Robert Scheer: The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

[marmar]

from truthdig:



The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

Posted on Feb 2, 2012
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 a fawning cover story in the 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 a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a 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 Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, 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.

“I think the evidence is that I am right about that. If you look at the big players, Lehman and Bear Stearns were both standalone investment banks,” Summers replied, referring to two investment banks allowed to fold. Summers is very good at obscuring the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_democrats_who_unleashed_wall_street_and_got_away_with_it_20120202/

[snappyturtle]

1. Will read. Thanks. Did you happen to see Bill Moyers

last Friday night? It was the third in a series (the first three episodes of his new show: Bill Moyers and Company) about the collapse. Very interesting. You can view all three episodes at:
www.billmoyers.com

[marmar]

2. Yep, I saw it.....Good stuff.

nt

[zipplewrath]

3. "Most progressive president in 30 years..."

Yup, when we constantly hear about the "most progressive president in 30 years..." basically this is the basis of comparison. The president that passed NAFTA, DOMA, DADT, as well as Welfare "reform". As this article suggests, we took one of the guys that dismantled Glass-Steagall, and put him back on the job trying to "fix" the mess. There's "Change" for ya. And I'm suppose to "cheer" about that? What'd we get out of that? Bankers getting bonuses and stimulus packages that were too small by half.

[xchrom]

4. du rec. nt