 Last week the House of Representatives passed an awful bill, HR992, the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, real barn burner of a title. You'll recall that in 2008 some very big banks made some not-so-great bets that didn't really pan out for them. One of the things that fueled this near-collapse of some of the world's largest financial institutions was a financial instrument known as derivatives trading. So in 2010, when Congress passed a new set of financial regulations, they included a provision that essentially said, you have to isolate your crazy-ass gambling and a separate non-banking entity that's not backed by the government's insurance fund. This encourages banks to engage in less risky trading and makes government bailouts less likely. But HR992, which passed the House with bipartisan support, would undo these new rules. Now in the last video we talked about how 992 was literally written by lobbyists for city group and how members of the House were flooded with Wall Street money in the election cycles leading up to the vote. But I feel like the snapshot I gave in the last video doesn't really do the kind of corruption we're talking about justice. So today we're gonna focus on some more egregious examples. Members of the House that voted yes on this bill got 146% more campaign money from interest groups representing Wall Street than members who voted no. It's also worth noting that 70 of those yes votes came from Democrats. When asked by The New York Times why so many Democrats would support such a bill, House aides explained that since it looked like there were enough Republicans on board to pass it anyway, they decided to hop on board and collect that sweet, sweet financial services money for their campaigns. And something tells me that if you were to go to Republican aides with the same question, you'd probably get a pretty similar story with the party names reversed. Now, I really want everyone to just take a moment and appreciate how profoundly wrong this concept is. Members of the House of Representatives, our representatives, are passing bills written by lobbyists for big banks in order to raise money from those banks. Not because they think it's good for the economy, not because it's going to create jobs in their district, and not because their constituents ask them to, but because there might be some cash in it for them. But why deal in abstracts when we can put a human face on this crapulence? Enter Representative Jim Himes of the Great State of Connecticut. Himes is a former Vice President with Investment Bank Goldman Sachs and a current member of the Powerful House Financial Services Committee. Himes was a co-sponsor and vocal supporter of 992, as well as a top recipient of Wall Street money in the 2012 election cycle. Seven of the top 10 contributors to his campaign committee and leadership pack were interests representing major financial institutions. And at the top of that list is Citigroup. So the top financial backer of the guy who co-sponsored an aggressively campaign for 992 just happens to be the bank whose lobbyists wrote 70 of the 85 lines in 992. In fact, the only politicians who received more Citigroup money than Jim Himes in the 2012 election cycle were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Since I don't want to let the other co-sponsors of 992 off the hook either, it's also worth noting that the bill's primary sponsor and eight co-sponsors received on average 17 times more money from Citigroup than other members of the House. But the reason I'm focusing on Jim Himes is because of a quote he gave when specifically asked about special interest influence on HR992 and other industry-backed bills. I'm quoting him directly now. I won't dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amounts of fundraisers by its legislators. It's appalling, it's disgusting, it's wasteful, and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It's unfortunately the world we live in. And this is why I'm picking on Jim Himes because Jim Himes knows exactly what he's doing. He openly recognizes what happens every single day in Washington DC as conflicts of interest and corruption, and he's content to just go along with it because that's just the world we live in. Like if only he were in a position of power to do something about it. You know, that guy should really run for Congress. This is everything that's wrong with our political system in a nutshell. Politicians like Jim Himes love to pay lip service to ideals like transparency and accountability. And if you bring up something like money in politics, they'll always feed you some variation of the same line. Oh well, believe me, I mean no one's more disgusted with the system than I am. But I mean, you can't change the system, it's just how the system works. But those politicians are usually the first ones to turn around and enthusiastically work that same system to stay in office for as long as possible rather than risk losing their seat to try and change something they all know is terrible. If you want to take action and help us stop congressmen like Jim Himes from accepting money from interests they're supposed to be regulating, like Citigroup, you can click the link in the description below or the button at the end of the video. And if you find this kind of corruption as head-explodingly frustrating as I do, please consider helping us get the word out by sharing this video with your friends and family. It's easiest for corruption to thrive when nobody knows that it's happening, so just passing this along can make a huge difference. As always, you can find the sources for all of the facts and figures we used in this video in the description below and there is some really great research and journalism in there from people who are way smarter than I am. You can also subscribe to our channel by hovering over this here watermark and clicking the subscribe button assuming you have YouTube annotations turned on, otherwise I just kind of look like a crazy person right now. I'm Monsour Gidfar for Represent Us and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.