Sucking Up to the Bankers: A Bipartisan Lovefest

[depakid]

This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them. Yet both of our leading presidential candidates are scrambling to enlist not only the big-dollar contributions but, more frighteningly, the “expertise” of the very folks who advocated the financial industry deregulations at the heart of this meltdown.

Republican candidate John McCain even appointed as his campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm, who went from being chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, where he sponsored disastrous legislation that empowered the banking bandits, to becoming one of them at UBS Warburg. Gramm was forced to resign from McCain’s campaign only after he went public with his contempt for the financial concerns of ordinary Americans, calling them “whiners” and perpetrators of a “mental recession.”

But Gramm and the Republicans couldn’t have done it without the support of leading Democrats. The most egregious of Gramm’s legislative favors to the financiers took the form of legislation named in part after him — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law only after then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin prevailed upon President Clinton to sign the bill.

The bill’s immediate major effect was to legitimize the long-sought merger between Citibank and insurance giant Travelers. Rubin’s critical support for the bill was rewarded with an appointment, within days of its passage, to a top job at Citibank (later Citigroup) paying more than $15 million a year.

That is the same Rubin with whom Democratic candidate Barack Obama met, along with other influential advisers, on Tuesday to figure out what to do about the sorry state of our economy. But what in the world did he expect to learn from Rubin? And why did he appoint Rubin’s protégé, Jason Furman, who ran the Rubin-funded Hamilton Project, to be the Obama campaign’s economic director?

Hopefully, during their encounter Tuesday, Rubin offered himself as a contrite model of everything that the candidate of change needs to change.

After all, Goldman Sachs, where Rubin spent 25 years of his business career before entering the Clinton administration, has been one of the prime corporate villains in the financial shenanigans that led to the subprime mortgage scandal.

As co-chairman of the firm, surely he had knowledge of the financial hanky-panky that would prove so disastrous down the road. Indeed, as Treasury secretary, he favored an extension of the deregulation that enabled this explosion of banking avarice. Not surprisingly, the current Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, also previously headed Goldman.

More: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/30/10703/

[Cerridwen]

1. See my sig line.

It ain't new - just "improved."

[truedelphi]

2. And Hilary had been suggesting that if she was the nominee and then the President, she

Would ensure that Alan Greenspan oversee the mortgage mess!!

:rofl:

[depakid]

3. The primaries are over- time to acknowledge reality

which seems to be that basically we get the same policies and advisers anyway.

[truedelphi]

4. That is what I was saying (Or thought I was saying)

The guy who was for so long at charge over the Federal Reserve (Previous to that, he was a business failure much like George W) was the man that Hillary wanted to have help us out of a mess that he helped us experience.

No matter who gets elected to what, the same faces will preside at the same institutions. With just a few changes.

Like musical chairs at a kid's party.