Well, look at the big job the Senator got who spearheaded the repeal of Glass-Steagall for the banks. As soon as it was done, he was made vice chairman of one of the largest of banks, paid multi-million dollar income and his only duties was to go around giving speeches.
R.K.: Who is this?
PCR: Phil Gramm.
R.K.: Phil Gramm. Yeah.
PCR: So, it's the way it works. When the morality of the culture breaks down, everybody is for sale, even the guardians who are supposed to protect the public. See, this is the problem with the liberal and the progressive view-- they don't understand that it all comes back to what is the moral fiber of the population.
R.K.: What is the what? I couldn't hear that.
PCR: The moral fiber. If it's been eroded, corroded, if money is all, if money is the most important thing, if you have to have money to have a good opinion of yourself, to be valued by others, to be looked up to, then everything ends up for sale and that's the trouble. And that's... so I say the answer is to go back to regulation, but there is still some regulation and as that SEC prosecutor said, he simply couldn't bring indictments of the banks because the higher ups wouldn't permit it because they were protecting the banks so they got good jobs when they left.
And when you look at how the government is run, who are the secretaries of the treasury? They come out of Wall Street, mainly out of Goldman Sachs. Who runs the financial regulatory agencies? Former Goldman Sachs executives. Who runs all of the European organizations? Former Goldman Sachs executives.
Don't you remember how when the EU stepped in to Greece and Italy and said, we're having to take over your government because you can't pay your bills and if you want loans to get these bills paid, you'll have to let us decide who is in the government. They appointed a Goldman Sachs guy to run Greece. They appointed another one to run Italy. So, when you have the whole system run by the people who are abusing it and looting it, regulation is non-existent.
You could have every regulation you could think of on the books, it just wouldn't be of any use because the prosecutors would be blocked by the higher ups from bringing the cases.
R.K.: It's... you know, I gotta say, when I have these conversations with you, they're usually pretty bleak. What you've given here is a pretty bleak assessment.
PCR: No, I'm not giving a bleak assessment. I'm telling you the truth. I'm telling you what the real situation is. So, it is not the case like so many liberals and progressives think, that we would have plenty of regulation if it weren't for Milton Friedman and the libertarians. It wasn't Milton Friedman and the libertarians who overturned Glass-Steagall.
R.K.: Well, it was Clinton.
PCR: It was republicans and democrats acting as agents for the banks. It wasn't done by an economics department or--
R.K.: And that's the kind of history that makes me believe that at this time in the world and in history legislation is not going to change things. Elections are not going to change things.
PCR: Well, elections could, like I said earlier, if you actually get third parties and they get these votes. You know, like has just happened in the European Union elections, this was a shock and this just happened when the tea party guy, the university professor unknown just unseated Eric Cantor. Now, t it can happen. But the question remains, what happens to this guy?
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