Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.
Do those convention delegates, and the fawning media that were wowed by the former president's rhetorical seductions, not recall that just before he left office Clinton signed off on the game-changing legislation that ended the sensible rules imposed on Wall Street during the Great Depression? It was Clinton who cooperated with the Republicans in reversing the legacy of FDR's New Deal, opening the floodgates of unfettered avarice that almost drowned the world's economy during the reign of George W. Bush.
How convenient to ignore the Financial Services Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law to summarily end the Glass-Steagall barrier against the commingling of investment and commercial banking. Do the Democrats not remember that Citigroup, the first too-big-to-fail bank made legal by the law Clinton signed, became the $15 million employer of Robert Rubin, the Clinton treasury secretary who led the fight for the law that legalized the creation of Citigroup? Or that Citigroup -- led by Sanford Weill, to whom Clinton gave one of the souvenir pens he used to approve that onerous legislation -- went on to be a major player in the subprime mortgage swindles and had to be bailed out with more than $50 billion of taxpayer funds?
Those scams were based on bundling suspect mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), backed by the phony insurance of credit default swaps (CDSs), all of which were given "legal certainty," to quote Lawrence Summers, who replaced Rubin as Clinton's treasury secretary. It was Summers who encouraged Clinton to sign the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which declared CDOs and CDSs immune to any existing regulatory law and the purview of any regulatory agency.
Timothy Geithner, a protégé of Rubin and Summers in the Clinton Treasury Department, was appointed, with Rubin's enthusiastic endorsement, to be head of the New York Fed while Bush was president. Geithner happily partnered with the Bush administration in saving AIG and funneling trillions of dollars to the banks that had caused the crisis. When Barack Obama appointed Geithner as treasury secretary, the new president committed to the Bush strategy of saving the bankers rather than those in the middle class who had much of their life savings tied up in the vanished equity in their homes.
The Democrats who boast so much about their inclusion of black and brown people have not seemed to notice that the accumulated wealth of both groups has declined by more than half since the onset of this crisis, wiping out much of the economic gains of the civil rights movement.
Sorry, I couldn't dance at the party as I did with the Democrats the last time around. Of course I prefer Obama over Republican Mitt Romney, who is backed by a rapacious crowd of hucksters who have rallied around the former CEO of Bain Capital as one of their own.
If Wall Street financial moguls are now giving more money to Romney than to Obama, it is a measure of the extent of their greed rather than Obama's effectiveness in curtailing that greed. The banks are bigger and more powerful than ever. The quite-limited victories for consumers cited in convention speeches by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and California Attorney General Kamala Harris -- both truly heroic fighters for consumer rights -- were accomplished over the objections of White House insiders.
Obama has followed the examples of Summers and Geithner instead of those of Warren and Harris, and that is what has made the election a tossup as voters continue to suffer in an economy that Democrats as well as Republicans wrecked.
Once again, the thing that saves the Democrats is the capricious evil that now defines the Republican Party. In another time, Romney might have been in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate and socially sensitive leader who offered a perhaps more efficient but no less caring alternative to the big-city-based Democrats of his era. As Clinton pointed out in his address, it was Eisenhower who sent federal troops to guarantee the integration of Little Rock High School in Arkansas over the objection of many Southern Democratic politicians and who also built the federal highway system. In short, Ike was a balanced and thoroughly decent GOP leader of the sort that Romney's own father, George, aspired to be.
Not so the son, who attacks the automobile industry bailout that his auto manufacturer father would have embraced, as he would have Obama's moderate health care program, based in every significant detail on Mitt Romney's version in Massachusetts. Romney is an unmitigated liar unrestrained by any moral or logical standard, as demonstrated in his defense of the Bain Capital experience. That part Clinton got right.
I still like Howard Dean. Other than Bernie Sanders, he's the most articulate voice progressives have. I just wish he spoke up more.
I don't think you can say she's a closet lefty.
Maybe 2016 the Democrats will nominate an old Roosevelt Democrat if the rank & file can wrestle control of the Modern Democratic Party aka the Rockefeller Republican Party away from it's Wall Street Handlers?
Or Maybe 2020, or 2024?
Someday maybe.
I have been wondering why the new administration has continued carrying out the ruinous, misguided policies of the Bush administration when it came to the banks. I simply couldn’t figure out why we were giving away trillions of dollars on absurdly favorable terms to a group of incompetent managers — reckless speculators, really — who destroyed their own companies.
Perhaps this helps shed some light:
“Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions.
In total, Mr. Summers made a total of about 40 speaking appearances to financial sector firms and other places, with fees totaling about $2.77 million. Fees ranged from $10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co.
Let’s review: Summers, along with Robert Rubin, pushed for the repeal of Glass Steagall, and supported the Commodity Futures Modernization Act; If memory serves, he was also around during the LTCM bailout.
If the history books eventually judge the Obama administration a failure, they may have to point to one horrific appointment as the root cause of the misguided policies: The “Smart Guy” who decided to continue the “Dumb Guy’s policies.
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A few points:
(a) There was nothing with Glass-Steagall that would have prevented the Housing Crisis and follow-on Financial Crisis. Everything that was done after the repeal of Glass-Steagall was done before Glass Steagall. The comingling of Investment Banking and Commercial Banking had nothing to do with the crises and it was mostly mono-line banks that had the problems.
(b) Nothing in G-S would have prevented CDO’s which have been around for decades. What regulation under the CFM would have prevented the Housing Crisis. Most of the commercial banks got in trouble for holding straight vanilla loans on their books, not CDO’s. The biggest buyer in the waning years of the bubble were Freddie and Fannie.
(c) Black and Brown people’s wealth has gone down since the bubble….that probably means that the wealth they had during the bubble was illusory and based on unsound economic drivers. Easy come, easy go.
I agree that Ike was a great President. He also presided over the a 90% marginal tax rate system that produced about the same normalized income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than we do today under a much lower tax rate schedule. Laffer was right so lets celebrate!
Kai
Yes Bill Clinton was just a great president and an even better shyster!
I am DONE with the two major parties. I couldn't stand watching much of either convention of the major parties this year; what a bunch of crooks & lies from both parties. You'd think the Dems forgot Clinton was basically a moderate Republican, and the GOP forgot they even existed more than 3 1/2 years ago. The Dems vote on the party platform was enough for me. Why would I want to listen to Obama make a bunch of promises he won't keep AGAIN? I voted for him last time and he has been a huge disappointment.
I tell my progressive/liberal friends to take a serious look at the Green Party candidates and my conservative friends to take a serious look at what the Libertarian Party has to offer.
This year, I'm going ALL 3RD PARTY for my votes. IT IS NOT A WASTED VOTE! That is pure propaganda of the two main parties, of which both are leading us to disaster.
Yes, Obama is preferable to Romney. And the Democrats, for all their obvious failings, are far less hypocritical and judgmental than the corporate-backed fundamentalist freak show that opposes them. But let's make no mistake, voters: BOTH PARTIES ARE STEERING US INTO OBLIVION. Anticipate redemption at your own peril.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/the-financial-crisis-and-_1_b_782927.html
Such being the case, then... as RIhter said below, or above, depending on how you read this, but nonetheless earlier: Now what?
The debts swinging like the sword of Damocles above our heads are primarily, "gambling," debts.
Incurred by individuals (as parasitic as they are traitorous) so linked to their counterpart functionaries in public institutions that they were rewarded for their criminal excreta, with even more capital, from the very people they raped. And of whom they would have, still sore... to pay off the rest of their gambling debts, at 100% to the dollar... the same level at which they got compensated, last time.
Glass Steagall would stop this; our centuries version of the venerable pitchfork. Glass Steagall IS, ONE HALF of the NOW WHAT, the other half, is making sure it gets passed: Someone, as in one group (1%) or the other (guess) is going to be kissing something. And without Glass Steagall it won't be the 1%, or, where the sun shines... either.
Burn the debt.
Glass Steagall.
The biggest problem we have with our political process may just be the inability of the voting public to do the work necessary to vet the candidates they vote for instead of being manipulated into voting for them by the lies of those who would benefit from their election to office.
You were being gentle, that's exactly what the problem is; no matter they have help. But hold that (quoted) thought: I just looked and saw that you have 22 fans; smart folks if your post is typical. It comes to me that if I were to add the name:
Glass Steagall... To the end of my posts, no matter the subject or topic being discussed or replied to, then, it would be "just" one, person.
However, were you and I (humor me) both, to do so, that would be, two. And if I were to ask my fans, and if you, were to ask your fans... and then there would be more.
I think that might do it.
At some point it would become, the, elephant in the room.
People would start to become educated. If you know about the Commodities Exchange Act of 1936; then you probably how much the Banksters hate Glass Steagall, and, that will only come to pass, if lifted, and carried... by the people. We... are, the candidate we need. It turns out, that what's been missing all this time, is, and has been us.
What do you think? What could it hurt? I'll go first.
Glass Steagall.
Hillary2016!
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LOL. Warren is truly a fraud. Here she is addressing the Chamber of Commerce last year, promising that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau "would ease some burdensome regulations."
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/warren-courts-her-top-critics/
OR, disband the Republican Party and hand it all over to the Democrats.
OR, disband both parties and hand it all over to a new third party with no experience.
The only thing I'm sure of when I vote is that the Republican mantra of "smaller government" has always meant deregulation of industry, and deregulation has NEVER worked to the advantage of the consumer or the average investor. When I vote a Democratic ticket I know there's always a chance that I'll get screwed somehow, but if I vote for a Republican ticket I know that getting screwed is a certainty.
You will be screwed if you vote, and you will be screwed if you don't vote.
Team A Harvard Lawyer against Team B Harvard Lawyer.
Sigh.