The provision, the White House says, will make the oil industry more transparent.

This legislation will immediately shed light on billions in payments between multinational corporations and governments, giving citizens the information they need to monitor companies and to hold governments accountable.  It will shine a sustained light on the relationship between corporations and governments in the oil and mineral sectors, and make impossible the kind of back-room dealings that cost taxpayers in lost royalties.

The White House also says that it will work to make the provision a “global standard.”

The challenge for us now is to make this a global standard.  The United States is committed to working with other countries to ensure the implementation of similar disclosure requirements in other financial markets and will make this a priority in the year ahead.

The larger truth is this: Even as Republicans claim political momentum, the country is in the midst of a major shift leftward when it comes to the role of government. That shift is playing itself out from infrastructure to health care to finance and perhaps eventually to the environment. No one knows whether these shifts will revive the U.S. economy and lay the foundation for stable, broad-based growth, just as no one could predict the impact of the rightward turn in American policy in the early 1980s.

Decades later, liberals and conservatives still disagree about whether Reagan’s reforms changed America for good or ill. What they don’t disagree about is the fact that they fundamentally changed America. Those changes made Reagan one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Eighteen months in, it’s a good bet that historians will say the same about Barack Obama.

While I’m inclined to see President Obama’s first eighteen months as a success for his agenda, I’m not sure if it’s wise to prematurely declare Obama a transformative president. While you can imagine a future where historians describe Barack Obama as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history,” you can also easily imagine a future where the Obama administration fails to reduce high, long-term unemployment, setting the United States up for a “lost decade” and facilitating a conservative party uninterested in substantive government action on problems like climate change and debt reduction. In this future, Barack Obama was an inspiring but ultimately lackluster president who failed to meet the challenges ahead of him.

What’s more, I don’t think there’s much evidence for a leftward shift in American politics. For nearly everything other than health care reform — which Obama campaigned on — legislative momentum was generated by events.  The stimulus couldn’t have happened without the economic crisis, and the same goes financial reform. If there’s anything we can directly attribute to Obama, it’s managerial competence; Obama is genuinely interested in seeing regulatory agencies that work as advertised. It’s not a nationwide ideological transformation, but it’s nothing to slouch at either.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) yesterday introduced an amendment to the Senate financial reform bill that would force companies to disclose safety and health information to their shareholders.

The proposal is a response to the horrific April 5 explosion that killed 29 miners at a Massey mine in West Virginia, as well as the more recent deadly explosion on a BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Investors ought to know if a company is jeopardizing its workforce in order to maximize its profits,” Byrd in a statement. “In addition, failure to disclose these adverse safety or health conditions could have a significant financial impact on investors, especially if there is a halt in operations because a company failed in its obligation to protect its workers.”

Under Byrd’s proposal, publicly traded companies operating in high-risk environments — places like coal mines and oil rigs — would be required to submit occupational safety information to the Securities and Exchange Commission or face financial penalties. Byrd outlines the four categories of safety information the companies would have to disclose:

1) Pending litigation regarding health and safety.

2) Significant health or safety conditions at risky workplaces, which may cause the corporation to incur damages arising from wrongful deaths.

3) Significant health or safety conditions that may impact financial conditions or operating results within the corporation.

4) Trends in health and safety violations that may affect the relationship between costs and revenues of a corporation.

West Virginia’s other institutional lawmaker, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D), is the lead co-sponsor of Byrd’s proposal. A separate but similar Rockefeller amendment, which would apply the new safety disclosure rules only to mining companies, has Byrd as the lead co-sponsor.

Shareholders might just appreciate the new disclosure. Massey’s stock, which stood at $54.80 the day of the mining explosion, closed at $33.47 yesterday. BP, meanwhile, has seen its stock price plummet from nearly $61 the day of the rig accident to below $50 at the close of trading yesterday.

Then again, maybe stock owners wouldn’t appreciate the disclosure at all. One of the most remarkable stories to follow the recent energy industry disasters was the one indicating how quickly the companies acted to convince shareholders that their investments were safe. Massey, in the midst of being attacked for putting increased production above worker safety, even announced that it would compensate for lost production at the Upper Big Branch mine by — you guessed it — increasing production at other mines. And that was before all the miners were even known to be dead.

The message inherent in that announcement was clear: Investors would care more about the fate of the company’s value than the fate of the missing miners.

In this sense, the Massey and BP tragedies are as much condemnations of Wall Street culture as they are the companies themselves. And that’s not going to change any time soon.

The effort that seems most secure? Derivatives reform. The effort that seems least secure? A provision ensuring banks put all relevant liabilities clearly onto their balance sheets, as well as too big to fail and hard leverage cap requirements.

In response to a question about the GSEs, Dodd said they are in “desperate need of reform” this morning. “But candidly there’s only so much I could only take on with this bill and so that comes up. But not in this round. It’s in the next wave here we have to deal with GSEs.”

To this end, last week the Treasury Department released a list of seven questions Washington will try to address with housing and mortgage finance reform. It is seeking the advice of housing market professionals and others, and asked the public to write in answers and attend town hall meetings on the subject this summer as well. The questions are:

1. How should federal housing finance objectives be prioritized in the context of the broader objectives of housing policy?
2. What role should the federal government play in supporting a stable, well-functioning housing finance system and what risks, if any, should the federal government bear in meeting its housing finance objectives?
3. Should the government approach differ across different segments of the market, and if so, how?
4. How should the current organization of the housing finance system be improved?
5. How should the housing finance system support sound market practices?
6. What is the best way for the housing finance system to help ensure consumers are protected from unfair, abusive or deceptive practices?
7. Do housing finance systems in other countries offer insights that can help inform U.S. reform choices?

The American Financial Stability Act: Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform proposal is due to be taken up next week. It imposes “tough” new capital and leverage requirements that “make it undesirable to get too big.” (Dodd has not specified any numbers, leaving that up to regulators.)

It also creates a Financial Stability Oversight Council, to keep an eye on big banks. The Federal Reserve and FSOC can force a bank (or a non-bank financial institution, like an investment bank) to slim down if the regulators determine it poses a danger to the financial stability of the country. But this is only a “last resort.” Additionally, the Dodd bill looks to implement a version of the Volcker Rule — stopping banks from speculating with their own funds, or “prop trading.” But this rule will not be finalized or implemented until FSOC completes a study of it.

The Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act: Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-Ark.) derivatives reform bill passed out of committee today and will be merged into Dodd’s bill. It makes derivatives trading a less lucrative enterprise by forcing many over-the-counter derivatives trades into clearinghouses, improving price and volume transparency and encouraging competition. The bill helps to limit bank size by forcing financial firms that have access to the Fed discount window to stop trading in swaps, a currently unregulated form of derivative.

The Safe Banking Act: Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) introduced a new bill to break up the banks today. They say they hope to offer it as an amendment to the Dodd proposal. It mandates hard leverage and size caps on banks and non-banking financial institutions. It limits commercial banks’ assets to 2 percent of GDP, and non-banks’ assets to 3 percent. It also prevents banks from holding more than 10 percent of insured deposits. Finally, it imposes a 16-to-1 leverage cap.

The Return of Glass-Steagall: Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) has said she will reintroduce Glass-Steagall-type provisions as an amendment to financial reform. (Glass-Steagall is a Depression-era rule, rescinded in 1999, that banned banks from combining commercial and investment banking functions.) She has the backing of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Republican Senators Richard Shelby (Ala.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.) and John Cornyn (Texas) have also said they support repealing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

Additionally, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-Ark.) derivatives reform bill out of committee. All of the committee Democrats, plus Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), agreed to the plan, which Wall Street stringently opposes.

“I think the administration’s proposal is a common-sense way to make sure that money should be repaid, and I believe it should be included in financial reform legislation to be considered on the Senate floor,” Schumer said today at a Senate Finance Committee hearing.

In January, President Obama proposed taxing big banks’ profits at 0.15 percent, both to pay for the multi-billion dollar cost of bailouts and to deter risk-taking. Today, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the head of the Senate Finance Committee, said he would hold hearings on the proposal. But Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has thrown water on the idea of attaching the bank tax to the broader financial regulatory reform bill due to be taken up next week.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said that if Republicans take a unified partisan stance against Wall Street reform, which Democrats had thought would be a slam dunk, it may not make sense to spend weeks trying to muster 60 votes for a controversial climate change proposal.

“If Republicans continue to play pure politics with financial reform, they would probably come close to shutting it down,” McCaskill said of the impact of Republican opposition on bipartisan talks on climate change.

“That’s a bad sign of how productive we’ll be,” she said.

Regardless of the outcome of financial reform, a climate bill could be a tough political proposition in advance of November’s midterm elections. If financial reform succeeds and wins popular support, Democrats would likely prefer to ride that wave into the midterms than to tackle divisive climate legislation. And if a Wall Street bill falls prey to nasty partisan bickering, then as McCaskill says, it’ll be tougher to get the necessary Republican support to beat back a climate bill filibuster.

But if all that’s the climate bill’s Scylla, its Charybdis is the inevitability that the Democratic majorities in Congress will be much smaller come January than they are currently, so for comprehensive climate legislation, it’s likely now or never.

Almost two years after the crisis hit and almost one year after the Administration first laid out a detailed plan for holding Wall Street accountable and protecting consumers, he will call for swift Senate action. The crisis has already wiped out trillions of dollars in family wealth and cost over 8 million jobs. The President will also remind Americans what is at stake if we do not move forward with changing the rules of the road as a part of a strong Wall Street reform package.

Two years ago, during the presidential campaign, Obama spoke about the need for financial reform from Cooper Union — where he will deliver his remarks on Thursday. And he will need to deliver them well. The administration’s efforts to reform Wall Street have been hampered not just by Republican intransigence, but by messaging problems. Despite the popularity of reforming the banks, the administration has faltered in explaining just what it plans to do and why that is the best way to do it — in part because rather than using blunt regulatory instruments, such as a tax on financial transactions, the bill is a patchwork quilt of tripwires, oversight changes and complex rules. For more on the complexity of Wall Street reform, see Ryan Avent’s smart comments here.