NickCole, I am happy to see that you haven't abandoned Democratic principles. I was beginning to worry.
Concerning your points, however: all the gains you mentioned that Bill Clinton effected were laudable, of course, but the fact that he signed that repeal of the Glass-Steagel Act is just too big to let go. It just is.
In terms of profundity, I equate the repeal of that act with the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand in the 1910s. Please listen to me, and I think you'll agree.
Both incidents set in motion a chain events that rocked the world to its very core. In the case of the repeal, it nearly brought the entire financial world to its very knees. We haven't been to war, no, but we teetered on the verge of a complete collapse of the financial system as we know it. I shudder when I contemplate how close we came to oblivion.
This last paragraph shows you understand nothing about what happened. It's an hysterical distillation of ObamaCo propaganda talking points, nothing more. And the worst part is you don't even know it; you think you're informed and came up with that but it's straight out of what ObamaCo wants people to believe.
I do not understand why so many people willingly believe what a politician, or anybody else, says rather than doing their own research. Boggles my mind.
I worked at Goldman Sachs all through the 1990s. I voted for Clinton, which placed me in a very small minority among my collegues, and I opposed Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall), which placed me in an even smaller minority. I was very critical of Clinton for signing it, and I know what the climate in financial services was like before and after, and how few people --Republican and Democratic in and out of the industry-- thought it was a bad thing.
Should Glass-Steagall have been repealed? I thought and still think absolutely not. But I understand what it was and what it wasn't, and it did not "set in motion a chain events that rocked the world to its very core." (It's fascinating what drama queens the NoDramaObama crowd actually is.) What Gramm-Leach-Bliley did was officially allow commercial banking to get into investment banking, which in reality had already happened. Interestingly, banks that remained independent despite Gramm-Leach-Bliley, like Lehman and Bear Stearns, were the ones that collapsed during the economic crisis. And the way it all unfolded supports the belief that in fact Gramm-Leach-Bliley softened the impact of the crisis. The crisis didn't happen because investment and commercial banks were merged, although I believe that was bad and should end, the crisis was a result of a real estate bubble and mortgage/credit corruption.
The real cause of the economic crisis is not one piece of legislation but of layered irresponsibility, with the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke at the top of the heap. Their role in this is so egregious, both those men should be in prison. Then there's Clinton who pushed to relax middle-class requirements for credit cards and mortgages (when I criticized that I was called elitist and old-fashioned). And Wall Street firms for bundling Mortgage Backed Securities laced with garbage and using those toxic assets as collateral. Then there's mortgage brokers, real estate agents, home buyers who participated in driving up the price of real estate too far too fast and over mortgaging it with bad loans. And don't get me started on Congress, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd right at the front of the line along with Republicans. I spoke out about all of this as it was happening and got shot down by most Republicans and Democrats who called me henny penny and dismissed my concerns out of hand -- but I was right (now they say "nobody knew" but the truth is a few of us did know and were ignored). And I'm right today that neither Obama nor Congress, neither Democrats nor Republicans, are doing what must be done to restructure; and without it we're going headlong into another economic crisis that'll leave us in even worse shape.
ObamaCo wants to blame Clinton and Gramm-Leach-Bliley, though they have not moved to reinstate Glass-Steagall, nor have they passed legislation to replace it. It's now been a year and a half, and if they really believe the repeal of Glass-Steagall sent the world to the edge of oblivion, you ought to wonder why they haven't done something about that.
The signing of that repeal—a most colossally foolish act—was more than bad enough to balance out the few good things Clinton accomplished during his tenure.
Believing that signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley "was more than bad enough to balance out the few good things Clinton accomplished during his tenure" is just ignorant. People who prospered as a result of Clinton's great economic moves, and who didn't lie and cheat and make stupid choices in the 2000s just because they could or because "everybody else is doing it," are still today much better off than before Clinton, in careers and owning homes and in many cases other assets they would almost certainly never have been able to otherwise.
Here we are in 2010, a year and a half after the economic crisis hit, and despite what we've known for that year and a half, the Obama Administration has not enacted legislation similiar to Glass-Steagall or any substantive financial regulations. I happen to agree that Clinton was foolish to sign Gramm-Leach-Bliley (though I know darn well you'd have gone along with the crowd back then and supported it as well), but he did it when the economy was humming and it looked on the surface like a good thing to do. So what's Obama's excuse, supposedly believing Gramm-Leach-Bliley caused the crisis and doing nothing to remedy that while being President for a year and a half and counting?
Clinton made his share of mistakes and IMO signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley was one of them, though he stands by it. But it was not the reason for the economic crisis. And through a Republican administration and a new Democratic administration the law stands today just as it did a year ago, two years ago, ten years ago.
](/images/smilies/bang.gif "Brick wall ](*,)")
