via AlterNet:
Nation Books /
By Robert ScheerThe Great American Stick-Up: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
For Wall Street, the holy grail was not cash handouts but a deconstruction of the complex public-private partnership ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.October 27, 2010 |
Editor's note: Excerpted from the book The Great American Stick-Up: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street, by Robert Scheer, by arrangement with Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2010.Ronald Reagan called her his favorite economist, and Wendy Lee Gramm seemed to deserve the praise. Both while she was an academic economist and after Reagan appointed her to various regulatory positions in his administration, she excelled in articulating antiregulatory rhetoric that marked her as a true believer in what would later be labeled the “Reagan Revolution.”
Reagan himself had risen in politics after six years of tutelage as a spokesman for the General Electric Company, from 1954 to 1962. It was a time of conversion, as he described it, from being a “hemophiliac liberal” Hollywood actor to a cold-blooded Big Business conservative. Carrying the company’s banner, Reagan came to absorb the message that government regulation developed during the New Deal had become a chokehold on economic growth. Although as governor of California and later in the White House Reagan would preside over massive government budgets and even expand them, he found in Gramm an ideological “small government” soul mate. The Mercatus Center, an antiregulation think tank based at George Mason University from which Gramm has proselytized mightily, proudly boasts in her website biography that the Wall Street Journal “called her ‘The Margaret Thatcher of financial regulation.’”
However, unlike the former British prime minister, neither Gramm nor President Reagan was able to bring about much change in the balance between government and the private sector. While his administration did funnel hundreds of billions of dollars in new Cold War military spending to corporate contractors -- hugely expanding the national debt in the process -- Reagan was not able to deliver to Wall Street a parallel windfall.
For Wall Street, the holy grail was not cash handouts but a deconstruction of the complex public-private partnership ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to restrain capitalism’s most self-destructive patterns. For these so-called FIRE firms -- Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate -- this half-century-old regulatory system, modest as it was, was an irritant that limited their ability to gamble and leverage their dominant positions. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/books/148609/the_great_american_stick-up%3A_how_reagan_republicans_and_clinton_democrats_enriched_wall_street_while_mugging_main_street/
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