General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: And the hits just keep coming.... Bernie Sanders: The Model of the Democratic Party Is Failing [View all]KPN
(15,636 posts)The Great Recession was the result of a lot of things, but it's massiveness, and the need for taxpayers to bail out the banks, was without question the final result of the 3 decades long neutering of and eventual repeal of Glass-Steagall. Granted, lobbyists and and the GOP initiated the slow demise of Glass-Steagall's effectiveness via initial deregulatory changes in 1974 that served to undermine the act, but there's no question that Dems contributed to that deregulation and were complicit. Not only did Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton continued the deregulation that started way back under Ford, but then they actually took the position that Glass-Steagall was obsolete! Did they replace it with something better? No! they simply repealed it. Was it obsolete? Well yeah, but no frigging no wonder! It's teeth had been removed including by them.
Dodd-Frank is another example of inadequacy and failure in my view. It hasn't fixed the too big to fail problem at all -- and whatever teeth it had have already been watered down by lobbyists -- under Obama's watch.
You can't blame everything on the GOP. Sure gerrymandering weakened our and Obama's hand significantly. But this has been long in the making and involves more than just the Great Recession ... and many of us have been saying so -- well before the GOP fired up the Tea Party or Faux News became the largest source of evening "news" for America.
Again, I really have to wonder why some can't accept and/or object to the notion that maybe the Party needs to do some rethinking on some things. Why is that? As a lifelong Democrat, I just have to wonder about that. It doesn't make sense to me.