Great Moments in Bi-Partisanship: The Signing of Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999

[Octafish]

27. "Dollar Bill Phil" Gramm + Larry Summers, Protector of Plutocracy

Dollar Bill Phil Gramm

"Dollar Bill Phil" Gramm, The senator who's raising bundles of cash from Wall Street in his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, likes to tell audiences how tough he is on those who commit "crime in the streets." But when it comes to "crime in the suites," ol' Phil turns into a bleeding heart, knee-jerk defender of corporate muggers.

By Jim Hightower / Alternet, April 25, 2000

"Dollar Bill Phil" Gramm, The senator who's raising bundles of cash from Wall Street in his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, likes to tell audiences how tough he is on those who commit "crime in the streets." But when it comes to "crime in the suites," ol' Phil turns into a bleeding heart, knee-jerk defender of corporate muggers. These thieves can be more brutal than any thug who grabs your purse on the street. Ask the victims of Prudential-Bache -- a blue chip mugger who ripped-off not a purse, but the life savings of trusting retirees all across the country who had invested in a fraudulent securities scheme Prudential peddled to them in the eighties. Not to worry though -- Ol' Phil Gramm to the rescue! The rescue of Prudential and other white-collar criminals, that is. While he's been raising money from Wall Street firms, he's been using his Senate position to protect them from you small investors. Last year he single-handedly choked to death two bills: one that would have made investment advisors more accountable to their customers, and another that would have made it easier for you to fix mistakes they make on your credit reports. This year Gramm is even trying to strangle the tiny "office of Investor Education and Assistance" -- the consumer agency that tries to inform you investors of your rights and help you get your money back when some high-powered stockbroker steals from you. And now "Dollar Bill Phil" has managed to weasel his way onto the Senate finance committee -- which oversees the securities industry -- giving him even more power to be a willing accessory to Wall Street's "crime in the suites" -- and making it harder for you victims to do anything about those crimes. So when you hear Phil Gramm going on and on about how he's going to "free the marketplace," grab your wallets -- It means he's turning loose his corporate contributors to mug you.

SOURCE: http://www.alternet.org/story/8198/hightower%3A_dollar_bill_phil_gramm

To demonstrate DU's new spirit of Buy Partisanship, I present Larry Summers:

Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story

By Matthew Skomarovsky
LilSis.org
Jan 10, 2011 at 19:31 EST

EXCERPT...

Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.

Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.

SNIP...

Summers also starting showing up around the Hamilton Project, which Rubin had just founded with hedge fund manager Roger Altman. Altman was another Clinton official who had come from Wall Street, following billionaire Peter Peterson from Lehman Brothers to Blackstone Group, and he left Washington to found a major hedge fund in 1996. The Hamilton Project is housed in the Brookings Institution, a prestigious corporate-funded policy discussion center that serves as a sort of staging ground for Democratic elites in transition between government, academic, and business positions. The Hamilton Project would go on to host, more specifically, past and future Democratic Party officials friendly to the financial industry, and to produce a stream of similarly minded policy papers. Then-Senator Obama was the featured political speaker at Hamilton’s inaugural event in April 2006.

Summers joined major banking and political elites on Hamilton’s Advisory Council and appeared at many Hamilton events. During a discussion of the financial crisis in 2008, Summers was asked about his role in repealing Glass-Stegall, the law that forbade commercial and investment banking mergers like Citigroup. “I think it was the right thing to do,” he responded, noting that the repeal of Glass-Stegall made possible a wave of similar mergers during the recent financial crisis, such as Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. He was arguing, in effect, that financial deregulation did not cause the financial crisis, it actually solved it. “We need a regulatory system as modern as the markets,” said Summers — quoting Rubin, who was in the room. “We need a hen house as modern as the food chain,” said the fox.

CONTINUED...

http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-american-plutocracy-the-larry-summers-story/

Lil Sis is the antidote to Big Brother.

PS and most importantly: You are most welcome Uncle Joe!