This won't take long.
First (as some would have it), Barack Obama, the "unbound" version:
(go to 3:15 of the clip, and then from 5:30 to 6:02)
Text:
Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is "too big to fail."
{snip}
Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest, or sponsor hedge funds, private equity funds, or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers. If financial firms want to trade for profit, that’s something they’re free to do. Indeed, doing so –- responsibly –- is a good thing for the markets and the economy. But these firms should not be allowed to run these hedge funds and private equities funds while running a bank backed by the American people.
HOORAY!
Right?
Well not so fast.
The ability of the banks to dabble in all those risky ventures casino bets, which ultimately led to the economy's collapse last year, was given them by an act of Congress passed in the final days of the Clinton adminstration, an act that repealed an important portion of the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act (which prevented this abuse of fiduciary responsibility), otherwise known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
So what's not to cheer about? This:
(go to 3:00)
Transcript:
Sanders: We didn't hear much from the Bush Administration who told us over and over again that the fundamentals of the economy were sound. We didn't hear much from the Fed. Now looking back do you think that maybe there was a problem there that you did not raise some alarms out there and say, "We got a problem when trillions of dollars are being floated around the world in a deregulated and non-transparent way"? When you heard people talking about the fundamentals of the economy being sound, how come you didn't raise an alarm?
Bernanke: Well there was a massive credit crisis and it's been true that our regulatory system and our financial supervisory system did not succeed in preventing those impacts and I think it's very important....
Sanders: "Not succeed in preventing them!" Let's take it another way: do you think that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a tragic mistake?
Bernanke: No, I don't think so...
(Thanks again, Senator Sanders, for putting this asshole on the record in direct opposition to the President who is mind-bogglingly still supporting him.)
The irony is thick, but it is not delicious (unless you are a teabagger hoping for the catastrophe that the Obama financial team is courting).
It's been a full year since he took office and the guy I voted for - in part because he assured me that he would re-regulate the financial industry - only just the other day seriously proposed such re-regulation, and then only after his New Deal-loving base deserted him in bright-blue Massachusetts a few days prior.
One year. One fucking year the financial industry has been operating under the same fucked up rules absence of rules that caused both the Great Depression and the Great Recession. One year on, and the re-regulation is still just a gleam in some politician's eye.
Brilliant.
And still, AND STILL, he retains faith in Bernanke who thinks Gramm-Leach-Bliley was a good idea, and he retains the services of Laurence Summers who, among others, had a large part in crafting that disasterous Federal Ponzi scheme.
If I retained any vestiges of faith in Barack Obama's integrity, you could color me confused right now.
Instead, I'm just a deeper shade of disgusted.