"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against
the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better,
but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse
than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking
primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions,
to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley
"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination.
All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.
"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
It won’t be news to anyone here that the Bush administration colluded with the plutocracy to call in pre-emptive strikes on financial regulation. But the biggest deregulation coup, which allowed banks to act like investment brokers and investment brokers to act like banks, took place under the Clinton administration in 1999. The Orwellian named Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act removed financial safeguards which were put in place after the American 1929 Depression by the Glass Stengel Act of 1933.
Yes – that’s Phil Gramm of Nation-of-Whiners fame.
Clinton may have placed the charges, but the Bush administration lit the fuse. When Elliot Spitzer tried to blow the whistle on predatory lending, the Bush administration had the FBI investigate his personal life and leak the investigation to the press.
Here’s what Spitzer wrote, presciently, in the Washington Post in February of 2008.