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"The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It" / Robert Scheer

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KoKo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-02-12 08:02 PM
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"The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It" / Robert Scheer
Published on Thursday, February 2, 2012 by TruthDig.com
The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It
by Robert Scheer

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. ... Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.Former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, right, share a laugh in 2006. Both men share blame for the economic collapse of 2008. It was Clinton’s financial deregulation that legalized the merger of commercial and investment banks, creating institutions that were both risky and too-big-to-fail.

At least Summers, in a testier interview by British journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, was asked some tough questions about his responsibility as Clinton’s treasury secretary for the financial collapse that occurred some years later. He, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.

“I think the evidence is that I am right about that. If you look at the big players, Lehman and Bear Stearns were both standalone investment banks,” Summers replied, referring to two investment banks allowed to fold. Summers is very good at obscuring the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.

The point of Glass-Steagall was to prevent jeopardizing commercial banks holding the savings of average citizens. Summers knows full well that the passage of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was pushed initially by Citigroup, a mammoth merger of investment and commercial banking that create the largest financial institution in the world, an institution that eventually had to be bailed out with taxpayer funds to avoid economic disaster for millions of ordinary Americans. He also knows that Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

More at......
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/02
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chill_wind Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Feb-03-12 07:20 PM
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1. Memory Lane..
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No Elephants Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-27-12 03:57 PM
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4. What was that signing? Repeal of Glass Steagall? NAFTA? The end of welfare, as we know it?
DOMA? DADT?

Which beauty was it?

Between those bills and the DLC, we owe Bubba for a lot. Er, I mean, we owe Bubba a lot.
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formercia Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-09-12 08:07 AM
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2. Billy was just paying back for his Rhodes Scholarship
The boys don't ever give anything away for free. They never pay full price for anything.
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KoKo Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-09-12 07:32 PM
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3. This seems an "old post" ....but, what's gone on since the post is new..and not good things.
Edited on Thu Feb-09-12 07:32 PM by KoKo
:-(
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formercia Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jun-26-12 11:58 AM
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5. Billy pays off his Rhodes Scholarship
Nothing is free...nothing.
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