Today, Warren Buffett testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). His widely panned performance may just be the catalyst that keeps credit agency reform in the Wall Street Reform bill. The Guardian:

There was an excruciating moment when Buffett argued that the rating agencies "made the same mistake as 300 million other Americans" in believing that house prices would never fall. Come on, most of those 300 million people didn't have the same access to the sponsors of mortgage-backed securities as did Moody's and Standard & Poor's.

When the storm broke in 2007, the agencies were taken wholly by surprise. The most revealing comment on the affair came in a well-documented memo sent by a Moody's employee to his bosses in the same year. The company's errors, he wrote, made it look "either incompetent at credit analysis, or look like we sold our sold to the devil for revenue".

Why would Buffett want to be associated with such an industry? That's easy – he liked the business model. Who wouldn't? Two firms sit at the top and many institutional investors are forbidden from buying financial products that don't carry a rating.

It is not obvious how the industry should be reformed. The fee structure – whereby issuers pay for a rating from the agencies – creates conflicts of interest. But it's not clear that an "investor pays" formula would be viable. On that score, Buffett was correct. But his woolly defence of past mistakes merely underlined the madness of taking these agencies so seriously. That, at least, was a public service of sorts.

It's no surprise that in response to Buffett's performance, Senator Al Franken and others renewed their fight to keep a credit-rating amendment in the Wall Street Reform bill. Reform is moving forward.

In today's must-read in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Warren makes the case for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The consumer agency is a watchdog that would root out gimmicks and traps and slim down paperwork, giving families a fighting chance to hang on to some of their money. So far, Wall Street CEOs seem determined to stop any kind of watchdog. They seem to think that they can run their businesses forever without our trust. This is a bad calculation.

It's a bad calculation because shareholders suffer enormously from the long-term cost of the boom-and- bust cycles that accompany a poorly regulated market. J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently explained this brave new world, saying that crises should be expected "every five to seven years."

He is wrong. New laws that came out of the Great Depression ended 150 years of boom-and-bust cycles and gave us 50 years with virtually no financial meltdowns. The stability ended as we dismantled those laws and failed to replace them with new laws that reflected modern business practices.

Even though boom and bust causes suffering on Main Street and is of questionable value for Wall Street - the banksters are fighting hard for it.

Now, a year later, President Obama's proposals for reform are bottled up in the Senate. The same Wall Street CEOs who brought the economy to its knees have spent more than a year and hundreds of millions of dollars furiously lobbying Washington to kill the president's proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The latest bankster-funded lie is that the CFPA is more "big government." Warren lays waste to that argument:

The latest lie is that the CFPA is "big government." The CEOs all know that the current regulatory structure, which they support, is big government at its worst: bureaucratic, unaccountable and ineffective. The CFPA will consolidate seven separate bureaucracies, cut down on paperwork, and promote understandable consumer products. In the process, it will stabilize the industry, rebuild confidence in the securitization market, and leave more money in the pockets of families. Complaining about short, readable contracts and efforts to slim down bureaucracy only further diminishes the banks' credibility.

This generation of Wall Street CEOs could be the ones to forfeit America's trust. When the history of the Great Recession is written, they can be singled out as the bonus babies who were so short-sighted that they put the economy at risk and contributed to the destruction of their own companies. Or they can acknowledge how Americans' trust has been lost and take the first steps to earn it back.

Wall Street is using their money and influence to take advantage of a broken Senate to obstruct reform that's good for Main Street. Our economy needs the CFPA and we must fight for this common sense solution that will make government smaller, more efficient and better able to protect consumers.

Senator Richard Shelby is making a play to be king of the obstructionists in the Senate. First, he holds up 70 nominees because he wants more pork for his state. And, now, he's doing Wall Street's bidding and trying to scuttle real financial regulatory reform:

HuffPost asked Shelby if Dodd had confirmed to him on the floor that he was moving ahead with an independent Consumer Finance Protection Agency.

"Well, that's been our biggest split, okay, and it's still at impasse there," Shelby said. "But we're talking."

Yup, that's right - Shelby is holding up financial regulatory reform because he doesn't think there should be an organization whose mandate will be to protect consumers. It's been over a year since the collapse that brought about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and, so far, no meaningful reforms have been passed to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is our opportunity to pass reform and all Shelby and his Republican pals can do is say no to meaningful reforms.