I am thrilled to present this link to the article Local Muslims Proud To Be Part Of America by Thomas Caywood of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette Staff.

I also found the discussion in the comments about the article to be heartening.  I was glad to participate in the discussion.

It makes me realize that there is hope in all parts of our state. It also makes it all worthwhile to participate in these discussions even when I often find myself in the position of  holding the minority view

The commentary Analysis: No let up in G20 reforms after Basel agreed by Huw Jones from Reuters is an encouraging sign.

A deal on bank capital rules won’t see world leaders take their foot off the reform pedal but will instead clear the decks for them to focus more squarely on an even harder issue — tackling too-big-to-fail banks.

One of the excuses that was used to justify deregulation in the United States was the need for U.S. banks to compete with foreign banks that did not have to live with the same type of regulations we had here.  (Of course not enough people here asked, “If the other banks are allowed to do crazy and dangerous actions, why would we want to be like them and let our banks do the same?”)

However, considering how foolish we were to emulate the others’ folly, it helps if the others end their folly along with us.

“The Basel Committee and the FSB [Financial Stability Board] are developing a well-integrated approach to systematically important financial institutions which could include combinations of capital surcharges, contingent capital and bail-in debt,” the two bodies said in their statement on Sunday.

The other thing to remember is that tough regulation is not only about punishing the guilty.  It is also about preventing the crooks from having an unfair advantage over the law abiding.  When the crooks have an unfair advantage, their are two unhappy free market responses.  Either the business’s run by ethical people are driven out of business because they cannot compete against the unfair advantage, or the ones with only weak ethics are driven to follow the practices of the totally unethical so they can save their businesses.  This should not be the kind of situation we want to allow or encourage.

How do I know the market will react this way?  I first observed this during the dot com bubble when I was a mutual fund investor.  There were mutual fund managers who were managing funds that were growing by 90% a year by investing in companies in the bubble.  These managers were getting huge financial bonuses and their mutual funds were growing larger.

The prudent managers who could not match this impossible performance were drummed out of the business and their mutual funds shrank in size.  It is a miracle that their were any prudent managers left to pick up the pieces after the bubble burst and those other risky funds collapsed.

I always told my friends who were taking chances, “It is not how much money you make on paper, it is how much money you get to keep in the long run.”

Frank Rich makes a lot of sense in his column Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back.

As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.