Back to 1929 with John McSame and The Greedheads

So it sounds like what caused the economic shitstorm that’s banging on our collective head now – what are we supposed to call it? “meltdown?” “crash?” – is the same thing – what was that thing called? – that caused the Stock Market Crash of 1929, triggering the Great Depression. That’s what it sounds like to me.

It’s mostly about two acts of Congress – “laws,” they call them. The first one was enacted under Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D) , the President who was elected to get us out of the Great Depression that his predecessor, Herbert Hoover (R) had led us into. FDR wanted to make it impossible for the insatiable greed of the financial and banking industries to wreck the lives of millions of Americans ever again. So in 1933 he signed the Glass-Steagall Act, which (among other things) made it illegal for a single institution to be both a bank and a financial services provider (i.e. deal in insurance, stocks, or other investments).

The second Act of Congress – again read, “law” – trashed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, stripping away the safeguards that FDR’s progressive administration had put in place. In the 1980s, after 50 years of a reasonably well regulated financial system, the greed-heads were complaining that American businesses couldn’t compete in the world market because their hands were tied by bureaucratic regulations. Those were the Regan years, but memories of The Depression were still so vivid that even The Great Communicator and his voodoo economists couldn’t engineer the gutting of Glass-Steagall. Not yet.

Fast forward to 1999, when Republicans control both houses of Congress. They hook up with a goodly number of (what were called “neo-liberal”) Democrats, ram through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act with a VETO PROOF two-thirds majority, and the blow-dry Prez from Arkansas is obliged by law to sign it.

And POOF! We’re back in 1929, and guess what kids – the sky is falling.

PS: The “Gramm” of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is John McCain’s senior economic adviser, who had to resign when he called Americans, “A nation of whiners” and the current catastrophe, “a mental recession.”

And John McSame? He says he’s always been a deregulator; no shit, he says so himself.