[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Who Will Take On the Banks?

Wed Mar 5 06:19:30 MST 2008

by Robert Scheer

Truthdig (January 22 2008)

It was smart of the top Democrats to cut presidential candidate
Representative Dennis Kucinich out of that South Carolina debate, where
they lamely attempted to deal with the dire consequences of the banking
meltdown without confronting the banks. They made all the proper
concerned noises about millions of folks losing their retirement savings
and homes, but none was willing to say what Kucinich would have said:
Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government
holds them accountable.

How do I know Kucinich would have said that? Because I interviewed him
for the Los Angeles Times back when he was mayor of Cleveland and the
banks foreclosed on his city after he refused to sell the public power
plant. Others can talk a populist line, but Kucinich lived it. He was
forced out of office that time, but voters realized ten years later that
Kucinich had been right. Thanks to the public power alternative that
Kucinich refused to sacrifice, Cleveland had cheap power, and he was
elected to the Ohio Legislature and then to Congress as his reward.

I bring this up now not to push a Kucinich presidential candidacy, which
seems quite forlorn given the power of big money and big media to set
the stage for permissible political debate, but rather to hold out a
yardstick for measuring the "progressivism" of the top three Democrats.
Sure, they all would be preferable to their likely Republican
alternatives, although Senator John McCain has been far better than all
three Democrats on both campaign-finance reform and taking on the
defense contractors who have been bleeding us dry since 9/11. I got a
little worried when Senator Hillary Clinton said she could do the best
job in confronting McCain on national security; she is shameless in
throwing money at war profiteers, while McCain has held the line on some
of the more egregiously wasteful military expenditures.

With a military budget that has more than doubled since 9/11, soaking up
trillions of dollars in obligations for future generations, it is stupid
to argue about whether the Democrats or Republicans would spend more on
needed domestic programs, because the money for those programs will not
be available. Kucinich was the one candidate on the Democratic side
willing to do what Representative Ron Paul has in the Republican debates
- challenge the phony patriotism of ripping off the taxpayers for
war-fighting expenditures in Iraq and elsewhere, leaving us less secure.

While Paul is very good, indeed the best candidate, on the waste of
taxpayer dollars on foreign military ventures, as is expected from a
libertarian, he is hostile to the need for government regulation to
control the excesses of the marketplace. And it is those excesses that
are at the root of the financial chaos we have visited upon the world.
As with the Enron scandal, which was the direct result of the
bipartisan-supported deregulation of the energy industry, so too the
subprime mortgage and easy-credit scandals now upon us. For decades,
banking lobbyists have pushed through legislation freeing them to wreak
havoc on our lives while they profit from lucrative personal bailouts
even as their own companies suffer.

Deregulation became the mantra covering corporate theft in both
Republican and Democratic administrations, and it is amazing that not
one of her interlocutors at the South Carolina debate asked Senator
Clinton about her husband's signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of
1999, which permitted banks, stockbrokers and insurance companies to
merge, overturning one of the major regulatory achievements of the New
Deal. More important, both political parties have refused to place any
serious restraints on the interest charged by banks and think it
perfectly normal, indeed healthful, for the economy that folks are given
home loans or credit cards at unrealistically low interest rates
calculated to soar after an introductory phase. What a sorry scene to
see the top Democratic contenders unable to agree that some interest
rates below thirty percent may rise to the level of usury.

For those unfamiliar with the moral crime of usury, believing it's only
a legal crime if loan sharks threaten your knee caps, let me quote from
Ezekiel 22:12 of the King James Bible: " ... Thou hast taken usury and
increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion,
and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God". Not being overly familiar
with Scripture, I am grateful to Kucinich, a product of a stern Catholic
upbringing, for having informed me, more than a quarter of a century
ago, that the bankers, and the politicians who service them, are
courting the wrath of God - even if they fool the voters.

_____

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080122_who_will_take_on_the_banks/

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