A giant hustle that served the richest of the rich and left the rest of us holding the bag

[kpete]

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_great_american_stickup_it_was_the_economy_stupid_20100914/

‘The Great American Stickup’: It Was the Economy, Stupid
Posted on Sep 14, 2010

By Robert Scheer

Editor’s note: This excerpt originally ran on The Huffington Post.

Excerpted from “The Great American Stickup.”


“It Was the Economy, Stupid”



“How did this happen?” ~ President George W. Bush



“It was a humbling question for someone from the financial sector to be asked—after all, we were the ones responsible.” ~ Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Goldman Sachs CEO



They did it.

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..... This was a giant hustle that served the richest of the rich and left the rest of us holding the bag, a life-altering game of musical chairs in which the American public was the one forced out. Worst of all, legislators from both political parties we elect and pay to protect our interests from the pirates who assaulted us instead changed our laws to enable them.

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.... It is not conspiratorial but rather accurate to suggest that blame can be assigned to those who consciously developed and implemented a policy of radical financial deregulation that led to a global recession. As President Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Rubin, the former cochair of Goldman Sachs, led the fight to free the financial markets from regulation and then went on to a $15-million-a-year job with Citigroup, the company that had most energetically lobbied for that deregulation. He should remember the line from the old cartoon strip Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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If we accept a broad dispersal of blame or a sense of inevitability—or simply ignore the details, since they can be so confusing—we lose the opportunity to rearrange our institutions to prevent such disasters from happening again.

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If we as a people learn anything from this crash, however, it should be that there are no adults watching the store, only a tiny elite of self-interested multimillionaires and billionaires making decisions for the rest of us. As long as we cede that power to them, we can expect to continue getting bilked.

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more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/the-great-american-sticku_b_715928.html
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[xchrom]

1. recommend

[glitch]

2. Good to see Reagan/Clinton catching their share of blame for The Set-Up, but the Bushes

should get fair credit for The Take.
I'd hate to see them ignored, they worked so hard.