Mother Jones - Comments for "Deer in Headlights"

Kevin: I have my doubts that repealing Glass-Steagall contributed much to our current problems, but in any case the repeal was supported by Robert Rubin and Larry Summer and signed into law by Bill Clinton. Ditto for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act a year later.

I can't believe you're saying this Kevin. The repeal of these acts enabled the Enron debacle, among others, and even worse, they permitted the creation of the completely unregulated credit default swaps market and all of the securitized mortgage instruments, including CDOs, SIVs, etc., which lie at the heart of the meltdown in our financial markets.

I'm sure Phil Gramm, the sleazebag who engineered their passage, will take comfort in your words. Clinton, Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs are not on the side of average guy. Clinton and Rubin are hugely wealthy and have nothing in common with most people, financially. They don't deserve a pass, just because they're Democrats.

No Shit, Lucy. Let's all worry incessantly about whether Obama is secretly Ronald Reagan while we *know* for a fact that McCain is a disaster of epic proportions just waiting to happen.

And Anonymous, your musings about the UK and Tony Blair just described the 8 years of Bill Clinton to a tee. I think that the 8 years of Clinton was better than anything McCain could ever provide, so if Obama sticks with the same type of administration as Clinton, we're in a lot better shape than we are now.

Let's try, shall we, to get past the FICTION that Democrats control the Congress when Republicans filibuster everything against their self-interest and Bush can veto and will veto anything the Democrats manage to slide past. Democrats DO NOT control Congress. Please stop repeating this crapola narrative.

Worth repeating for all those concerned Mitches so troubled that Obama didn't entrance the Senate into regulating Wall Street. But why not give the benefit of the doubt to the mavericky Deregulator of Keating 5 fame who during 26 years in Congress did nothing but oppose reigning in the casino. Seems fair.

This is completely armchair campaign strategizing here, but it seems to me like this would be a good time for the Obama campaign to remind people that John McCain is one of the Keating Five.

"The last time the U.S. faced a financial crisis of this magnitude, John McCain was accepting $112,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Keating in exchange for favors in the U.S. Senate. Keating was later convicted of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy for his role in the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Can we trust John McCain in this time of economic crisis?"

Right on schedule, Sebastian Malleby notes that the repeal of G-S was supported by Democrats.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/?hpid=opinionsbox1

John McCain - the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century!

I think only one Senate democrat voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill in 1999 which repealed Glass Steagal -Fritz Hollins. See http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm...
So it is not true that Dems voted for all the deregulation.

----Hell, last year Senate Democrats couldn't even bring to a vote the biggest no-brainer of all time: a bill to close the carried interest loophole that allows billionaire hedge fund owners to avoid paying income tax at normal rates.----
Let's try, shall we, to get past the FICTION that Democrats control the Congress when Republicans filibuster everything against their self-interest and Bush can veto and will veto anything the Democrats manage to slide past. Democrats DO NOT control Congress. Please stop repeating this crapola narrative.

Okay, so now the U.S. will provide $85 billion to AIG in a so-called "loan". This is effective nationalization. We now pretty much have a state-owned financial system thanks to a Republican administration, despite having no legal authority to do this. They will borrow money from China to nationalize finance. Meanwhile, the American people are likely to vote for an old coot for president and a door knob for VP. Anybody who does not recognize our country is dying is blind.

From my perspective, of course, he not only hasn't solved our economic problems, he's actually helped to create them. From McCain's perspective, however, I believe that he would dispute the causative relationship between some of the legislation we've been discussing, which he championed, and the current financial meltdown.

My point,however, did not concern who was more responsible for the current situation but rather was an attempt to point out that people like Kevin tend to give Obama credit for simply talking about things intelligently but don't seem to expect him to take a stand on a difficult issue and fight for what he believes in. I don't think that's right. Borrowing from Anatole France, I would say that it is by acts and not words that people live.

On another level, I was trying to express something that is worrying me about Obama and what his election might portend for the Democratic Party. This is something I've been thinking about for the past few months. The question "who is Obama" is important: Is he a believer in "High Broderism"? A DLC mole? Ronald Reagan's true heir? Or is he, as his followers on the left believe, "the one" who will restore Camelot and change the Democratic Party from a docile, ineffective party DLC leaning party to a dynamic reform party with an agenda of social and economic justice?

I've been following politics in the UK for most of my life and recent developments in our sister party, Labour, have but me in mind of a scenario in which an Obama victory is actually a terrible, possibly irreversible defeat for Liberalism. It all depends on who Obama really is. Consider that under Tony Blair, Labour was constantly being faced with having to choose between the lesser of two evils: That is to say, he often made proposals which were contrary to the Labour Party's most cherished or longstand principles but which enjoyed considerable Conservative support. Thus, Labour was confronted with a terrible dilemma ---- vote against Blair, and bring down his government even though the result would surely be that the Conservative would come to power and ram through something even worse or vote against their principles. Choosing the lesser evil, Labour MP's voted again and again in support of what were essentially conservative proposals put forward by their leader with the result that the UK has now shifted significantly rightward. Despite having been "in power" for so many years, Labour has achieved almost none of its traditional liberal aims and its credibility with the public has nearly reached the vanishing point.

If Obama is Ronald Reagan's true heir as Tony Bair and Gordon Brown have been proven to be Margaret Thatcher's, I fear that we may suffer the same fate as Labour: Eight years of compromise, forced always to settle for the lesser evil, watching our liberal addenda and the peoples' trust in our party fade to the vanishing point, followed in eight years by the election of an even more conservative Republican.

It is difficult to know what is best, but I believe we should debate the thing while there is still time.

My donations to the Obama campaign are really just thank-you notes for saving us from the John Edwards catastrophe-in-the-making, the Hillary Clinton permanent-soap-opera, and (hopefully) the Hundred-Years War of Palin/McCain.

As long as Obama gets elected, restocks the government with competent staff once again, keeps his cool and tries his best, I really don't care about anything else.

Mine is the audacity of modest hope.

IF we ever have to think Kevin Drum, it because he cause us to think, to pause.

And for that, Drum is golden, is he not?

Thanks Kevin - for giving us the the floor and the forum. We just might be on to something here and it is because of you and your commitment to openness. Thanks dude.

And inkblot too, of course, the regal cat who is above it all.

Perhaps I'm confused about what it is that members of Congress do, but I was under the impression that, unlike the rest of us, if Barack Obama has a "good idea about re-regulation of Wall Street" he is in a position to implement that idea by proposing legislation.

He has. It's just that the current occupant of the White House doesn't seem like the sort of guy who is keen on helping Obama or any other senators deal with this issue.

It's sad that the Senate couldn't get a vote on the carried interest loophole, but Obama ought to be pushing the fact that he is for closing it.

Its much fairer than the sex-ed ad.

OK, somebody else mentioned this ad, so I am going to let loose. I have emailed Kevin (as well as many other bloggers and reporters) several times about this, which has gone unreported in any major blog or newspaper thus far.

The short version: the same "sex ed for kindergartners" that McCain is bashing Obama for has been funded by Bush for years via a grant administered by the CDC. Not just that, it has been implemented in such "radical" places as Tennessee and North Carolina.

So I say to anyone else reading this thread: you're either with me or you're against me. Either tell me why this is not a story worth reporting, or join me in trying to get Kevin or some other blogger or newspaper reporter to break the story. I would be really interested to hear the argument for why it's not a major-media story, e.g.,

Who cares if Bush has been funding "sex ed for kindergartners" for years and if NC and TN have been implementing such programs? That couldn't possibly give valuable context to the bill Obama voted for. Everyone knows that Bush (as well as the people of Tennessee and North Carolina) have the same kind of radical anti-family agenda as Obama, the agenda that the bible-thumper McCain is trying to protect us against. Why would we want to report a new, hard fact like this? It's much more effective simply to keep whining about the Republicans lying. No one could possibly be interested in a Republican administration supporting the same thing Obama is being attacked for.

OK, who wants to make an argument like that?

This has been my complaint about Obama (and Clinton.) Obama has raised tons of money, but he squandered an opportunity already in his hand to actually change the world.

Instead of telling us how he would lead, he could have led and talked about how he has led, and then he would not be in such a close race.