While they are thankfully well out of the loop in the current scramble in Washington to both reverse the economic collapse and try and help financial companies and financiers profit from it, it’s worth reading too in this 10-year-old clip what Phil Gram and then Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE and now embattled president of the New School in New York City) had to say about ending Glass-Steagall.
Sen. Gramm:
'The world changes, and we have to change with it. We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.''
And then Sen. Kerrey, with a line that should probably be etched someday on his tombstone as his most memorable line:
“The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown.”
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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