Here we go again. Once again the 'bipartisan' consensus in Washington, fueled by an intoxicating brew of conventional wisdom laced with campaign cash, has repealed some of those 'cumbersome regulations' that do nothing of value -- nothing, that is, except prevent catastrophes. There will be celebrating on both sides of the aisle when the President signs this bill.
And when disaster strikes a few years from now, as it inevitably will, they'll all say "Nobody could have seen it coming." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même crap. Creationism can't disprove the theory of evolution - but a little time in Washington will make you think twice.
Here we are, surrounded by still-smoldering financial wreckage, and almost everyone in Washington is falling over themselves to repeat exactly the same kinds of actions that got us into this mess. Last time around it was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, introduced by Republican Sen. Phil Gramm and enthusiastically signed by President Clinton in the presence of Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
This time it's the deceptively named "JOBS Act," introduced by the far-right Republicans in Congress and passed overwhelmingly by members of both parties. The President indicated his eagerness to sign the bill early on. Once again basic protections for investors, including individuals and families, are being recklessly overturned in a deregulating frenzy. Some of those protections were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal, in which sociopathically unscrupulous business people conducted a hoax that ruined thousands of families and deprived many of their life's savings.
We haven't learned a damn thing.
The hype that led Washington honchos to name this tragic bill the "JOBS Act" is the same brand of patented b.s. that inspired lawmakers to call Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the law that overturned Glass-Steagall, the "Financial Services Modernization Act." That act of "modernization" actually turned the clock back -- from 1999 all the way back to 1929, stripping away some of the common-sense measures that prevented the formation of too-big-to-fail banks that could gamble with their customers' money or bring the economy to the brink of ruin -- which they promptly did, less than a decade later.
What did our wise leaders say when that bill was signed? "The world changes, and Congress and the laws have to change with it," said Phil Gramm. "In the 1930s ... it was believed that government was the answer ... We have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers."
''This legislation is truly historic,'' said Bill Clinton. ''We have done right by the American people.''
''With this bill,'' said Larry Summers, ''the American financial system takes a major step forward toward the 21st Century -- one that will benefit American consumers, business and the national economy.''
Actually that bill helped crash the economy, costing trillions and leaving millions of people un- or underemployed. They, on the other hand, all got rich.
And they weren't done. Phil Gramm then passed something called the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which Bill Clinton signed, opening the floodgates for Enron's abuses. Gramm's wife was then appointed to the Board of Directors of Enron, making him even richer. Later, after Enron's fraud caused so much tragedy, a shell-shocked nation passed Sarbanes-Oxley. But the Commodities 'modernization' act wasn't done with its worked: It enabled a division within my former employer, AIG, to gamble in a way that helped trigger the crisis of 2008.
Now we have the "JOBS" Act, which undoes Sarbanes-Oxley's key provisions. In a typically cynical move, the corrupt dealmakers of DC have appropriated two good ideas -- "crowdfunding" by individuals, as is done on Kickstarter, and the need to find investment capital for small and medium-sized businesses that are the engines of job growth.
But this bill will actually hurt both those efforts. Kickstarter finances creative projects, where it's fairly easy for investors to decide whether they feel a project has artistic merit. But this bill will unleash a torrent of unscrupulous scam artists onto the public, leaving them unable to decide which project has merit and which doesn't. Since these ventures won't be required to provide some basic financial data, many of them will bilk their investors -- drying up the pool of available capital for truly worthwhile startups.
Besides, why have we been pumping capital into the nation's banks through the Fed? Wasn't the purpose of all that support -- including TARP -- to prop them up so that they would lend to American businesses?
Worse, the bill is designed so that even billion-dollar corporations can be considered "startups," leaving the door open for a dozen Enrons of tomorrow to shaft the unwary. The common-sense protections proposed by Sen. Jeff Merkley were rejected, while the equally rational protections of Sens. Scott Brown and Jack Reed, which were passed, will be fairly easy for clever sharks to swim around. We've seen this play before, and it never has a happy ending. That will no longer be required of them, thanks to the "JOBS" Act.
Even that phony name -- "JOBS Act" -- isn't new. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley used the same acronym for an equally cynical bill in 2004, the "Jumpstart Our Business Strength" Act. Then, as now, the bill was supposed to create jobs. What it really did was provide $39 billion in tax cuts for overseas earnings by US corporations. Create jobs? Not so much.
Now we can look forward to another signing ceremony, filled with smiling and happy bipartisan faces. None of the people at that ceremony will pay the price when the bill for their actions comes due a few years from now. But you and I will.
And unless we change our political system, soon after that the whole process will begin again. When will we ever learn?
Follow Richard (RJ) Eskow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjeskow
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Janis Joplins song "freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose" is prophetic.
The repubs and dems are teaming up to insure the spread of freedom throughout the 99%.
With the soon to be ekstatik 300 million americans full of new found freedom, some one has to be in control. The brilliance of the Dems in congress, they vote with the Repubs so the new wealth of the great poor, and free class, will have fair and balanced representation. ........
It is tough to compromise ones principles the way they do, surely they ought to get compensated for it !!!!!! HELP WERE FALLING AND NOBODY CARES !
Is this historical ignorance or something darker?
Why ever go back to 1929? Why do this intentionally?
Ominously for some… maybe “they” want to get it “right” this time?
Our “urgent” task is in somehow preventing 2008 from leading to 1938!”
*Recurring Editorial Cartoon Idea:
A camel is lying crumpled in the sand crushed under the weight of a morbidly obese “Brünnhilde-like” singing woman who has just finished scribbling something in her notebook.
In the distance are desert sands, dark clouds, burning oil derricks and drones...
Depending on the day….the rapidly expiring broken backed camel could be labeled:
“Freedom… Republican Democracy…Capitalism…Humanity…”
By Robert Scheer
That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in fawning cover story in current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. ... Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.
At least Summers, in a testier interview by British journalist Krishnan was asked some tough questions about his responsibility as Clinton’s treasury secretary for the financial collapse that occurred some years later. He, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_democrats_who_unleashed_wall_street_and_got_away_with_it_20120202/
I just visited family in Germany, they do not understand what is going on in US. Capitalism has been so productive last 80 years because labor and capital have balanced the system. Any system out of balance in reeling toward catastrophe!
I find it interesting that Sarbanes-Oxley did nothing but renew board of directors responsibility and signature for internal audits, as if the procedures for accounting had never existed. I am certain investments under the JOBS Act will confuse these procedures even more. It will require less an appreciation of the new algorithms directors will sign off on than some of the old adages of Thomas Hobbs: greed is unfathomable and cannot be controlled.
We have learned to love a productive form of capitalism that has produced goods and services for the masses because its criminal element has be tightly monitored and prosecuted. That left the little poeple free to create value without being eaten by the sharks. But now that the financial police have left the scene (deregulation) the sharks are once again feeding at will on the wealth of the weak. Who benefits? The sharks of course, and when we see both political parties signing these destructive bills we see the same advisors standing behind each. One can almost see the paychecks going from the Larry Summers of the world to the Presidents who now effectively work for them.
What happened? Simple corruption of the type that has hit almost every other country, now has hit us. No country ever comes fully back from corruption once it has signed away its principles, but it can recover periodically as leaders with integrity (such as FDR) fight back against the crime. We the voters let this happen and we all are going to pay.
1. Wait 80 years for the next socialist leader to naturally emerge from the wreckage of capitalism.
2. Move north to Canada.
3. Vote for third parties who claim to have an interest in social justice.
4. Run for local office and be a tiny part of the solution.
5. Go to wall street as a mole and become a Billionaire. Then quit and use your wealth for good.
6. Move to a rural moutain outpost and secede from life as a survivalist.
7. Write that book that reveals the problems of financial politics for what they are and inspires a generation to devote themselves to financial reform.
8. Become an artist and live a good life and change by example.
9. Become a doctor that does plastic surgery on children with cleft pallettes and devote your life to doing good around the world.
10. Become a politician and infiltrate the system and gain power over the sociopaths who are in charge and bend them to your will which may be better than theirs if you try.
Now its your turn.
This bill is a desperate act to lure investment, it won't fly. World GDP averages $50-65 Trillion a year. Wall street shadow economy averages $600-800 trillion...it is all fraud, there isn't that much money in existance.
Russia, China, India and Japan no longer use the US dollar as the world standard currency, they all have agreements to use their own currencies, leaving the US dollar out. It was started by ALBO in South America. Total GDP loss so far: $20.6 Trillion.....a big bite out of the world economy. Peru, Brazil and other South American nations are also setting up their own trade agreements without the US dollar. This is the real WW 3 war, and we are losing. We are so corrupt, caused total collapse of the world economy and the world has united against us.
They all agree the US is the cause, and our leaders are too corrupt to regulate change to redeem our markets. This won't fly because we are no longer considered credible.
We forget that the banking industry (or rather their lobbyists, or rather their bribes) had tried to repeal this bill 11 times. The 12th time was the charm. (When you have unlimited money you have unlimited time.) It cost the banking industry $300 million and 20 years to repeal it and when they did it passed on a strict party line vote. It happened at 2:45 AM and legislators just had to get some sleep.
The well publicized fear at that time was that the banks would now become so large that they would own the government and no oversight would be possible. The banks would then be the government and the inalienable rights that promote the general welfare would be supplanted by decisions favorable to the concentration of wealth at the top of the financial industry.
All of this comes as no surprise to anyone except to many of the readers of the Huffington Post.
After seeing multiple catastrophes created by the Wall St. system (and the current global banking system) I'm in favor of dismantling Wall St. trading altogether, and re-regulating the banking industry back to the point that banks once again SERVE the country instead of destroying it.
Especially now that high speed trading is adding a new layer of corruption into the trading process... giving certain investors extraordinary advantage over individual investors.
The whole financial system is rigged folks. We never needed Wall St. and we still don't. It's simply large scale gambling... Get your money out of Wall St. folks, there are much better ways to make money.
"We haven't learned a damn thing."
Oh, haven't "we"? Seems as though the "we" that have learned plenty are the big bankers and the two corporatist parties (the Dems and the GOP, of course). What have they learned? They have learned that there are massive personal fortunes to be made for themselves when Wall Street uses middle-America's hard earned savings to make bets like a guy playing roulette (Russian roulette for the middle-class). The political parties have learned that the American people are willing to stick to their two party (all corporatist parties) political "system" no matter how egregiously the legislation that they pass harms the middle class and favors the "too big to fail banks" and the immoralists on Wall Street. So they've learned not to fear voter backlash.
The "we" that has not learned anything are average, uninformed Americans who are increasingly sliding into poverty and don't have the gumption to figure out why.
Emerging nations no longer use the US dollar. ALBO started it in 2010 once the world realized nothing would be done to fix or moderate our markets after causing the worst global economic collapse in modern history. ALBO established an electronic currency, the Sucre, allowing members nations to trade using their own currencies leaving the US dollar out. Russia and China followed their lead. After the latest sanctions on Iran, India and Japan joined with Russia and China. Iran is a rich and fruitful trading partner, none of them will stop trading with them for the USA.
The entire global annual GDP averages $50-65 trillion. The GDP of nations no longer using the dollar average $20.6 Trillion. Shadow banking on Wall Street averages $600-800 Trillion, it is all on paper, that money doesn't exist.
The world has united against us. This is the real WW 3, and we are losing.
But it is too late now, those laws are gone and those elements of society that were for so long repressed have been let out of their cages. We look back on tehe"almost depression" of 2008 and breath a sigh of release still not understanding that it was only a warning shot. The big dissasters are still before us and the banks are still devising the next mind numbingly complex financial scam that will take the whole world down this time. We should not be trying to find out who's fault these things are and instead be acting toward the enforcement of a peoples revolution that will suplant the runaway non elected financial powers that now control us. But we forget that when it happened last time it took a war. We have allowed a lot to slip away between our fingers.
"But it is too late now, those laws are gone and those elements of society that were for so long repressed have been let out of their cages" catch mine above when it appears....FF