This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books). Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a fourteen-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president.
Not one of the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination who debated Monday night rose to a point of seriousness in addressing the nation’s grievous problems.
How I wish that Ben Bernanke would get caught e-mailing photos of his underwear-clad groin.
Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover, whose tenure is linked to the Great Depression. Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” as the article’s title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability. But that has always been the man’s special gift—to rise above, and indeed benefit from, the messes he created.
His list of safe nostrums—painting tar-surface roofs white and seeking more efficient solar and battery production—to be featured at his lavishly funded Clinton Global Initiative conference in Chicago next week is vintage Clinton hype. All of those solutions are of the win/win sort that he loved to ballyhoo as president; who in his or her right mind would be against green job creation? But that hardly speaks to a crisis in which, as was reported Tuesday, the housing meltdown continues unabated as the toxic mortgages sold and packaged by the leading banks and investment houses clog the real estate market, destroying consumer confidence and hobbling job creation.
Conceding that the bailed-out banks are sitting on $2 trillion that they won’t lend, Clinton offers not a word about mortgage relief for swindled homeowners. With an all-time high of 44 million Americans living below the poverty line, Clinton once again brags of his success in ending the federal welfare program.
There is only a one-sentence reference in the Clinton article to the era of financial greed: “The real thing that has killed us in the last 10 years is that too much of our dealmaking creativity has been devoted to expanding the financial sector in ways that don’t create new businesses and more jobs and to persuading people to take on excessive debt loads to make up for the fact that their incomes are stagnant.” Now that’s a clear description of the consequence of President Clinton’s policy of radical deregulation of the financial industry, but he writes as if that outcome has nothing to do with him.
Clinton signed off on the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the legislative jewel of the Franklin Roosevelt administration designed to prevent financial institutions from getting too big to fail. In signing the Financial Services Modernization Act, which broke down the barrier between high-rolling Wall Street investment firms and consumer banks carrying the deposits of ordinary folk, Clinton gushed in 1999, “Over the [past] seven years we have tried to modernize the economy.… And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”
The first beneficiary of that legislation was Citigroup, a corporation that resulted from a merger that would have been banned by Glass-Steagall. Upon signing the law, Clinton handed one of the pens he used to a beaming Sandy Weill, Citigroup CEO and a close friend and financial supporter of the president. Clinton’s treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, then went off to be a $15-million-a-year exec at Citigroup and was in a key position there when the bank made those toxic derivative packages that would have forced it into bankruptcy had US taxpayers not bailed the bank out.
So much for the “modernizing” that Clinton had bragged about.
A year later a variation of that same word appeared in the title of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed and which exempted from government regulation all of the collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that would later prove so toxic. That legislation led to the explosion of the market in unregulated mortgage-based securities, the key source of the financial-sector “dealmaking” that Clinton now bemoans.
In his memoir Clinton pays tribute to Rubin as “the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton.” He wrote that line in 2004, when Rubin, who had come to Clinton from a top job at Goldman Sachs and later left for Citigroup, was already clearly defined as someone who profited mightily from the very bills that he had pushed through while working for Clinton.
As with so much in the Clinton record, the former president remains in deep denial over having any culpability for his misdeeds. In his thousand-page memoir there is no reference to the above-mentioned radical deregulation of the economy that he presided over. As evidenced by his Newsweek article, the man has long been convinced that there is no problem or contradiction of his that cannot be simply plastered over with blather. Sadly, he may be right.
Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
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2. posted by: kewe65 at 06/22/2011 @ 3:28pm ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
That's the problem alright. The democrats (since Bill Clinton) are basically republican lite. They cave into the demands of the right wing, shift the party to the right and get small increments of what the people who elected them want. In short, they've been serving the well to do, not the working class. The democratic party has become a group of sell outs. We all know where the GOP/Tea Party and Libertarians stand which is hand in hand with the international business scene. But, it turns out the democratic party is holding hands with them to. They pretend not to be, but they are. The democratic party reminds me of a spouse who is screwing around on their partner and getting away with it. Everyone but the partner knows what they are doing. In this case, the partner is the liberals who continue to vote for people who sell them out.
Michael26, if the dems are pathetic, the teapubs are worse than pathetic, is there a word for that? Talk about stinking at govt, the teapubs stink to high heaven.
isn't this a bit of a false equivalency matching the results to specific, cherry-picked decisions that are collectively part of governing? the fact is many of these decisions were trade-offs with a GOP-led Congress Clinton made in order to get the taxes and other programs that turned around the economy, in order to fix the massive problem Reagan started. Governing is choosing and the executive branch doesn't make or change the laws (you apparently needed that little civics lesson). You have to ask yourself, would Clinton (or Obama in the same situation now) have chosen a different path if there was a true DEM super-majority? Doubtful. Calling Clinton and Obama ego-maniacs next to Bush's and Reagan is a hoot - talk about the pot calling the kettle black
This is a good article! However, while I am not that fond of Clinton or Obama, voting Republican is jumping from the frying pan into the fire. There is no distance between the Corporate Democrats and Corporate Republicans with regard to the economy. Neither party has a clue about governance. I think everybody needs find a minority party to vote for in 2012, to send a message to both parties. By the way, one reason your taxes have gone up is because of the privatization of Government. The profit motive is not supposed to be in government, and you will end up paying for some CEO's golden parachute.
We haven't had a democratic real president since JFK and perhaps Johnson.
posted by: Beethoven1 at 06/22/2011 @ 11:31am
I doubt you mean that since JFK would be rejected by you and the left as a stooge for conservatives.
He believed taxcuts were good for the economy and business
He believed in a strong and aggressive national defense
From JFK's 1960 Campaign
"Senator Kennedy, on the floor of the Senate and as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly called attention to the need for military strength as the basis for a durable peace. His ringing call to close the "missile gap" which will face us in the years ahead was termed by Joseph Alsop as "one of the most remarkable speeches on American defense and national strategy that this country has heard since the end of the last war."
http://tinyurl.com/3ujtyjs
Responding to Khrushchev in the '61 Berlin Crisis
"President Kennedy went on to say that he intended to match the drastic increase in the Soviet defense budget. He called for an additional 3.2 billion dollars in defense spending and upped the Army's strength from 875,000 to nearly a million soldiers. He also asked for a huge increase in non-nuclear weapons and civil defense preparations. In addition, the president announced he would double or even triple draft calls, and that he would put some reserve and National Guard units on active duty status."
We haven't had a democratic real president since JFK and perhaps Johnson.
All well and good to lump blame on one Democratic President, who was and is very popular with the people. How about spreading some of that love around to Reagan and his corporate sponsored Trickle Down Economics, or Bush I and II. Have you forgotten that W also had a hand in this? You and your right winged BS, blame game, and trying to push attention off what is really going on in this country is what is to blame.
The GOP are pathetic.
Pardon the typos in my post. I did not proof it first.
Bill Clinton never had any principles other than one, which was to be a two-term president. He is a corporatist. Clinton should realize that he is the past. He had his time, and it is gone now. I left the Democratic Party because it stands for nothing and became an Independent. This time I may vote Republican. I can benefit from their lower taxes. The Democratic Party runs on an empty gas tank and advocates higher taxes for nothing. It akin to throwing money down the drain. My question to any Democrat is this:why pay higher taxes for nothing? I doubt that Clinton, Obama or any Democrat can give me a reasonable answer to that question.
Clinton and Obama are very much alike. Two ego-maniancs. Both stink at governance. Both support a corporate agenda at the expense of the people. Obama has done nothing to to rein in the financial industry destroyed the economy. I had read this economic fiasco was coming. I pulled my money out before has was made out of it. I do feel sorry for people who saw their investments ruined.
The Democrats are pathetic.
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