorious from the free-for-all and carried out what was then a record $25 billion takeover of the tobacco and food giant. The excesses of all involved inspired Time magazine to write that the process had “crossed an invisible line that separates reasonable conduct from anarchy.” Bryan Burrough and John Helyar titled their 1990 book about the takeover Barbarians at the Gate.

After the RJR Nabisco deal, the appetite for major LBOs waned, in large part because of the collapse of the market for the junk bonds that made most of those deals possible — a collapse hastened by the demise of Drexel Burnham Lambert amid an insider trading scandal. KKR survived, though its stature was considerably diminished. Its reputation took a big hit in 1991, when Sarah Bartlett’s book on the firm, The Money Machine, accused KKR of gouging its own investors, including public pension funds.

KKR held on during the deal drought of the 1990s and finally got its reward in the mid-2000s, when buyouts started to enjoy a resurgence. This time around, KKR and the other LBO firms, now operating under the sanitized rubric of private equity, avoided much of the risk of the dealmaking of the 1980s and shamelessly milked bought-out firms with bloated management fees. As a 2006 Wall Street Journal headline put it, “In Today’s Buyouts, Payday for Firms is Never Far Away.”

The Great Recession has put a crimp in the private equity game, but KKR could not resist one more big deal: itself. For the past three years it has struggled to go public in a convoluted process involving an offshore affiliate based in Guernsey. Now it finally seems to be succeeding, but this is hardly a cause for celebration.

KKR’s initial offering serves mainly as a reminder of how much the firm has done to bring about our current economic ills. KKR helped popularize the idea that wealth could be created out of thin air rather than real productive activity. Its buyouts were part of the inspiration for securitization and other machinations that precipitated the near meltdown of the financial system in 2008. Given that the interest paid on LBO debt was deductible on company tax returns, KKR’s buyouts also pioneered the dubious practice of having the federal government effectively subsidize wheeling and dealing, paving the way to the Big Bailout of Wall Street.

All those deals made Henry Kravis and George Roberts very rich, but they have left the country much poorer.

When Senate Republicans unveiled their alternative approach to reform on April 26, buried in the document was a provision that called for less rather than more regulation. The GOP proposal would make smaller publicly traded companies exempt from a key provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sarbox, for short), the corporate accountability law enacted in 2002 in response to the accounting scandals at companies such as Enron and WorldCom.

The provision in question, Section 404, requires firms to maintain a system of internal controls to ensure the integrity of their financial statements, which must include an audited assessment of the adequacy of those measures. A breakdown in such controls is an invitation to financial fraud.

Senate Republicans would like to provide an immediate exemption to companies with a market capitalization of $150 million or less and would instruct the Securities and Exchange Commission to explore the possibility of setting the cutoff even higher. The SEC has already delayed implementation of the Section 404 requirement for smaller firms, and it convened a business-dominated advisory committee that recommended consideration of Sarbox relaxation for firms with market capitalization up to $787 million. The Commission, however, has refused to create a permanent exemption.

Truth be told, it is not just Republicans who are pushing the exemption idea. The financial reform bill that passed the House in December contains a Section 404 small-business exemption that was proposed – against the wishes of Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank – by Democrat John Adler along with Republican Scott Garrett, both of New Jersey. The amendment passed with the blessing of the Obama Administration, with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel personally lobbying members of the Committee on its behalf.  Senator Dodd, however, did not include a small-business exemption in his financial reform bill.

The Sarbox small-firm carve-out may win some friends in business circles, but it entails serious risks. Chief among them is that the exemption could serve as a stepping stone to further weakening or abolition of the entire law.

This is more than a remote possibility. Republicans make no secret of their distaste for Sarbox in general and have used this as a theme in criticizing the Dodd bill. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint called that bill “Sarbanes-Oxley on steroids,” adding: “Like Sarbanes-Oxley, it is reactionary legislation that’s more likely to hurt U.S. businesses than reform the financial system.” A recent Wall Street Journal editorial denounced Dodd’s bill as “a souped-up version of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill of 2002 – that is, a collection of ill-understood reforms whose main achievement will be to make Wall Street even more the vassal of Washington.”

Congress is not the only arena where Sarbanes-Oxley is under assault. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a challenge by the rabidly anti-regulation Competitive Enterprise Institute to the legitimacy of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which was created by Sarbox by regulate public accounting firms. Some legal observers believe that a high court ruling against the Board could lead to the demise of Sarbox in its entirety.

Even if this dark scenario does not come to pass, does it make sense to loosen the controls on smaller firms? Fraudulent behavior is hardly unknown among public companies of modest size. In fact, such companies have long been used as vehicles for criminal enterprises. A 1996 Business Week investigation found that “substantial elements of the small-cap market have been turned into a veritable Mob franchise, under the very noses of regulators and law enforcement.”

Lately, the focus has been on the sins of the financial giants, but that’s no reason to dilute oversight of smaller players. Now’s a time for tightening regulation across the board.

In fact, Goldman would have us believe that it took a bath in the overall mortgage security arena. This story line is a far cry from the one put forth a couple of years ago, when the firm was being celebrated for anticipating the collapse in the mortgage market and shielding itself – though not its clients. In a November 2007 front-page article headlined “Goldman Sachs Rakes in Profit in Credit Crisis,” the New York Times reported that the firm “continued to package risky mortgages to sell to investors” while it reduced its own holdings in such securities and bought “expensive insurance as protection against further losses.” In 2007 Goldman posted a profit of $11.6 billion (up from $9.5 billion the year before), and CEO Lloyd Blankfein took home $70 million in compensation (not counting another $45 million in value he realized upon the vesting of previously granted stock awards). Some bath.

Goldman is not the only one rewriting financial history. Many of the firm’s mainstream critics are talking as if it is unheard of for an investment bank to act contrary to the interests of its clients, as Goldman is accused of doing by failing to disclose that it allowed hedge fund operator John Paulson to choose a set of particularly toxic mortgage securities for Goldman to peddle while Paulson was betting heavily that those securities would tank.

In fact, the history of Wall Street is filled with examples in which investment houses sought to hoodwink investors. Rampant stock manipulation, conflicts of interest and other fraudulent practices exposed by the Pecora Commission prompted the regulatory reforms of the 1930s. Those reforms reduced but did not eliminate shady practices. The 1950s and early 1960s saw a series of scandals involving firms on the American Stock Exchange that in 1964 inspired Congress to impose stricter disclosure requirements for over-the-counter securities.

The corporate takeover frenzy of the 1980s brought with it a wave of insider trading scandals. The culprits in these cases involved not only independent speculators such as Ivan Boesky, but also executives at prominent investment houses, above all Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham. Also caught in the net was Robert Freeman, head of risk arbitrage at Goldman, who in 1989 pleaded guilty to criminal charges. When players such as Freeman and Milken traded on inside information, they were profiting at the expense of other investors, including their own clients, who were not privy to that information.

During the past decade, various major banks were accused of helping crooked companies deceive investors. For example, in 2004 Citigroup agreed to pay $2.7 billion to settle such charges brought in connection with WorldCom and later paid $1.7 billion to former Enron investors. In 2005 Goldman and three other banks paid $100 million to settle charges in connection with WorldCom.

In other words, the allegation that Goldman was acting contrary to the interest of its clients in the sale of synthetic collateralized debt obligations was hardly unprecedented.

What’s not getting much attention during the current scandal is that in late 2007 Goldman had found another way to profit by exploiting its clients, though in this case the clients were not investors but homeowners.

Goldman quietly purchased a company called Litton Loan Servicing, a leading player in the business of servicing subprime (and frequently predatory) home mortgages. “Servicing” in this case means collecting payments from homeowners who frequently fall behind in payments and are at risk of foreclosure. As I wrote in 2008, Litton is “a type of collection agency dealing with those in the most vulnerable and desperate financial circumstances.” At the end of 2009, Litton was the 4^th largest subprime servicer, with a portfolio of some $52 billion (National Mortgage News 4/5/2010).

Litton has frequently been charged with engaging in abusive practices, including the imposition of onerous late fees that allegedly violate the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. It has also been accused of being overly aggressive in pushing homeowners into foreclosure when they can’t make their payments.

Many of these complaints have ended up in court. According to the Justia database, Litton has been sued more than 300 times in federal court since the beginning of 2007. That year a federal judge in California granted class-action status to a group of plaintiffs, but the court later limited the scope of the potential damages, resulting in a settlement in which Litton agreed to pay out $500,000.

Meanwhile, individual lawsuits continue to be filed. Many of the more recent ones involve disputes over loan modifications. Complaints in this area persist even though Litton is participating in the Obama Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program and is thus eligible for incentive payments through an extension of the Toxic Assets Relief Program.

There seems to be no end to the ways that Goldman manages to make money from toxic assets.  On Wall Street, as in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

BONUS FEATURE: Federal regulation of business leaves a lot to be desired, but it is worth knowing where to find information on those enforcement activities that are occurring. The Dirt Diggers Digest can help with our new Enforcement page, which has links to online enforcement data from a wide range of federal agencies. The page also includes links to inspection data, product recall announcements and lists of companies debarred from doing business with the federal government.

Among the many reasons for the financial debacle of the past few years was the failure of board members at the big commercial and investment banks to exercise any kind of meaningful oversight while the executives of those companies were applying the business principles of Charles Ponzi. This was a replay of what happened during the Enron and other corporate scandals of the early 2000s.

One of the key causes of feckless boards is the phenomenon of interlocking directorates — the tendency of large and powerful corporations to share directors. This happens when the chief executive of a big company or bank sits on the board of another corporate leviathan, or when retired business executives join multiple boards. In these cases the outside director can usually be counted on to endorse the strategies put forth by top management and to be generous when it comes to setting executive compensation policies. And perhaps be willfully ignorant when management is cooking the books.

According to the recent report from its bankruptcy examiner, that was the case when Lehman Brothers was engaged in its Repo 105 scam to hide the fact that its balance sheet was becoming overwhelmed by toxic assets. Prior to its collapse in 2008, the chair of the audit committee of Lehman’s board was the retired chief executive of Halliburton.

Tucked in Dodd’s 1,336-page bill is a short section (no. 164) that addresses the board issue by proposing a modification in what is known as the Depository Institutions Management Interlocks Act (DIMIA), an obscure law from 1978 that prohibits someone from sitting on the boards of more than one bank, depending on the size and location of the institutions. Dodd wants to apply DIMIA to the large nonbank financial companies that would be subject to additional regulation under his bill. In doing so he would bar the Federal Reserve from allowing any interlocks between those nonbank financial companies and large bank holding companies.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does not begin to address the corporate governance lapses that helped bring about the Wall Street meltdown. Those lapses showed that existing rules on corporate boards, such as those contained in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, are not up to the task.

And we certainly can’t count on big financial institutions themselves to choose the best board members or even to exclude those whose track record should disqualify them. Citigroup made a big show last year of revamping its board, but the person it chose to chair that body was Jerry Grundhofer, who, in addition to being the former CEO of U.S. Bancorp, had served as a director of Lehman Brothers during its last ignominious year.

Another bailed out institution, Bank of America, also chose some new directors last year. Its choices included two former regulatory officials – Susan Bies of the Federal Reserve and Donald Powell of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – whose agencies did little to detect or prevent the crisis. B of A also brought on Robert Scully, a former executive of Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, groups such as the AFL-CIO called on companies on whose boards Enron’s outside directors also served to ease them out when they came up for reelection. In 2005 board members at Enron and at WorldCom had to pay millions of dollars of their own money to settle lawsuits brought by investors in the two companies brought down by fraud.

So far, those who served on the boards of the large banks have avoided a similar fate. It would be good to see them face litigation and public disapprobation, but at least they should be barred from continuing to serve on the boards of institutions where future financial crises may occur. Strengthening the rules against interlocks in a meaningful way would also help diminish cronyism in the boardroom.

Big Money requires the kind of strong external regulation that financial reform could conceivably bring about. That regulation should also make sure that institutions also have a decent first line of internal regulation in the form of truly independent and diligent board members.

At this week’s public hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the nation’s most powerful bankers were, unfortunately, treated with a lot more deference. Sure, there was one satisfying exchange between FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in which Angelides likened the firm’s practice of betting against the very securities it was peddling to clients to that of selling someone a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer.

But those moments were rare. For the most part, the bankers came away unscathed. Most of the ten commissioners treated them not as suspected criminals whose misdeeds needed to be probed, but rather as experts whose opinions on the causes of the crisis were being solicited. This gave the bankers abundant opportunities to pontificate about industry and regulatory practices while avoiding any incriminating admissions about their own firm’s behavior.

For example, Commissioner Heather Murren, CEO of the Nevada Cancer Institute, asked Blankfein whether there should be “more supervision of the kinds of activities that are undertaken by investment banks?” This allowed him to babble on about the “sociology…of our regulation before and after becoming a bank holding company.”

The bankers seemed to have expected tougher questioning. Their opening statements sought to soften the interrogation by conceding some general culpability, though it was done in a mostly generic way. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase admitted that “new and poorly underwritten mortgage products helped fuel housing price appreciation, excessive speculation and core higher credit losses.” John Mack of Morgan Stanley acknowledged that “there is no doubt that we as an industry made mistakes.” And Brian Moynihan, the new CEO of Bank of America, noted: “Over the course of the crisis, we, as an industry, caused a lot of damage.”

But much too little time was spent by the commissioners exploring how the giant firms represented on the panel contributed to that damage. A search of the transcript of the hearing produced by CQ Transcriptions and posted on the database service Factiva indicates that the word “predatory” was not used once during the time the four top bankers were testifying.

The commissioners failed to challenge most of the self-serving statements made by the bankers to give the impression that, despite whatever vague transgressions were going on in the industry, their own firms were squeaky clean. Even Angelides failed to pin them down. When he asked Blankfein to state “the two most significant instances of negligent, improper and bad behavior in which your firm engaged and for which you would apologize” the Goldman CEO admitted only to contributing to “elements of froth in the market.” Angelides asked whether that included anything “negligent or improper.” Blankfein again evaded the question and the Chairman gave up.

The bankers also went unchallenged in making statements that were incomplete if not outright erroneous. When Blankfein, for example, claimed that Goldman deals only with institutional investors and “high-net-worth individuals,” no one pointed out the firm’s ties to Litton Loan Servicing, which has handled large numbers of subprime and often predatory home mortgages.

The Goldman chief also made much of the fact that he and other top executives of the firm took no bonuses in 2008. That’s true, but he failed to mention that, according to Goldman’s proxy statement, he alone became more than $25 million richer that year when previously granted stock awards vested.

The bankers were at their slipperiest when it came to the few questions about the issue of being too big to fail. They would not, of course, admit to being too big, but in spite of every indication that the federal government would never allow another Lehman Brothers-type collapse to occur, they labored mightily to argue that they could conceivably go under. This notwithstanding the fact that a couple of them had just thanked U.S. taxpayers for the financial assistance their firms had received.

I suppose it’s possible that the Commission is saving its best shots for later stages of the investigation and its final report, but its handling of the banker hearing deprived the public of a chance to see some of the prime villains of the current crisis get a much-deserved tongue-lashing.

But what have we got to show, with regard to checking corporate abuses, for the past 12 months of Democratic control over the legislative branch as well as the White House? Last year this time, excitement over Obama’s election and the Democratic gains in Congress persuaded many activists that great things could once again happen in Washington. The big business agenda would supposedly no longer reign supreme, and progressives anticipated major legislative gains regarding healthcare coverage, financial regulation, the climate crisis and union organizing.

Now those expectations seem hopelessly naïve. Rather than radical changes, we’ve ended up with a disappointing series of half-measures, quarter-measures, and stalemates.

The biggest frustration is in the healthcare arena. We seem to be on the verge of getting a new system that will expand coverage and curb some of the most egregious insurance industry abuses, but these improvements come at a high cost. The final bill will likely have a strict individual mandate compelling those without coverage to become customers of a bunch of blood-suckers yet a weak employer mandate allowing many companies to avoid providing decent coverage to their workers. It will not seriously regulate insurance rates yet may end up penalizing union workers who gave up wage increases to get more generous benefits. The bill that squeaked through the Senate and is expected to form the basis of the final legislation is so compromised that veteran reformers such as Physicians for a National Health Program have called for its defeat.

After crippling the economy through reckless investments and forcing millions of homeowners into foreclosure, the big banks have largely been treated with deference by Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration. Nothing has been done to break up institutions deemed too big to fail and thus able to extort massive taxpayer-funded bailouts. Despite loud complaints from bankers used to sumptuous pay packages, the federal government’s restrictions on executive compensation have been pretty indulgent. The bill that passed the House in December creates a new consumer protection agency for financial services, but it is unclear how much power it will have. And the bill lacks aggressive regulation of the exotic financial instruments that helped bring about the crisis. Separate legislation on credit cards that was enacted curbs some of the industry’s most outrageous practices but does nothing about usurious interest rates.

The climate bill passed by the House in June not only shunned strict emission limits in favor of the dubious cap-and-trade system, but it would allow many major polluters to avoid paying for their emission allowances for up to 20 years. And the overall emission reductions the bill envisions are far below the level needed to make a substantial dent in global warming.

And then there’s the Employee Free Choice Act, the key priority of the labor movement, which did so much to get Obama and many Democrats elected. The legislation has been in suspended animation for many months as Senate leaders apparently cannot muster enough votes to overcome intransigent opposition not only from Republicans but also from some Dems. EFCA remained stalled even after the AFL-CIO signaled it was open to compromise on the key issue of card-check organizing.

Overall, corporate interests have been remarkably successful over the past year in avoiding serious restraints on their freedom of action. Much of what the Democrats are accomplishing amounts to the appearance of reform. It gives the impression that corporate misbehavior is being addressed but is actually inoculating business against more stringent regulation. In the case of healthcare, the situation is even worse: by turning millions into captive customers, Congress is granting unprecedented power and legitimacy to a discredited industry.

There are plenty of obvious explanations for this dismal performance. It is easy to point to the corrupting effect of corporate campaign contributions and lobbying by former Congressional staffers as well as the pernicious role of conservative Democrats and egomaniacs like Joe Lieberman.

But the progressive movement also deserves some of the blame. The euphoria following the 2008 election gave rise to another bout of the delusion that serious change requires nothing more putting in office a certain number of people with the preferred party designation.

During the 1930s FDR is supposed to have told activists in a private meeting: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Although that quote has showed up in several blogs over the past year, the underlying message seems to have been lost on many of today’s activists. With the absence of substantial popular pressure, it has been easier for Congressional Democrats to succumb to the siren song of the corporate interests.

Ironically, it has been the woefully ignorant and confused tea party movement—serving as a witting or unwitting stalking horse for the corporate elite—that has lately shown the power of grassroots mobilization. Their positions make no sense, but the tea baggers have made sure that Congressional Republicans maintain a hard-right stance on everything.

Perhaps we will accomplish more if we return to our own barricades.

In case you have forgotten, Glass-Steagall was one of the signature reforms of the New Deal era, signed into law by FDR as part of the Banking Act of 1933 (photo).  Reacting to Wall Street’s excesses of the 1920s and the stock market crash, the law mandated a separation between the speculative world of investment banking and the supposedly more prudent business of commercial banking. This forced big institutions such as J.P. Morgan to spin off their securities operations, leading to the formation of firms such as Morgan Stanley.

While many credited Glass-Steagall with promoting financial stability, by the 1980s commercial banks began clamoring to get back into the more exciting (and potentially more profitable) game of underwriting corporate securities and providing other investment services. Little by little, the Federal Reserve gave in, which only emboldened the big players. In 1998 wheeler-dealer Sandy Weill directly defied Glass-Steagall by arranging a merger of Travelers Group and Citicorp, thus creating the behemoth we know today as Citigroup. What was left of Glass-Steagall was repealed by the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

The near-meltdown of the financial system has engendered new interest in the principles that had been embodied in Glass-Steagall. McCain and Cantwell are not the only ones talking about reviving the 1930s legislation. Several progressive members of the House made a similar proposal earlier this month. The idea has also been endorsed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Glass-Steagall redux would not, by itself, solve the problems of the U.S. financial system, and it is not a substitute for wide-ranging reform. But it would put a significant crimp in the casino culture that has taken root throughout the banking world. Another advantage is that it would by necessity bring about a reduction in the size of many mega-institutions that are now considered “too big to fail” and thus must be bailed out when they screw up in a spectacular way.

The McCain-Cantwell bill, for example, would require the likes of Citigroup and Bank of America to decide within a year whether they wanted to focus on lending or securities. B of A, for instance, would have to give up its branches or its ownership of Merrill Lynch. At the same time, a purer investment bank such as Goldman Sachs could no longer pretend to be a bank holding company, the designation it adopted last year to qualify for TARP funds.

If the bill proceeds, it could also serve as the foundation for an aggressive left-right response to the financial mess. Ever since the Bush Administration and the Federal Reserve started on the road to bank bailouts last year, many progressives and many conservatives have expressed outrage at the practice but have generally talked past one another. This has helped the banks avoid having any serious strings put on their rescue packages. And it let them sidestep the most obvious solution to the problem of having financial institutions deemed too big to fail: cutting them down to size.

The biggest obstacle to restoring Glass-Steagall and otherwise curtailing the power of the big banks may turn out to be not the financial lobby but rather the Obama Administration, whose chief economist, Larry Summers, championed the final repeal of Glass-Steagall while heading the Clinton Administration Treasury Department a decade ago. Despite Obama’s recent swipe at “fat cat” bankers, he and his advisors seem to think that it’s preferable to let the financial leviathans remain in place while putting some modest restrictions on their operations.

The problem is that the giant banks have become increasingly addicted to activities such as trading — the main source of the supposed rebound in the sector — and show less and less interest in mundane matters such as lending to businesses and consumers. The Obama Administration thus comes across as a defender of aloof Big Finance while the country struggles to finance an economic rebound. The fact that progressives can find more common ground on this issue with someone like McCain suggests that strange-bedfellows alliances may accomplish more than toeing the pro-business centrist line.

The announcement that Goldman’s top 30 executives will be denied cash bonuses this year is one of the most significant concessions Wall Street has ever made to public outrage. The members of Goldman’s management committee won’t be denied bonuses entirely but will receive them in the form of “shares at risk” – stock that cannot be sold for five years and is subject to recapture if the recipient engages in “materially improper risk analysis” or fails “sufficiently to raise concerns about risks.”

It is unclear whether these rules, which would require prudence rarely seen in the casino culture of investment banking, will be applied stringently. Goldman’s announcement that it will allow a shareholder advisory vote on compensation practices will make it a bit more difficult to flout the rules entirely.

While the ultimate impact of the Goldman move is uncertain, Britain and France are putting a real and immediate dent in bloated banker pay by imposing a 50 percent windfall tax on bonuses. Financiers in London and Paris are up in arms over the moves, with one investment banking chief telling the Financial Times that as a result of the tax the “contract between government and business is broken.”

And what exactly is that contract? As far as the financial sector is concerned, the traditional contract was that banks were expected to provide the capital needed for the “real” economy, and government did not regulate the market too strictly.  A decade ago, financiers got the regulatory regime loosened even more, which in the United States meant an end to the separation between commercial banking and investment banking. The new contract seemed to be that a fully liberated financial sector would magically create wealth to make up for the travails of the productive portion of the economy.

The crisis of the past two years put an end to that notion, and the contract we’ve been left with seems to be little more than an obligation by government to prop up a teetering financial sector with bailouts and access to virtually free funding. There is no quid pro quo imposed on bankers, who are allowed to deny credit to businesses and individuals alike and use their cheap money to rack up trading profits. And those profits serve mainly to pay for outsized bonuses for the bankers themselves.

It’s always been questionable whether big finance capital served a legitimate social purpose. Now it is clear that the big banks exist mainly for the enrichment of their own executives. About half of total revenue at these banks is set aside for compensation of executives and other employees.

That’s why Bank of America and Citigroup are so eager to repay their bailout money and free themselves from the constraints of the federal pay czar. And it’s why the big banks have felt no compunction about opposing the financial regulatory reforms now before Congress.

While financial industry lobbyists twist arms behind the scenes, Goldman is playing good cop with its bonus restrictions and the quasi-apology its CEO Lloyd Blankfein issued in November. Yet neither voluntary actions by the likes of Goldman nor modest regulatory reforms are sufficient. The current “contract” between big finance and not just government but all of society needs to be rewritten, and this time we shouldn’t let bank lawyers draft the document.

After all, CIT had already received $2.3 billion in TARP money last year after converting itself to a bank holding company. Other struggling TARP recipients, like Citigroup, had been able to come back for additional infusions as Tim Geithner showed himself to be a soft touch for large financial institutions.

To the surprise of CIT, it got rebuffed by the Obama Administration and will now have to file for Chapter 11 unless some deep-pocketed investors step in. CIT, with assets of about $75 billion, is a large but not a giant institution. It thus does not seem to meet the Geithner standard: it is not too big to fail.

While it is possible to understand CIT’s frustration, the company does not deserve too much sympathy. Putting size aside, there are reasons why CIT was not exactly a worthy candidate for a taxpayer handout. This is a case in which perhaps the right question to ask was whether the company in need was  too flawed to save.

For decades, CIT played a useful function in the business system with services such as commercial lending, factoring and equipment leasing. But in 1980 it developed an identity crisis as it was acquired by RCA in the first of what would be a long series of ownership changes. Two decades later it came under the control of Tyco International, the shady conglomerate headed by Dennis Kozlowski, who would later be convicted of misappropriation of corporate funds and become infamous for the extravagant lifestyle–including a $6,000 shower curtain–he enjoyed with those funds.

CIT split from Tyco in 2002 and sought to make a new name for itself. Unfortunately, the way it did that was to get into two very sleazy businesses. In 2005 it entered the student loan market. Within two years, CIT’s Student Loan Xpress was being investigated by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for paying kickbacks to university officials who steered students into predatory loans. Faced with a scandal, CIT agreed in May 2007 to sign a code of ethical conduct drawn up by Cuomo. It then booted out the president of Student Loan Xpress and later exited the business.

The other new endeavor was subprime home mortgages. For a while this dubious business boosted CIT’s earnings, but when the subprime market turned sour, the company took a big hit. In 2007–shortly after telling Investment Dealers Digest that “our subprime profile is strong”–it started posting losses and was forced to write down the value of its subprime portfolio by $765 million. It ended up leaving this field as well. CIT lost some $633 million in 2008.

CIT’s reputation was also tarnished in 2005, when it and two other leasing companies agreed to a $24 million settlement of charges brought in two dozen states about their links to the crooked telecom services company NorVergence.

In recent years, CIT has promoted itself using an advertising campaign based on the tag line Capital Redefined. Apparently, the new definition of capital is to engage in unethical business practices and then expect the federal government to come to your assistance when market conditions turn against you. Large or small, that kind of company is not worth saving.