Matt Taibbi on how Wall Street is using the recession for yet another power grab. Key paragraph:
So that’s the first step in wall street’s power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation’s top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm’s fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.
On this side of the Atlantic things are slightly better, but again we see how the government and the banks are conspiring together to exclude democratic controls from their decision making. Parliament has had no say in the emergency measures taken by our finance minister, while parties like the Christian Democrats are abusing the sense of urgency to force through long desired measures like raising the mandatory retirement age to 67 from 65.