Because if we didn't give our overlords what they wanted, the Chinese---or who the fuck ever---would:
in February 1995, newly-appointed Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, his deputy Bo Cutter and senior advisers including John Podesta gave the president three days to decide whether to back a repeal of Glass-Steagall [...]Podesta, who was then staff secretary but went on to become Clinton's chief of staff, wrote a covering note telling the president that all his senior advisers backed the plan, although he noted the danger that “allowing banks to engage in riskier activities like securities or insurance could subject the deposit insurance fund to added risk”.
But Clinton's advisers repeatedly reassured him that the decision to let Wall Street dismantle regulatory barriers designed to protect the public after the Great Depression simply represented inevitable modernization.
“The argument for reform is that the separation between banking and other financial services mandated by Glass-Steagall is out of date in a world where banks, securities firms and insurance companies offer similar products and where firms outside the US do not face such restrictions,” wrote Podesta.
Podesta currently works at the White House as special adviser to President Barack Obama. Sperling stood down as director of Obama's National Economic Council last month.
Along with Cutter, who worked on Obama's transition committee, all three men were close allies of Rubin, who spearheaded the deregulation of Wall Street before joining the board of Citigroup in 1999. In 2007, he briefly became its chairman.
The closeness of Obama's team to the deregulation policies of the late 1990s is well known and has been criticised by campaigners as a reason for the current administration's reluctance to institute more aggressive Wall Street reforms after the banking crash.
I am beginning to have fantasies of severed heads impaled on pikes. I do not like such visions because I am not a violent man by nature, but I suspect I am not alone in wondering if anything short of the French Revolution will bring about the change the Republic needs and desires. Hate to think so!
---Baron V
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