Bill Clinton on deregulation: ‘The Republicans made me do it!’

[kristopher]

Bill Clinton on deregulation: ‘The Republicans made me do it!’
The ex-president seriously mischaracterizes his record
By Ryan Chittum
OCTOBER 1, 2013

Bill Clinton sat down with Fareed Zakaria last week on CNN for a typically wide-ranging interview that touched on chemical weapons, big data and privacy, whether Chelsea Clinton should run for office, etc.

You know, the usual Bill Clinton interview. But Clinton’s comment about his record on regulation is an actual newsmaker, because it’s a giant whopper:

What happened? The American people gave the Congress to a group of very conservative Republicans. When they passed bills with the veto proof majority with a lot of Democrats voting for it, that I couldn’t stop, all of a sudden we turn out to be maniacal deregulators. I mean, come on. I know Senator Warren said the other day, admitted when she introduced a bill to reinstate the division between commercial and investment banks, she admitted that the repeal of Glass-Steagall did not cause one single solitary financial institution to fail.

This is, to be kind, bullshit. Memory is a hazy thing, but I have a hard time believing Clinton doesn’t know full well he’s not telling the truth here (and with his record, he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt).

Let’s go to the tape. Clinton installed Robert Rubin and Larry Summers in the Treasury, which resulted in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which officially did in Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which left the derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West (not to mention a disastrous strong dollar policy that was a critical and underrated factor in the bubble). He also reappointed Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan, who has as much responsibility as anyone for creating the crisis, as Fed chairman—twice.

Now it’s true that Clinton faced an extremely hostile Republican Congress for the last six years of his presidency. But his administration actively encouraged the big deregulatory legislation, and squashed its own dissenters, like Brooksley Born, who saw disaster ahead.

Clinton would have you believe that he signed those bills ...

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/bill_clinton_the_republicans_m.php

Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, Columbia Journalism Review's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at [e-mail]. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.

[djean111]

1. Um, aren't we also being told that deregulation is a Good Thing? Cognitive dissonance much?

I find it more logical to roll my eyes when a Clinton speaks, at this point, and just go on to something else.

[kristopher]

4. Scattershot works like that...

[DefenseLawyer]

6. That depends. Do you thing regulation is a good thing?

If so, then yes, deregulation was a good thing. If not, then obviously it is a bad thing, foisted upon us by Republicans. Seems crystal clear to me.

[NCTraveler]

2. Once again the Clintons follow Sanders lead.

The republicans made me vote against a pathway to citizenship. The Clintons copy Sandrers on everything.

[PoliticAverse]

3. "they passed bills with the veto proof majority" - which he was still free to think were bad

and veto with a statement as to why they were bad.

[NWCorona]

5. Exactly!

[bvf]

11. Yep.

Like his wife, he's counting on the audience's ignorance. In this case, it's of basic civics.

Clinton. Because the Less You Know...

[ibegurpard]

7. So veto them anyway

[randome]

10. That's not how political capital is valued or spent in Washington.

A politician always avoids being on the losing side of a confrontation, especially when there is nothing to be gained by it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Where do uncaptured mouse clicks go?[/center][/font][hr]

[UglyGreed]

8. What will the Republicans

make the progressive who can get things done do????

[Octafish]

9. The Republicans made him take a job at UBS, too...in ''Wealth Management''

UBS is a Swiss bank that is enjoying better days, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders.

Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

SNIP...

As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/

About UBS Wealth Management

It's Buy Partisan

After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?



It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:

President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool

SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html

One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.

Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.



Thank you for the heads-up on the history, kristopher! Columbia Journalism Review is TOPS!

[Doctor_J]

12. That is what the new democrats always say when they sell us out.

The thought of Hillary in the white house with a republican congress should scare the bejeebers out of anyone who cares about the country.