That's the secret history of the Clinton era. That's the story which revisionist creeps like Melissa don't want you to know about.
by Melissa's good friend, Joan Walsh. Bring on that revisionist history, Joan:
Pure bullshit. Let me repeat some points made
.
Glass-Steagall was a law. As Joan may have learned from her civics teacher -- do they still teach civics in high school? -- laws are neither made nor repealed by presidents; they are made and repealed by Congress. In this case, the repeal measure was the Republican-led Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was crafted to allow Travelers to buy Citibank in 1998.
My earlier piece quotes a summary of Anglachel's marvelously detailed research into this period:
So what do we see in this contemporaneous report? That the White House had been pushing back on this act for months. That certain Congressional Dems, Dodd and Schumer foremost, explicitly wanted to kill Glass-Steagall. That the White House fought them as well as Gramm on this issue...
Despite that incontrovertible fact of history, jackass brie-and-chablis progs like Melissa and Joan -- can't you just picture them "doing lunch" at the latest trendy bistro? -- continue to say "Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall." As though
any president could do such a thing.
Did Clinton sign the bill? Yes, and I'll tell you why. Clinton was concerned about CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 act which Clinton had dramatically strengthened. Bascially, the CRA helped combat redlining, and
made it easier for minorities to get loans.
Discussing the reasons for the Clinton administration's proposal to strengthen the CRA and further reduce red-lining, Lloyd Bentsen, Secretary of the Treasury at that time, affirmed his belief that availability of credit should not depend on where a person lives, "The only thing that ought to matter on a loan application is whether or not you can pay it back, not where you live." Bentsen said that the proposed changes would "make it easier for lenders to show how they're complying with the Community Reinvestment Act", and "cut back a lot of the paperwork and the cost on small business loans".
(No, the CRA did not cause the subprime loan madness that created the 2008 crisis, although many Republicans will try to convince you that it did.)
The same forces which attacked Glass-Steagall also wanted to gut CRA at the same time. Clinton got the best deal he could. He signed the bill; in exchange, CRA was protected.
You think otherwise? You think Clinton could have done better?
What part of the words "veto-proof majority" do you not understand?
And while you mull over your answer to that question, you might also want to try your hand at another poser that I've been asking for the past four years: Can you name a single black person not named Obama whom Obama has helped? Ever? I can tell you which black people were helped by Clinton: Anyone who was ever aided by his strengthened version of the CRA.
So much for the charge of racism.
I'll have to give Walsh credit for writing these words:
And whether it was the Volcker rule getting commercial banks out of speculative, proprietary trading, or efforts to sell shady derivatives on "exchanges" for the sake of transparency, or a contingency plan to force the toxic behemoth Citibank into bankruptcy, Obama let important reforms either die on the vine or be diluted into ineffectiveness. He had a rare window to change the system radically, and it's now closed.
Of course, that's the reason why so much Wall Street money went into the Obama campaign in the first place -- to make sure that a controllable president was in office. I also have to give little Davey Sirota credit for the following:
Obama is also a man who criticized Bush-era civil liberties policies as a candidate and then as president not only extended those policies -- but, in many cases, actually made them worse. Among other things, he has pressed for longer Patriot Act extensions than congressional Republicans, added bipartisan legitimacy to warrantless wiretapping (which he explicitly promised to end) and claimed autocratic powers that even the extremist Bush administration never dared to claim (for example, the power to assassinate American citizens without charge).
And let's not forget trade and healthcare. Candidate Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA and reform the corresponding free-trade template that has cost Americans so many jobs. He also repeatedly pledged to champion a public option to compete with private health insurers and promised to push for legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Now, President Obama is pushing a new series of NAFTA-like deals in Panama, South Korea and Colombia. And, as we now know, he didn't merely try but fail to pass a public option or the Medicare drug-negotiation provisions -- he actively used his power to eliminate those provisions from the final healthcare bill.
Of course, Sirota goes on to assail those evil, evil Clintons.
What bugs the fuck out of me is this: The Obama failure has completely discredited the anti-Clinton crowd, and yet these clowns continue to write as though they don't know that they've been discredited.
We wouldn't be in the current mess if not for people like Walsh, Sirota, and the Obama groupies at
The Nation. If not for them, we would now have President Hillary. True, she probably would have done a lot of things that would have pissed me off. Even so, we can safely presume that she would have dealt with Wall Street very differently -- and she probably would have spent the stimulus on
jobs instead of tax cuts. This much is certain: She was very clear about her desire to institute a new HOLC to help people keep their homes.
We need to make sure that the psychotic Clinton-haters get the news:
Your side lost. Obama's failure has consigned you to the trash heap of history. Stop writing. Just stop writing. You have no credibility. Just go the fuck away.They spent much of 2008 telling us to get out of the party. Now it's
our turn.
BigTrouble: Here's a new site which may be of interest to you:
IndictBreitbart.org. There is reason to believe that Big Things are going to start happening on the Breitbart front, and very soon. As I've said before: The problem with guys like Brietbart is that they are creatures of impulse, creatures of the Id -- and they simply don't know when to cool their jets.
More to come.
(By the way: Andy is pissed off because some people have called him gay. Oh, come on, Andy. In today's America, if you are male and at all well-known, there will always be someone out there who has nothing better to do with his time than to spread gay rumors about you. If Lee Marvin were still alive, people would be calling him gay. Consider it a sign that you've made it. Hell, even I have been called gay -- and if that person says it again, I'll sic my ferocious Hell-hound Bella on him.)
