More of the Same You Can Believe In
mimus
well as party label, has placed a hold on President Obama's nomination of
Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Sounds
like a minor issue to get worked up about, but the senator is right. Like
most Americans, I am eager for Obama to succeed, but I see this
appointment as further evidence that the president has entrusted his
economic policy to the wrong people.
Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was in the Treasury
Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall
Street lobbyists was all the rage. Sanders gets right to the point: "Mr.
Gensler worked with Sen. Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit
default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has
resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history."
Sanders' hold will not stop the Gensler nomination because Congress and
the president, recognizing the nation's mood, want to give Wall Street
whatever it wants to make the stock market go up. And Gensler is a
reassuring figure to the moguls of finance-- he was a partner at Goldman
Sachs before being brought by Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to the Clinton
Treasury Department.
After Rubin left to take a $20-million-a-year job at Citigroup, which he
helped run into the ground, Lawrence Summers, his protege and replacement
at Treasury, elevated Gensler to be an under secretary. Gensler then
performed as Summers' point man in advocating for deregulation legislation
that enabled the current debacle.
The explosion of toxic assets is a direct result of the laws pushed
through by Rubin and his followers, and in the decade since, we have had a
20-fold increase, to more than $530 trillion, in the value of those
newfangled financial instruments, which Warren Buffett in February 2003
correctly termed "financial weapons of mass destruction."
Yet when one member of the Clinton administration, Brooksley Born,
then-head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to sound
a warning, she was treated by the rest of Clinton's economic team as the
enemy.
In response to Born's warning, they drove her from government and pushed
through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which summarily exempted
from regulation the derivatives that now haunt us. The claim at the time
by Summers, now top economic adviser in the Obama White House, was that
"(t)his legislation promotes innovation and competition in the U.S.
financial markets and may help to reduce systemic risk." Of course now we
know, as Born predicted, that it did quite the opposite. What irony that
Gensler is being rewarded with Born's old job for getting it wrong . . . .
<more:>
http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200990326078
And then there was the Oil Bubble, enabled by the CFMA and its engineers,
and carefully not interfered with by either Party, and now even more
carefully not being investigated by the Obama Administration, the present
Congress, or the American "mainstream" "free press" . . . .
And of course prosecution is completely out of the question.
Three trillion dollars stolen, and the world and US economies torched,
and, yet, silence.
A silence more than golden.
--
The road the nation decided to take
produced a perfect Eldorado
to the most sordid and criminal speculators
the world has ever seen,
the type of citizen
who has no regard for the people, the nation, or honor,
and who cares not whom he ruins
or the effect of his acts on national or international life.
Many of them have borne great names;
they have been regarded as leaders
in the financial and social world;
they have influenced and dominated governments.
< Ernie Bevin (1933)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2006/PSI.gasandoilspec.062606.pdf