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Consider that it was the Clinton administration, led by Lawrence
Summers, which signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act of
1999, which ripped down the firewalls that had been established by the 1933
Glass Steagall Act designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now
experiencing. Glass Steagall established
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the
financial system. With Glass Steagall
demolished, and the passage of NAFTA, the Democrats tumbled gleefully into bed
with corporations and Wall Street speculators.
They used institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a welfare
gravy train.
And now, many of the
architects of this deregulation, including Summers, have come back to haunt us
in the Obama White House. But the cost
for our empire of illusion is not being paid for by the corporate titans, it is
being paid for on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing
towns, and in depressed rural enclaves.
Human beings are not commodities, they are not goods -- they grieve,
they suffer and they feel despair. They
raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood (despite
the glibness of many in the media) by complicated sets of statistics, lines on
a graph that chart stocks, or the absurd utopian faith in unregulated
globalization and complicated trade deals.
It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making
enough money to live with dignity and hope.
The growing desperation across the US is not unleashing simply a recession -- we have been in a recession some time now but rather a depression unlike anything we've seen since the 1930s. It has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and to do without unions or benefits -- which is excellent news if you are a corporation.
Video clip of a Chris Hedges interview:
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