Wall Street held itself a big fat profit party last week. The nation’s six largest banks reported $23 billion in profits. That’s for one quarter – three months. Pop the Champagne. Buy another Lamborghini.

Well, if you’re a Wall Street banker, that is. Not if you’re a college student looking for a loan. ‘Cause bankers and Congress don’t intend to give you a break today.

Not if you’re one of the tens of thousands of workers furloughed because of the sequester. ‘Cause Congress has no intention of charging highflying banks a financial transaction tax, the revenues from which could prevent many of those cuts.

Not if you’re one of those middle class Americans who bailed out the banks and now fears renewed recklessness on Wall Street will require another rescue. ‘Cause Wall Street has persuaded Congress that it really, really should not closely regulate banks.

But, hey, they’re partying on Wall Street, right? The thing is, people are supposed to rule. Not Wall Street, not banks, not money. People rule in a democracy. This is something apparently forgotten by some in Congress. Banks are corporations, which are legal entities established under rules written by people. Their existence should advance America and Americans. Not the other way around. Many in Congress need to be reminded of that.

Start with the U.S. House of Representatives. Just last month, the House passed measures to reverse regulations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Financial Protection Act and to deregulate derivatives, those high-risk financial instruments at the heart of the 2008 market collapse.

Members of the House lost sight of who they work for, who rules. Here’s a hint: It’s not banks.

Over in the Senate, by contrast, several lawmakers have made it clear they know people rule. Two groups of Senators are working to strengthen financial regulation.

A Democrat and a Republican, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, introduced legislation requiring big banks to increase the capital they must hold to cover losses. That would diminish risk of another taxpayer bailout. It would also encourage the nation’s largest banks to break into smaller financial institutions with reduced capital requirements.

Similarly, two Democrats, a Republican, and an independent in the Senate introduced legislation to update and reinstate the Glass-Steagall regulations that prevented market crashes for 70 years – from the time they were passed in 1933 in response to the Great Crash until 1999, just 9 years before the 2008 crash that caused the Great Recession.

The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act would restore the regulations that prohibited banks that use federal deposit insurance from engaging in risky Wall Street activities like swaps dealing. The key sponsor is Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts who succeeded in getting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau included in the Dodd-Frank law. She’s intent on ending too-big-to-fail banks. She says bankers are free to gamble on Wall Street, but not with the federally insured money in Main Street Americans’ checking and savings accounts.

Republican John McCain of Arizona is with her. Which is remarkable because he voted to repeal the original Glass-Steagall Act.  He says overturning Glass-Steagall was a mistake because “a culture of dangerous greed and excessive risk-taking has taken root in the banking world” imperiling everyday bank customers.

Some bankers agree with them. That includes bankers who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall like Sanford “Sandy” Weill. He engineered mergers of traditional and investment banks to create Citigroup. Taxpayers forked over $476 billion to rescue Citigroup, the largest of the bank bailouts.

Now, Weill says investment and insured banking should divorce. Joining him are Phil Purcell, former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, and David Komansky, former CEO of Merrill Lynch.

Despite that support and despite the fact that the four biggest banks now are 30 percent larger than they were at the time of the crash and continue high-risk practices, previous attempts to revive Glass-Steagall failed. Warren and McCain aren’t backing down, though. They want bank rules that protect Americans. They don’t believe banks rule.

Warren made that clear on another matter as well – borrowing for tuition. She called for the interest rate on student loans to equal the rate that the Federal Reserve grants big banks.

Unfortunately, the majority in Congress failed to agree with her that the government should give students the same deal it gives banks. Instead, Congress is proposing legislation that would set the student rate at 3.85 percent for one year, but after that allow it to rise up to 8.25 percent. That rate increase would hit about 7 million students a year. But not banks.

That suggests a Congress that is ruling for banks ­– as does its failure to adopt a financial transaction fee. This tiny tax, about 3 cents on every $100 traded as currently proposed, would cool risky high-speed trading and raise about a third of the money needed to restore programs cut by the sequester.

Clearly, when six Wall Street banks can make $23 billion in three months, they can afford to pay this fee. Still, they’ll hand over millions to lobbyists to avoid it – just like they did to prevent reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. JPMorgan Chase spent $8 million lobbying last year; Wells Fargo, $6.8 million; Citigroup, $5.6 million.

Congress should pass the tax anyway. And Glass-Steagall. And a student loan rate matching the Federal Reserve rate for banks. Americans have the right to make the rules for corporations, particularly ones like banks that have failed spectacularly at self-governance.

The conduct of the New York State Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in rehabilitating the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge can only be described as anti-American.

The MTA plans to send $235.7 million of Americans’ hard-earned toll dollars to China for foreign steel and foreign fabrication to renovate a bridge over the Hudson River that Americans built with American steel and American fabrication 50 years ago.

The MTA must stop. It must stop converting this American landmark – the longest suspension bridge in North America – into a foreign-made object. The MTA must stop. It must stop eroding American manufacturing, spurning American workers and wounding the American economy. The MTA must immediately stop stimulating the Chinese economy, employing Chinese workers with American toll dollars, transferring technological skills overseas and heightening Chinese power over America by enlarging the trade deficit. The MTA must stop, now, and buy American.

It’s the MTA’s contention that it can dodge buy American requirements because it is repairing the bridge with toll dollars, not tax dollars. The MTA used this contrivance to buy 15,000 tons of steel plate from state-owned and subsidized Anshan Iron & Steel Group of China and fabrication work from the China Railway Shanhaiguan Bridge Group.

Responding to criticism that MTA, a government agency, shirked buy American requirements, the authority’s executive director Thomas F. Prendergast said American corporations and workers weren’t capable of doing the work. America is not number one, Prendergast said. American manufacturers and American workers are just not as competent as the Chinese, according to the MTA.

This is exactly what Caltrans contended when it purchased Chinese steel and Chinese manufacturing for the Bay Bridge construction in California – after refusing federal aid so it could duck buy American provisions. Americans just couldn’t do the work, Caltrans contended. And yet, American firms that bid on the project said they could. Caltrans ended up sending dozens of experts to China to babysit its contractors there; inspectors repeatedly discovered defects in welds, and the steel arrived from China 15 months late.

Caltrans said the bid from the consortium of American firms was too high, and the proposal would have delayed the project. But with hundreds of millions in cost overruns and a year’s delay attributable to the foreign purchases, the difference between the two bids at this point is negligible.

But it’s too late now. Caltrans denied American corporations the contracts, American workers the jobs, the American economy the boost. Caltrans contributed to the bleeding of American manufacturing jobs, 6,000 of which were lost just last month. MTA plans to join Caltrans in thwarting the Obama administration’s effort to create 1 million new manufacturing jobs.

With precious little effort, the United Steelworkers found two American bridge fabricators that said they could meet MTA’s requirements for specialized orthotropic steel decking for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Both are located in eastern Pennsylvania within 100 miles of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge site.

One was cleared by a bonding company, lined up financing and prepared to meet the MTA’s construction schedule. Also in eastern Pennsylvania, Lehigh University’s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems Center tested full-scale prototypes of the orthotropic steel panels for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Both American bridge fabricators were prepared to use American-made steel, which would employ Americans in good, family-supporting jobs in mills that are required to control emissions and that wouldn’t have contributed to pollution by hauling steel halfway around the world.

MTA ignored all that and went to China for the steel and fabrication. It ignored Americans’ strong desire for government agencies to buy American, with 90 percent of Republicans and Democrats supporting buy American for public works projects. MTA ignored untold hidden costs of buying foreign – including pollution, quality concerns and delays.

And while claiming American companies and American workers are not up to snuff, MTA overlooked the fact that Ansteel of the Anshan Iron & Steel Group has never before produced steel plate of the type required for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge project. And the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge linking Staten Island and Brooklyn would be only the second in the United States for China Railway Shanhaiguan Bridge Group. In fact, Anshan officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge project would be a test to determine whether its steel bridges “can go out into the world.”

The MTA decided to go to China even though eight bridges collapsed in China in little over a year, including one of the longest in Northern China, the Yangmingtan Bridge in Harbin last August. That $300 million span was only nine months old.

The MTA has tried to reassure protesters, including Republican and Democrat New York state lawmakers, that there is no risk. Prendergast told them all not to worry, no problem. “The safety of the public is always our paramount concern,” Prendergast contends – exactly what Caltrans said.

MTA officials and construction management staff went to China to make sure everything is ok, Prendergast says. Steel was tested with “good results.” Not great results. But, you know, good ones. Further tests will be done in the United States, Prendergast says. He pledges that MTA will maintain at the Chinese plant “a full time quality assurance presence,” whatever that means.

The upshot is that MTA and its construction manager will pay to send experts and staff to China to try to ensure good quality work, the same way Caltrans did. That’s a costly proposition. In addition, it means that these American professionals will transfer their technical knowledge and skill and expertise to a Chinese company. China won’t have to steal it. MTA plans to give it away.

These same MTA experts and consultants could have been sent less than 100 miles to one of two Pennsylvania firms to oversee quality control and collaborate with American manufacturers.
Any technical skill transfer then would have stayed within the United States, increasing American companies’ ability to complete such infrastructure projects in the future.

The MTA needs to stop this project right now. Think it over, Prendergast.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court gave Dixie throwbacks license to resume intimidating minority voters, diluting black and Latino balloting districts and instituting the 21st century version of poll taxes – that being excessive and expensive voter ID requirements.

The radical right-wing members of the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts eviscerated the venerable Voting Rights Act. They said the law’s preemptive federal enforcement of voting rights in nine states that have long, shameful records of egregious violations unfairly singles them out – discriminates against them, so to speak.

Now those states can do whatever they want. Texas and South Carolina quickly announced they would immediately institute costly voter ID requirements previously forbidden as discriminatory under the terms of the Voting Rights Act.

Free to poll tax; free to poll tax; thank John Almighty, Dixie’s free to poll tax.

If some black or Latino voter in those nine states feels a costly new voter ID law or redistricting violates his or her civil rights, that individual must challenge the authority and resources of an entire state by filing a lawsuit. Or persuade the U.S. Attorney General to do it.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court said it’s better for that citizen to be denied his most basic human right in a democracy – his right to vote – while waiting years for the outcome of his case than for nine states with histories of blatant illegal discrimination to be subjected to federal preclearance of their proposed voting laws.

This ruling sanctions voter suppression. Roberts concedes in his decision that states and municipalities continue to discriminate against minority voters. Then he destroys the only method Congress ever found to thwart it. As the last Presidential election clearly showed, African-American and Latino citizens lean heavily Democrat. Republicans have no intention of crafting policies that would appeal to those voters. Instead, the GOP intends to shut them up. John Roberts gave the GOP a hand, a big hand to clasp over the mouths of minorities.

This plan to stop Democrats from voting is more than 40 years old. Paul Weyrich, a founder of the conservative movement and a leader in creating both the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the so-called Moral Majority, told his followers this in 1974:

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome. Good Government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . .our [right-wingers’] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Simple. Straight forward. Just stop the opponent – in this case Democrats – from voting. And that is what voter ID, pushed now by another group Weyrich helped to form, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is all about. Numerous studies have shown voter ID laws are more likely to disenfranchise African-Americans, Latinos, poor people, students, and women, all of whom are more likely to vote Democrat.

The Texas ID law requires expensive and time-consuming efforts by citizens who don’t have specific forms of identification such as a Texas photo driver’s license or concealed handgun permit. Texas will offer a free Election Identification Certificate, but to get it, citizens will have to present specific forms of identification that can be costly and difficult to obtain, such as a birth certificate, which in Texas costs $22. In addition, to get the election ID card, a citizen must show up at a driver’s license center in person, and a third of Texas counties – 70 of them – don’t have centers.

South Carolina proposed a similar law. Federal officials blocked both because they would disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Within hours of John Roberts’ gutting the Voting Rights Act, state attorneys general in Texas and South Carolina announced their states would immediately implement the biased laws.

Suing to resolve these inequities doesn’t work, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent. She quoted a previous ruling:

“Voting suits are unusually onerous to prepare. . .Litigation  has been exceedingly slow. . .Even when favorable decisions have finally been obtained, some of the States affected have merely switched to discriminatory devices not covered by the federal decrees or have enacted difficult new tests designed to prolong the existing disparity between white and Negro registration. Alternatively, certain local officials have defied and evaded court orders or have simply closed their registration offices to freeze the voting rolls.”

The Voting Rights Act succeeded where the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution did not. Ginsburg noted that in the five years after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, almost as many African-Americans registered to vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina as had during the entire century following the Civil War.

The progress in the nine states, where now the percentage of African-Americans registered and voting sometimes exceeds that of whites, does not, however, justify ending the scrutiny. When a river polluted by industrial waste recovers sufficiently to support fish, regulations outlawing dumping aren’t eliminated.  That would result in backsliding.

Ginsburg predicted backsliding on voting rights. With the act in place, the justice department in recent years blocked implementation of numerous proposed laws that would have denied or abridged the right to vote on account of race or color.

Some of these were sneaky “second generation” barriers. They include, Ginsberg wrote, redrawing legislative districts to segregate the races and switching to at-large voting to dilute the potency of minority citizens clustered in districts.

For example, under the Voting Rights Act, federal officials rejected Texas redistricting because they determined it was “a deliberate, race-conscious method to manipulate not simply the Democratic vote but, more specifically, the Hispanic vote.”

And as history has shown, radical Republicans won’t be content with stealing the vote from the black guy down the street or that Latina woman at church or the college student next door or the senior citizen who relinquished his driver’s license. They’re coming for your right, too.

To be free at last, all citizens must exercise their full rights. Primary among them is the right to vote. Congress must guarantee it.

When a kid snatches an old lady’s purse, it’s punished as a crime. But when a corporation manipulates bankruptcy law to deny thousands of retired coal miners benefits they labored their entire lives to earn, it’s endorsed by federal court.

Late last month, a bankruptcy judge sanctioned a scheme in which corporations create shill companies with a dram of assets and a sea of retiree responsibilities. Such a debt-burdened outfit quickly goes bust. Bankruptcy court, the judge said, can’t consider the intent of a company’s creation, but can approve a plan to reorganize it by betraying decades of promises to retirees.

Corporations have reneged many times before on pledges for pensions and retiree medical benefits. This, however, is a new twist on that old scam. It’s alarming because what the bankruptcy court approved provides a template for companies angling to reduce costs by abandoning their commitments to retirees. It’s a swindle that must be stopped.

Of course, lots of people get hurt in bankruptcies, not just workers. All kinds of creditors – from the local accounting firm to the big copy paper provider – get stuck with cents on the dollar owed. But this case, the Patriot Coal Corp. case, is different. That’s because Patriot’s bankruptcy was deliberate. Peabody Energy kneecapped Patriot on purpose at the outset.

“There can be no Patriot Coal stock to dispute, or tonnage payments to negotiate, or companies to reorganize, unless there are men and women willing to bend their knees to excavate coal.”

So said Bankruptcy Judge Kathy A. Surratt-States in her decision. Peabody and Patriot would not exist without those bended knees.

The judge also noted the suffering of workers, more than 900 of whom wrote to her:

“Many discuss the horrendous conditions of the coal mines when those individuals first began to work, and how hard it was to achieve the promises made pursuant to both the previous and the current CBAs (collective bargaining agreements). Some discuss how physically, mentally and emotionally grueling being a coal miner was, many of whom worked as coal miners for over 30 years – a sacrifice made with due consideration of the promised health care from cradle to grave. . .

“Many coal miners talk of six (6) and seven (7) day work-weeks, of over 12 hours a day. Some letters discuss various injuries sustained while working in coal mines, limbs of self and relatives lost, and the lives lost of relatives and friends. . .And, as counsel for the UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) so eloquently stated, many current and retired coal miners do not have cost spreading abilities, because, for many, cost spreading ‘means cutting your pills in half. Cost spreading abilities for retirees means making a choice today over medicine or food.’”

And then she said none of it mattered. She contended she was forbidden from considering that. She also insisted that under bankruptcy law she couldn’t take into account whether Peabody, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, deliberately established Patriot in such a way that it would fail so that it could receive sanction through bankruptcy to desert its retiree health care obligations.

Peabody “spun off” Patriot coal in 2007 in what sounds like a pretty bad deal for Patriot. Peabody gave Patriot 13.3 percent of Peabody’s coal reserves and 72 percent of Peabody’s health care liabilities.

Patriot showed a fondness for debt, however. In 2008, it bought Magnum Coal Co., a similarly debt-hobbled firm. Arch Coal set up Magnum in 2005 by giving it 12.3 percent of Arch assets and 96.7 percent of Arch’s retiree health care liabilities.

Five years after its creation, Patriot employs about 4,200 and bears inherited responsibility for five times that many retirees.

It’s no wonder then, that by 2010, saddled with debt loaded on it by both Peabody and Arch, Patriot began losing money. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

The bankruptcy judge explained it this way: “There are several events that catalyzed Debtors’ (Patriot’s) bankruptcy filing. Above all other reasons however are the liabilities that Debtors (Patriot) inherited from Peabody and Arch.”

Patriot’s obligations to retirees and their family members exceeded $1.6 billion. But more than 90 percent of the miners owed these benefits never worked a day for Patriot. They were employed by Peabody, Arch and their subsidiaries.

The bankruptcy judge approved a plan under which Patriot would replace that obligation with a $300 million fund – a fund worth less than 19 percent of what was promised the retirees. Also, Patriot would place in the fund royalty payments that the bankrupt company contends could be worth “tens of millions” of dollars. Finally, the UMWA would receive 35 percent ownership of the bankrupt company – an “asset” the court contended could be sold to help finance the retiree health care fund.

None of this gets close to covering $1.6 billion in obligations. Thousands of miners and retirees have protested Patriot’s efforts to escape its commitments, marching in the streets of St. Louis and Charleston, W.Va. And the UMWA, which represents about 60 percent of Patriot’s hourly workforce, has said it will appeal.

The judge noted that the bankruptcy code requires that the court treat all parties fairly and equitably and that this standard was intended to disperse the burden of saving a company and to ensure that debtors did not seek reorganization on the backs of retirees.

Still, the judge allowed Patriot to reorganize on the backs of retirees. And on the backs of current workers whose labor contract will be broken and whose pay and benefits will be slashed.

When employers promise pensions or retiree health care, workers count on it as deferred compensation. It is money earned now but received later. When a bankruptcy judge approves rescinding those earned benefits, the court grants the corporation authorization to take money out of workers’ wallets – permission to pickpocket. It’s a crime when committed on the street. It’s a crime bankruptcy courts should forbid when it’s clear the failed company was set up to go bust and rob retirees of earned benefits. If the UMWA loses on appeal, Congress must change the federal bankruptcy code to forbid this new method of mugging workers.