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Edited on Thu Nov-06-08 09:43 AM by Leopolds Ghost
A couple people thought this bears emphasizing so I am posting it as a thread.
Larry Summers Deputy went on PBS (This American Life) during the bailout debate
to expose Summers' key role in lobbying for the Gramm deregulation act...
Larry Summers and Robert Rubin were the main voices for ending the New Deal, LEGISLATIVELY, AND THEY DID.
Summers was Gramm's inside man advocating for overturning Glass Steagall and allowing
Citibank and Nationsbank to ILLEGALLY aquire other companies (which is the Bush agenda,
remember -- using the bailout money to buy other financial institutions, making those
megacorps bigger than the Federal Government) with inflated stock dollars by changing
their name from "bank" to "banc"
...a year before the Gramm act got passed retroactively legalizing their actions (shades of FISA, anyone?)
THEY ILLEGALIZED THE NEW DEAL and ENDED the Great Society when they passed the HOPE VI,
Welfare Act, and Gramm Deregulation act which is why the New Deal is no longer an issue for Democrats.
So, um... yeah. Will we see Campaign Finance Reform? No, because Dems are now in favor
of maximizing private dollars - a bad trend that favors the upper middle class where
it previously favored the merely rich, so now it's OK. Will we see return of Glass Steagall?
That would require breaking up Citigroup, which would be "far-left wacko communism"
according to the ruling class media (and Dem) elite. (Buying billions in Citigroup
preferred stock to buy other companies and pay bonuses is sensible centrism, or more
accurately Toryism -- the new religion of the neocons and neolibs who are drifting
across party lines to remain in power.)
-------------
More info below the fold...
Summers and Rubin conspired behind the scenes to shut down their underling
(this deputy secretary of the Treasury's) efforts to regulate credit default swaps
(the root cause of the banking crisis.) Summers and Rubin were not merely
in Greenspan's camp, they were Gramm's allies within the administration.
They literally thought he had gone insane. The goal was deregulation, get
the government OUT of credit industry, ALLOW totally new swaps markets to be created
by guaranteeing losses but deregulating profits. (Total hands-off government
would not help business because these risky securities required an implicit
government guarantee, which they are now getting, and they needed government
intervention in the banking sector in order for the full force of the law to
protect the concept of two multi-national banks "owning" one half of this and
several other nations' bank assets.)
The goal was to end New Deal era anti-trust laws and allow 9 banks to buy up
the entire financial sector and invest private bank accounts as equity assets,
in lieu of goosing the market with Social Security funds. This in turn allowed Wall Street
to sustain an otherwise unsustainable doubling of the amount of paper money in equities,
from 4,000 to 8,000 Dow points (doubling again to 14,000 thanks to real estate equity
inflation which Clinton Democrats fully supported because, as Mark Penn and Mark Warner
have pointed out, a gentrifying America is a blue America, sprawl and edge city development
in purple states is a GOOD thing because it turns those states blue, and young voters
making over $100,000 in (inflated) dollars are the "new base of the party thanks to Obama." --Mark Penn.)
This was in turn masked and justified as the product of real wealth flowing magically
from improvements in information technology in the 90s-00s. They even recalibrated inflation
to tie dollar buying power to computing power, making Americans look much richer than they are
because their cell phones are so much faster, and allowing Mark Penn to claim that statistic
or the whole notion of a "new professional class" and also allowing commentators to claim
"industrial age liberalism is dead, Clinton and Obama killed it, finally."
See, with information technology, none of that cheap plastic crap actually has to be
manufactured, at least not anywhere we know about or have to drive past. we can go
entirely green in our "personal lifestyles" here in our ethnically segregated progressive
hotspots and not worry about where all that STUFF comes from. Even the UNION bosses
who come on Ed Schultz say they aren't asking Obama to reverse NAFTA because "those jobs
aren't coming back from Mexico." We can't make it here any more, you see. Too much enviro
regulation. Too many poor people overseas who make great producer class.
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