Robert Scheer: Pundits Side With Wall Street Over Main Street
Democrats and Republicans alike share the blame and responsibility in the nation's current financial fiasco.
How dare you throw that tea in Boston Harbor! Such is the anti-democratic arrogance of the fear-mongering pundits and politicians who tell us if we taxpayers don’t instantly give the Wall Street banking bandits a $700 billion bailout, then we are destroying America. Instead of applauding representatives from both parties who, for once, heeded the public rather than the fat cats, the established pundits blasted those who dared get out of line.
“When Madmen Reign” was the headline on a column by Bob Herbert in The New York Times, absolving the Democrats from any responsibility for the crisis despite a willingness of that party’s leadership in the past to vote for key legislation proposed by what he condemns as the “anti-regulation, free-market zealots” of the Republican Party. Both parties betrayed the principles of a true free market — remember the invisible hand of Adam Smith where no market player could influence price? — in favor of the concentrated power of oligopoly to control everything.
Those Republicans who dared to vote, this time, against the demands of the Wall Street power brokers were derided by New York Times columnist David Brooks as the “Revolt of the Nihilists.” While suddenly embracing President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s New Deal as the positive alternative to nihilist behavior, Brooks ignored Roosevelt’s main achievement, which was to put the public interest before that of the Wall Street titans.
Anyone who has bothered to study that history knows that Sen. John McCain was deeply involved in the push for rampant deregulation, and his choice of former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, the formerSenate Banking Committee chairman and the principle author of the decisive deregulation legislation — the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 — to co-chair the McCain presidential campaign mocks McCain’s attempt to blame the crisis on everyone but himself.
The Democrats, however, also are culpable, and it was sickening to watch Clinton on The Daily Show getting away with blaming a crisis he helped create on overexcited home purchasers. I don’t blame Daily Show host Jon Stewart for not knowing enough about the subject to challenge Clinton on his own fervent support of deregulation, but it is disappointing that The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, one of the nation’s sharpest commentators and an economist, should also miss that point.
Indeed, in his Times column castigating McCain for his connection to Gramm, Krugman said voters should be reassured that Sen. Barack Obama has Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to turn to for advice on how to handle this mess.
Rubin, the former head of Goldman Sachs, worked as hard as Gramm to pass the legislation his Wall Street buddies wanted. Rubin then returned to Wall Street as a honcho at Citigroup, the first company to successfully exploit the new legislation’s nefarious loopholes. As for his perspicuity, it was as recently as January of this year that Rubin termed the financial meltdown a normal phase of the business cycle.
Back in the spring, two months after Rubin’s “What, me worry?” silliness on the economy, Obama gave a brilliant speech on Wall Street’s problems at the same venue, Manhattan’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in which he singled out the legislation that Rubin had gotten Clinton to sign as central to the problem.
Obama should stick with the wisdom of a community organizer from the tough side of Chicago: Fight the bankers who swindle unsuspecting homeowners, and restore the bailout provision that Democratic leaders had proposed but then abandoned — stop the home foreclosures by empowering bankruptcy court judges to force a renegotiation of terms.
Any bailout worthy of support should put the endangered homeowner first, not the bankers who swindled them.
TruthDig.com editor in chief Robert Scheer‘s new book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Click here for more information. He can be reached at .
» wrote on 10/04/08 @ 09:53 PM
$700B could have purchased all the distressed mortgages and then some.
So yes, wall street won out over main street.
It was like a riot, a brick was thrown through the window and they grabbed whatever they could while they were able to.