FDR ; Hillary talking to US about how her husband followed in his footsteps [View all]

[RiverLover]

and FDR's Four Freedoms...

Such an affront. I'm beyond disgusted.

Here's the fact of the matter...

...The chief aim of what I have termed the Republican Counterrevolution has always been to roll back the New Deal. Anti-government rhetoric hides this as surely as states' rights hid racist segregation. Of all the New Deal legislation the GOP has sought to overturn, one that has always been at or near the top of the list is the Glass-Steagall Act.

Ironically, a Democratic president repealed this for them.

Glass-Steagall

An unreconstructed Southerner from Virginia, Carter Glass shepherded the creation of the Federal Reserve System through Congress, which has caused some to call him the "founding father of the Federal Reserve System." Later Glass would serve as Wilson's Treasury Secretary, recommending aid to Europe after World War I. Just before leaving Treasury to become senator, Glass warned about banks getting involved in stocks.

...When Franklin Roosevelt took office, both the President and Congress knew the banking crisis demanded immediate action. The result was one of the crown jewels of the New Deal: the Glass-Steagall Act, officially known as the Banking Act of 1933. Glass made sure the bill forbid banks from getting into the investment business. In addition, the bill established the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, which protects our bank deposits.

Bill Clinton and the Wall of Me

Billionaire Sanford I. Weill, who according to Louis Uchitelle made "Citigroup into the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan a century ago," has what I call the Wall of Me leading to his office, which he has decorated with tributes to him, including a dozen framed magazine covers. A major trophy is the pen Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a move which allowed Weill to create Citigroup. Fittingly, Citigroup is a major contributor to guess which current Democratic Presidential candidate?

A Frontline report on the repeal of Glass-Steagall shows how those with money end up with pens from the President of the United States on their walls.


Sandy Weill calls President Clinton in the evening to try to break the deadlock after Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Citigroup lobbyist Roger Levy that Weill has to get White House moving on the bill or he would shut down the House-Senate conference. Serious negotiations resume, and a deal is announced at 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 22. Whether Weill made any difference in precipitating a deal is unclear.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, "You're buying the government?"

When Bill Clinton gave that pen to Sanford Weill, it symbolized the ending of the twentieth century Democratic Party that had created the New Deal. Although the 1999 law did not repeal all of the banking Act of 1933, retaining the FDIC, it did once again allow banks to enter the securities business, becoming what some term "whole banks."

The repeal of one of the most important pieces of legislation in this nation's history came about as a result of another Clinton "triangulation," the wobbling attempt to find the middle of the road that has somehow managed to pass for a philosophy with many Democrats for over two decades. As former Clinton former campaign Richard Morris once described it, you move a little to the left, a little to the right. I'd love to hear Clinton give that explanation to a foreclosed home owner today.

With the stroke of a pen, Bill Clinton ended an era that stretched back to William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson and reached fruition with FDR and Harry Truman. As he signed his name, in the whorls and dots of his pen strokes William Jefferson Clinton was also symbolically signing the death warrant of Liberal America and its core belief in the level playing field that had guided the Democratic Party. But it was the gift of the pen to Sanford Weill and its assuming an honored place on the Wall of Me that rubbed salt in the wound.

In his famous First Inaugural Roosevelt asserted:


Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

Clinton not only repealed the act Roosevelt had put in place to curb those practices, but presented one of the pens used to sign it to one of those "money changers."

http://www.progressivehistorians.com/2007/11/bill-clintons-role-in-mortgage-crisis.html

The irony. The gullibility required to buy into this.....

The sadness that what has actually happened, & who did it, can be painted over with a pretty speech & a triangulated narrative.

And as a woman, I'm so ashamed this is what has become of my party.

Most of all, I just want to say I wasn't alive during FDR's time, but God, how I miss him. We could sure use him today, but instead we just get people who use his name.