The Rubin Con Goes On
By Robert Scheer
August 10, 2010
The corruptions of journalism were on full display when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria turned to Robert Rubin this past Sunday for advice on how to fix the financial crisis that he, as much as anyone, caused. I was trapped on a treadmill in front of an overhead television and unable to turn the thing off in time to avoid this assault on my mental and physical health.
As a result I was forced to hear Rubin, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, insist that he always favored regulating toxic derivatives and is therefore not at all responsible for the ensuing economic meltdown. He was responding to the sole critical question from the CNN host, who quoted a question by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “Did all the senior members of the
economics team have to be protégés of Robert Rubin, the apostle of financial deregulation?” Unfortunately, Zakaria just rolled over when his guest simply lied in response:
“First of all, I am not the apostle of financial deregulation. Quite the contrary. On derivatives … I developed a deep concern about the systemic problem that was created. When I was back at Goldman Sachs, it was a concern I had … a concern I had when I was in government. And in fact, when I wrote my book in 2003, I was so concerned about it that I actually included that discussion in there.”
Rubin and Summers were responsible for forcing Brooksley Born out of the Clinton administration because as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission she had the temerity to suggest regulating the mortgage-backed securities that eventually proved to be so toxic. Instead, Rubin and Summers pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed into law in his last month in office, categorically exempting those suspect derivatives from any government regulation.
By then, Rubin had moved on to a $15-million-a-year job at Citigroup, which became a prime exploiter of the subprime housing market. As a result of its massive involvement with toxic securities, Citigroup, with Rubin in a leading role until early 2009, had to be bailed out by the federal government with a $45 billion direct investment and a guaranteed Fed protection for $306 billion in potentially toxic assets.
There is much more, and I haven’t even touched on Rubin’s shameful role in Enron’s shenanigans. Enough said, though, to question not only Zakaria’s journalism but, far more important, Barack Obama’s leadership in first turning to Rubin as a key campaign adviser and then putting his disciples in charge of the U.S. economy.
Read the full article at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_rubin_con_goes_on_20100810/
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