Democrats are running some TV ad with President Clinton
advocating for President Obama’s re-election, and it’s pretty funny to me. In
the one I saw, Bill Clinton says we shouldn’t go back to the same failed
policies of deregulation that caused the financial crash. That’s a good point.
Most economists agree that the causes of the Wall St. meltdown and worldwide
financial crash were the repeal of Glass–Steagall (Section 20 and 32 were
repealed, and Section 16 was amended in the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), and
the “too big to fail” banking conglomerates and risky derivatives trading that
resulted from it. I wonder who signed that deregulatory piece of crap into law?
It must have been some evil Republican. Oh, no, wait; I remember now: it was President
Bill Clinton who did it, in 1999. He even
wrote a special signing statement saying how much it would help our economy and
lead to greater prosperity. And this makes him look just a little bit
hypocritical when he points fingers about deregulation, because he’s every bit
as responsible for the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act’s provisions, which
protected America’s economy for three-quarters of a century, as the Republicans
who wrote it.
But President Clinton could have made this ad seem less
hypocritical if he had taken responsibility for his part in this mess, and
said: “I know about the problems deregulation can cause, because I was talked
into signing into law the repeal of Glass–Steagall, which played a large part
in causing the financial meltdown. Well, Democrats have learned our lessons
about the dangers of deregulation, but Republicans seem to want to go right
back down this same road again. (Etc.)” Because by glossing that over, he looks
a lot less trustworthy to me, despite the fact that they appear to have written
his statement in a careful, lawyer-like manner so he can claim he didn’t say he
wasn’t also partly responsible for deregulation himself (although he clearly
does not mention it, either).
And despite touting their new Wall St. regulations, the
Obama administration has done nothing to reinstate the Glass–Steagall Act’s
provisions, nor to break up the “too big to fail” banks, which most of the
financial analysts I’ve heard on this subject say is what’s necessary to prevent
the next big financial meltdown, and that we’re in a worse situation of
inviting it now than we were in 2007. And that’s why it seems even more
hypocritical for Bill Clinton to claim that President Obama has the right plan
to protect the economy from financial deregulatory problems, when Obama’s
people haven’t even fixed the regulatory issue Bill Clinton created when he
signed the Glass–Steagall repeal into law. Or maybe President Clinton thinks
only deregulation done during Republican administrations is bad, and the
deregulation he signed is fine? He must, because he’s not pressing Obama to
reinstate it, even though we very badly need it back.
I like President Clinton, but I think this ad is pretty
misleading. And it’s too bad, because America is in a very bad state right now,
and we need honest solutions. We’re just too screwed for more of the same
political crap. If President Obama had fixed the problem President Clinton
signed into law (that is, undo the repeal of the Glass–Steagall provisions), I would
be a lot more convinced that he’s right for the economy; but as it happens, he
didn’t. And I know Republicans wrote that repeal bill, but President Clinton
could have vetoed it, but he signed it; and that one deregulatory action has
damaged the country more than all the others combined.
I have plenty other criticisms of this ad, but that’s enough
for now. Here’s the partisan propaganda piece:
And here’s the Wikipedia page on Glass–Steagall, if you’re a
bored masochist, and you want to check your facts:
