|
|
|---|
|
American Politics Journal Atrios Barry Crimmins Betty Bowers Buzzflash Consortium News Daily Howler Daily Kos Democatic Underground Disinfotainment Today Evil GOP Bastards Faux News Channel Greg Palast The Hollywood Liberal Internet Weekly Jesus General Joe Conason Josh Marshall Liberal Oasis Make Them Accountable Mark Morford Mike Malloy Political Humor - About.com Political Wire Randi Rhodes Rude Pundit Smirking Chimp Take Back the Media Whitehouse.org More Links |
Subject: Why I
hate Bill Clinton
The sight of Bill Clinton
back on the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich
was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy.
How desperate is the current
president that he would turn to the great triangulator, who opened the
floodgates to banking greed,
for validation of the sorry opportunistic hodgepodge that passes for
this administration’s economic policy?
A policy designed and implemented by the same Clinton-era holdovers
whose radical deregulation
of the financial industry created this mess in the first place.
These dislocations were authorized when Clinton signed off on the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which
reversed the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation between the high rollers
of investment banking and the
properly conservative, insured and regulated activities of commercial
banks entrusted with the life
savings of ordinary folks. With a stroke of a pen that he then
presented as a gift to Citigroup CEO
Sandy Weill, Clinton opened the door to the too-big-to-fail
monstrosities that have caused so much misery.
Back in 1999, even though he had been warned of the coming financial
instability, foreshadowed by
the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Clinton was giddy in
signing the bill:
“Over the past seven years we have tried to modernize the economy,” he
enthused. “And today what
we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing
down those antiquated laws and
granting banks significant new authority.”
A year later Clinton signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization
Act, advanced most fiercely
by his treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, who has been the dominant
personality setting economic
policy for Obama. Titles 3 and 4 of that act summarily exempted from
the surveillance of any existing
regulatory agency or laws all of the newfangled financial gimmicks—the
collateralized debt obligations
and credit default swaps—that have proved so toxic to the jobs and
homes of tens of millions of Americans.
I won't even mention Derivatives and Brooksley Born.
You can look that up yourself.
Combine the above and Clinton's sexual encounter with
Monica and you have a man who did more to destroy
our country than Ronnie and the chimp combined.
Jacob
But you did tell the truth - you HATE Bill Clinton.