Minnesota Farmers Union

(October 16, 2011) - When Chairman Frank Lucas gaveled the full House Ag Committee to order Oct. 12, ranchers, farmers and other aggies who depend on commodity futures markets to price their crops, livestock and dreams might have thought the hearing would center on what its title suggested: “To Review Legislative Proposals Amending Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.”

The hearing would do no such thing.

Two days before, on Oct. 10, the Committee’s Majority Staff circulated a seven-page memo to all members that outlined seven legislative proposals to amend the law designed to rein in American equity and futures markets’ excess that nearly derailed the global economy in 2008. (Read the memo at http://www.farmandfoodfile.com.)

Each of the seven proposals, though, sported two faces. The first was really a mask for the second: a legitimate question or concern about an some aspect of Dodd-Frank’s trading rules.

The second was the real deal: a primer on how to kill Dodd-Frank by sticking it with a thousand little pins—amendments, hearings, studies, cost-benefit analysis, lawsuits—and letting it slowly bleed to an irrelevant death.

No muss, no fuss, no fingerprints.