This morning, while reading my Washington Post, I was struck by the scathing tone of business columnist Steve Pearlstein’s latest piece, “Wall Street’s know-it-alls can’t tell right from wrong”:

I honestly don’t know whether Goldman violated Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. What I do know is that the facts outlined in the government case are a powerful and convincing reminder of Wall Street’s complete and utter amorality. There, concepts like truth, justice, fairness, trustworthiness, duty of care, right and wrong are now totally without meaning. There is only buy or sell, long or short, win or lose. The way Goldman went about creating and peddling its now-infamous Abacus CDO is of a piece with other stories of corner-cutting, truth-hedging and regulation-evading on Wall Street. Like the one about how AIG executives set up a series of phony reinsurance transactions with General Re in an effort to snooker investors and regulators into thinking it had more reserves than it really did. Or Lehman Brothers using short-term “repo” agreements at the end of each quarter to hide the amount of debt that it carried.

That’s the Wall Street that destroyed our economy. That’s the Wall Street that desperately needs reform. And, that’s the Wall Street being being protected from reform by Republican Senators.

GOPers in the Senate are filibustering Wall Street reform. On Monday, Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a vote to end that filibuster. So, we’ll actually get to see who is voting for Wall Street and who is voting for the rest of us.

Now, of course, the GOPers claiming they want more bipartisanship. That line might work for some of the traditional media types. But, by now, anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that for GOPers, the call for “bipartisanship” is just a tactic to kill legislation.

Wall Street may be completely and utterly amoral, but Wall Street funds the GOP’s coffers. And, Wall Street is being coddled by the entire GOP Senate caucus, including that faux moderate Susan Collins:

Senate Republicans continued to oppose the pending test vote, known as cloture. They used the threat of a filibuster as a bargaining chip, saying Dodd’s bill contains flaws that could harm the economy. “I hope that Senator Reid abandons his plan to force a premature cloture vote on Monday,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), whom Democrats have been courting in recent days. “A divisive vote on cloture at this point would be unfortunate.” The lead Republican negotiator on the far-ranging legislation, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, also cautioned Democrats against trying to force the bill. “I wouldn’t want to rush it and make a lot of mistakes,” he said. “We’re making progress, but we’re dealing in something very complex.”

Failure to vote for cloture should be destructive for the GOP. Sure, it will garner campaign contributions from Wall Street, but it’s hard to see how protecting Wall Street is a political winner in 2010 — unless the Democrats somehow screw this up, which is always possible.