“Sold Out”: New Report Follows Lobbying Money Trail Behind Deregulation that Helped Cause Financial

In a new report, Robert Weissman of Multinational Monitor points to twelve deregulatory steps that led to the financial meltdown. It also does an analysis of the amount of money Wall Street poured into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying over the last ten years. Their answer? A staggering $5.1 billion over the past decade.

Guest:

Robert Weissman, Director of Essential Action and editor of the Multinational Monitor. He is author of the new report “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.”

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration is making a concerted effort to boost confidence in the US economy amidst waves of continued layoff announcements, negative economic data, downward-spiraling markets. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped below 7,000 for the first time in eleven years. The market has now lost almost a quarter of its value this year and more than half since its high in October 2007.

Speaking to reporters yesterday after meeting with the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Obama said he was sure the US economy would rally back.



remainder here: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/4/sold_out_new_report_follows_lobbying

has really taken off with our pizza lovers I see.

Democrats letting it happen. Republicks obviously were the driving force and are the primary villains here. But Democrats were responsible for preventing these things form happening and they chose to enrich themselves instead. That, in essence, is why the DLC is a cancer on America. It is their corporatist ideology that directly led to the collapse of the regulatory system.

So not an equal amount of blame, but certainly an equal amount of responsibility.

but they all stayed in the game because it was so lucrative and easy. The Game was fixed and all with any brains expected the crash some day, but they were all making tons of money. Maybe just not expecting the total extent of the wreckage when the bets were called.

The beauty of the swindle was the taxpayer and treasury would have to back all the bets -no real downside to the racket. The financial house my have been inadvertently terminally busted, however.

The lesson being business "persons" out of governments period, and push re-start until something coughs back into life? Preclude the sell-out disasters by separating business from government with a money-proof firewall.

"...ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, we saw over the last decade and really the last three decades, with both parties in power in Congress and the executive branch, this long series of deregulatory moves. And as you go step-by-step through them, you see that those are the things that really paved the way for the current financial collapse.


Perhaps the signature move was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented co-ownership of commercial banks and securities firms, investment banks. That was precipitated by and directly authorized the creation of Citigroup, which is now sucking so much public taxpayer money and has really been at the cutting edge of driving the financial crisis we’re now in.


You can go forward another year and see that Congress, with the Clinton administration authorization, prohibited the executive branch agencies from regulating financial derivatives, the instruments that no one can really understand or get a handle on but which have multiplied the problem from the housing crash many-fold over. So we now have $600 trillion in financial derivatives being traded around the world, with no one having a handle on what they are, who owes whom, and all of this requiring us to pour tens of billions of more dollars more every day, it seems, into AIG.


You can step forward and look at the failure to enforce rules against predatory lending, beginning with the Clinton administration, but really accelerating in a really terrifying way with the Bush administration, so that there were about three actions taken by federal regulators in the peak period of predatory lending—three—against some of the commercial lenders and mortgage brokers who were undertaking some of the most abusive predatory lending activities. And on and on it goes.


And there was, of course, over the last three decades a real surge in deregulatory ideology. And perhaps the people who were putting this stuff forward believed in it. But it also makes sense to think that, maybe a little bit, they were influenced by the staggering amounts of money that the financial sector was pouring into Washington, as you said, more than $5 billion in campaign contributions and lobbying money. And, you know, they got a good return on investment, and it was good for them while it lasted. It’s turned out to be quite a disaster for them but, more importantly, for the rest of the country and the world..."