Just Say Why

Free Market Madness
by
David Schlecht

The next time someone tries telling you how wonderful the “free market” is and how it will solve all our problems, I suggest you stop and take a breath and really question it. Here’s why.

Though I’ve discussed the silliness of the supply side economics, or voodoo economics as it’s called, the “free market” is also based on outright lies.

Going all the way back to Econ 101, let’s revisit the economic structure of the robber barons. A middle class in an economy is something that does not grow or survive without political regulations and pressures. It’s that simple. Without regulations (in other word, a free market) pay for the working class will always reduce to subsistence levels. Always!

In a truly free economy, there are a few wealthy leeching off the misfortune of the rest of society. And then there are the working poor. There is basically nobody in between. In other words, no middle class.

Sure, there is a very small percentage of small business owners, but they are barely a step away from the working poor. Ever read any of Dickens’ stories? That is exactly how England’s free market worked in the 19th century; it’s how any free market works over time. Been to Somalia lately?

Other than the stinking and unethical rich, who would ever want such a society? Well, obviously someone is doing a great job of convincing the uneducated or naive that “free markets” are in our best interests.

There is no shortage of “think tanks” funded by the rich, whose sole job is to fool the gullible amongst us.

A “free market” society is an imoral society. Don’t believe the lies. It only causes disaster for anyone but the elite.

Finding the Right Balance
by
David Schlecht

The American Conservatives are working overtime trying to scare America about being socialist. They even go so far as to equate socialism with Communism. Firstly, it’s immoral and really sad to see a political party taking advantage of the ignorance of our fellow Americans. It only takes a few seconds to research the meaning of the two and one realizes that they are not equivalent. Shame on those Conservatives for taking advantage of the less fortunate.

Let’s talk about socialism, here. In simple terms, socialism is when a society unites together to ensure that certain needs are fulfilled. A good example of the dreaded socialism is our local police departments. We combine our tax dollars to ensure that everyone is protected by our socialist police departments. Personally, I like our socialist police departments. It was a good idea.

Our fire departments are socialist, as well. We have all combined our taxes to ensure that the fires will be put out, no matter whose house or whose neighborhood is on fire. Yes, a very good socialist idea, indeed.

Basically, almost everything about the services we collectively provide for each other through our taxes is socialism. And, all this socialism works quite well, until the Republicans get in power and privatize our social programs. Once profit is the primary purpose, the social value is lost.

Nobody really wants a social automobile industry, or computer industry. But, we do all agree that certain needs must be guaranteed, certain needs as defined by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. A good place to start is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Is that where we want to draw the line? Or should we do like the Republicans want, and throw away the social programs our forefathers have put in place for us and our country?

Is socialism bad and evil like the Conservatives would like you to believe? Imagine a country without social programs. Somolia comes to mind. That’s the kind of country the Conservatives want us to become: the ultra rich feeding off the poor, sick, and dying. It really makes you want to vote in another Republican, doesn’t it?

So, I think we can all agree that we want some level of socialism in our country, at least we know the country’s founding fathers did. So, how much is the right amount?

Again, getting back to the words of our founding fathers:

• Life
• Liberty
• and the Pursuit of Happiness

Should we have a national health care system? This is so very obvious that it’s the first item on the list. Without a national helath care system, there is no life. Without an education and without our legal systems, there would be no liberty. And, without education, and a national financial system, there is no guarantee of the pursuit of happiness.

Simply put, the bare minimum that our founding fathers wanted for our citizens is:

• National Health Care, available to all (for the slower among us, that means free)
• Police and legal protection, available to all.
• Education, again free to all.

Now there are obviously numerous considerations that our founding fathers didn’t think of. For example 200 years ago, there wasn’t much thought of environmental protections, but without the EPA, today, there is no way to stop the greedy (Conservative-donating) corporations from destroying the world around us.

This short list of social programs that we don’t have contains services provided for free or almost free in all the other industrialized nations. In other words, the minimum requirements as put forth by our founding fathers are provided by all the first-world countries EXCEPT America.

How did this happen? You can thank the Conservatives.

Now, let me be fair. The Republican Party has not always been like this. Only in the post Reagan era have the Corrupt Conservatives been in total control of the Republican party. And, now that America is seeing exactly what the Conservatives have to sell, they’re abandoning the Republican Party in droves.

This is bad.

If we are going to have political parties, we need more than one. But, as we all see, the Republican Party marches in lock-step opposing all the things America’s founding fathers fought and died for.

How do we get the unhealthy conservative bent out of our political discourse? Now that the Democrats are in charge, the corrupt corporate conservatives are working overtime trying to corrupt the Democrats as well and we can guarantee that they will have some level of success, but hopefully, not the kind of success they’ve had with the Republican Party.

It’s time for the Republicans to retake control of their party and it’s time for America to kick out the caustic Conservative memes. Some level of socialism, as envisioned by our forefathers is a good thing. Now we only need to decide how much is enough.

What’s With the Thomas Paine Lies?
by
David Schlecht

I’ve seen numerous posts over the years questioning the sickness of unending deceit coming out of the Republican Party. Today is no different. Why would any political party want to lie about the political leanings of one of America’s Founding Fathers?

The new video out pushing the Tea Party features a Thomas Paine impersonator. I just don’t understand why a party would choose one of the more progressive forefathers and make him up to look like he would, in some remote way, support what the Republican Party stands for.

There is no question that the Republican Party relies heavily on the failure of their followers to question their motives, or to even possess a grade school education.

Thomas Paine was for taxing the rich, and ensuring that aristocracies don’t take root in our country. He was all for “stakes” which were his program for scholarships which would be given to the young to allow them to get educated and start businesses, by taxing the rich.

For those who didn’t pay attention in elementary school, the Tea Party was really a revolt against big business, with the name of The Honorable East Indian Trading Company. It was a revolt because this mega-corporation, like Wal-mart, was given unfair tax breaks that threatened to destroy New England’s tea houses. It was a revolt against all the things the Republican Party stands for.

Thomas Paine wrote extensively about building a social safety-net, like Social Security, to protect the people. Check out Rights of Man.

Simply put, Thomas Paine was for all the things that this Tea Party is against. The purpose of this Tea Party is to revolt against taxes on the rich, the same taxes they were paying before Reagan screwed up our country. Thomas Paine was for estate taxes. Yes, those exact taxes the organizers of the Tea Party are opposing.

The billion-dollar families in America have united to create the Tea Party and they’re relying on the ignorance of the Republican followers. How can they expect such stupidity? Well, because they haven’t been let down, yet. Will they this time?

Senate Votes to Bankrupt America
by
David Schlecht

Last week our Senate representatives voted 51 to 48 to further reduce taxes on the overly-wealthy, thusly putting our country further in debt. The taxes on the wealthy have been reduced over the past 30 years, just like the last great depression, and we wonder why we’re looking at another great depression. How can our representatives really vote this way? It’s not rocket science.

Here’s a list of who voted against it:

Congratulations to all of them for doing the right thing. Do you see anything missing from this list? That’s right. There’s not a single Republican that voted against this bill. Not a single one. The party that lies to us about fiscal responsibility is at their finest, here, further expanding our debt while paying off their rich contributors. Why does anyone still vote Republican? Obviously if you’re the 1/10 of 1% of the richest greediest scumbags of the country, I can see why you vote that way. The rest of us, there’s just no excuse.

This stupidity couldn’t have passed without a few sick Democrats enabling the Corrupt Conservatives.Who were these sickos? They should be removed from office, TODAY! Here’s the list:

Now, I also see Nevada’s Ensing voting for this, but then there’s never been any question who Ensing thinks he is supposed to represent, and it certainly isn’t the Nevada public.

Had enough Conservative Corruption yet? It’s time to weed out the corruption, Democrats and Republicans, alike.

The True Cost of Doing Business
by
David Schlecht

While walking around our neighborhood, today, I noticed a business driving around tossing out little plastic packets of coupons, leaving them in the gutters, on the sidewalks, in our driveways, on our lawns, in our flowerbeds, and who know where else. In a “reasonable” society, this would be fined as littering. In our world, this is considered “doing business”.

This particular business has arranged to have the neighbors and the tax payers pay to puck up the by-product or the cost of doing business. What a deal. If you and I decided we could save a couple bucks throwing our trash on the businesses properties and driveways and homes, we would be hauled off to jail, so why can they get away with it?

This is only one very simple example of businesses sloughing off the cost of doing business onto society. In the case of this particular business model, the tax structure for the business must include the cost of cleaning up after the business, or better yet, requiring that the business clean up after itself. They should also be required to reimburse the society for the time and cost they put into the cleanup process. Sure, it’s only a couple dollars per packet, but it would better define the success of the business model if they had to clean up after themselves.

We can take this example to the next level. There was a gravel pit up the road where a construction company was mining out gravel for doing some nearby road work. Now that the road work is done, the gravel mine is abandoned and the damage from the strip mining gapes like an open wound at the drivers who pass by, on the newly repaired roadway. The construction business, like any mining operation is causing damage to the environment that they should be repairing. First off, the businesses should be required to repair the damage they do and the tax structure should be set up so that regulation of these repairs is paid by the business, not the rest of society.

Let’s look at this topic from a higher perspective. All businesses should be required to retain the environment in a pristine condition. Costs to the environment must be taxed to the businesses, and those taxes must be used to restore from the damage. Where else does society pay for the cost of doing business? Let’s list just a few.

1. Regulatory agencies for policing the businesses
2. Infrastructure for providing access and services in and out of the business
3. Legal infrastructure for providing a means of redressing grievances with and between businesses. This, of course means the cost of police services, fire services, legal services, laws, courts and such.
4. Medical services to those affected by the businesses. In the case of nuclear power plants, surrounding neighborhoods pay for centuries after a nuclear power plant fails. This also includes the cost of medical services to heal the millions who become sick each year from the sale and burning of gasoline, ethanol, coal and other fuels.
5. The cost of cleaning all the carbon out of the environment.

This short list obviously only addresses a small fraction of the costs that businesses should bear but that are pushed off on society instead.

Why do we let this happen? If  businesses can’t remain profitable while cleaning up after themselves, they shouldn’t be in business. It’s that simple.

Now that we’re in the process of cleaning up our financial system, maybe it’s time we started requring businesses to pay their won costs of doing business.

Biden Appeals to G20 Protesters
by
David Schlecht

Yesterday, America’s Vice President, the representative of the free world, appealed for calm and patience while the G20 “tackle the economic crisis.”

Why are our representatives (notice I didn’t say leaders) so ignorant to the fact that the G20 is an indication of the problem? The G20 is not the solution. The solution is to enable labor and fix the working conditions of the people of the Earth — all the people. The G20 get together to figure out how to make industry more profitable and this comes at the expense of labor and at the expense of the living conditions of the people of the Earth.

Why don’t our representatives realize this? Because big business has their ear, but the rest of us just quietly work harder and harder increasing our nation’s Gross Domestic Product while letting the greedy businesses take more and more of the profit. It has to stop. This, Mr. Biden, is the problem. The G20 is the problem.

Make the G20 more like the Labor20 and things will improve overnight and the people will quite demonstrating and rioting.

Reinventing America’s Economy
by
David Schlecht

We’ve been hearing a lot lately of the need to reinvent our economy. Our financial system is so broken that we can’t prevent it from melting down multiple times in each century. This essay investigates some areas where we can greatly improve our world by reinventing America’s financial structure.

We start with a short investigation of exactly what is causing this recurring nightmare that plunges so many of us into poverty every few decades. Without a firm understanding of the causes of the disaster, there’s no way to fix it. There is no way for me to say this without sounding like I’m politically biased but this is a fact obvious to anyone paying attention. The Conservatives around the world are directly responsible for this disaster just like they were for the last Republican Great Depression.

During the depression of the 1930s, we, the people put numerous safeguards in place to protect us from another disaster. We put many rules in place to control greed in our financial markets. We passed laws to prevent businesses from getting too big to fail. If these safeguards were still followed, today, we would not have this disaster. It’s as plain and simple as that. The people forcing through the failed policies around the world are all chanting “Free Market, Free Market”. Well, the greedy Free Market is what we’re looking at having to bail out. The banks are too big to let fail, so here we are, again, bailing them out.

And, here we are, again, bailing out the autmobile industry. We stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act which saves us from having businesses too big to fail. The last monopoly to get cleaned up was Ma Bell. Since that time, the Free Market Advocates have been getting their way and stripping us all of the safeguards our grandparents put in place to save us.

We’ve already addressed two of the major causes of this disaster, 1) Too Big to Fail Businesses, and 2) Lack of or refusal to enforce safeguards to control the greedy. The third leg of this stool is The Federal Reserve.

Unknown to most people, the Federal Reserve is niether federal nor does it have any reserves. Like “The Clean Air Act” or “The Healthy Forest Act”, the name is only there to confuse the unsuspecting and the gullible. This is a privately owned bank that we have put in charge of managing our country’s money supply. As I said, there are no reserves, so the Federal Reserve controls the money by providing credit.

America didn’t always have a Federal Reserve. It wasa created as a national bank to help control the flow of credit. However, it has been privatized and is now a for-profit bank with stockholders. Their responsibility is now to the stockholders, not to America, and many of the stockholders aren’t even American. Not only is the Federal Reserve a for-profit bank, but all the banks and gambling houses (aka investment houses) are now for-profit. This means that they make decision, not based on what’s best for America, but what’s best in the short term for their shareholders and their CEOs.

Now we know what three of the major causes of this disaster are, so let’s look at how to clean them up for good. Obviously we can’t rely on just safeguards, because our grandchildren will abandon our safeguards just like we abandoned the safeguards our grandparent put in place. We have to fundamentally change the structure of our economy.

#1. Too Big to Fail: Since we can’t rely on our politicians to enforce the safeguards against Too Big Businesses, we need to create an agency to monitor monopolies. We also need to put laws in place that let competetors initiate monopoly investigations against monopolistic competetors in the hopes of splitting them up.

#2. Free Market Greed and Foolishness: Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were both initially government lending institutions. They have since been privatized. As it alwasy happens when government functions are sold to the greedy, they get out of hand and end up, well, like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. Greed should be frowned upon, not rewarded. If greedy politicians want to privatize our government services, they should be unable to vote on any legislation in which they have received any money or gifts, either directly or via Political Action Comittees. Furthremore, any privatization must require a 2/3 vote in both the House and Senate.

Big business currently owns our government. There’s no simpler way to put it. It costs $20,000 per day for a politician to run for office because of the billions of dollars that are spent by greedy big businesses to buy our representatives. We need to take the money out of politics. We need immediate finance reform that prevents anyone from spending personal money on elections. This means all elections must be federally funded.It’s the only way to get the greedy businesses out of our government. Furthermore, we need to revise many of our corporate laws and remove the rights of personhood from our corporations. Corporations do not need and should not have the right of free speech. Corporations should not be allowed to own or invest in other businesses and corporations, all corporations should have “serving the public interest” as their fundamental purpose, and corporations should have a maximum life span after which they are shut down and sold off.

#3. Corrupt Banking Industry: First, federalize the Federal Reserve. Our nation’s credit should not be managed by greed and profit. For that matter, buy back Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and run them as the services they were intended to be. Secondly, every state should have a state-owned and state-run bank that provides credit for the people and businesses of the state.

There are, of course, many more things that need immediate attention, but these three are, in my opinion, three of the biggest issues facing us today.

What Part Taxes Play in the Recovery
by
David Schlecht

Let me preface this with a challenge. I’ve voted for my share of Republican candidates so don’t mistake this challenge as a partisan rant. A friend of mine recently asked me to tell him a single piece of legislation that the Republican Party has introduced and passed in Congress, that help the average voter. I was woefully unable to come up with even a single one. I must defer to our trusty readers for your expertise. Can you name a single piece of legislation benefiting the average American submitted and passed by the Republicans?

Now to our topic. What role will taxes play in the recovery process and what role should they play? Now that the foolhearty Conservative Economic joke has exploded in our faces, it’s time for us all to realize what went wrong so we can fix it and ensure it never happens again, at least not until the next Republican Great Depression.

Before JFK, the financial elitists were charged a 90% tax on anything over 3 million dollars. Over time, slimeballs in Congress passed bill after bill that allowed their rich buddies to get around the taxes. After enough time, the 90% was more like 70% actually getting paid. When JFK closed the loopholes (well, it wasn’t really JFK as he was assassinated before he could sign the law) he explained to the American people that this was actually a tax increase on the swine (my words, not his) bribing our representatives and the tax cut from 90% to 74% actually increased tax revenues.

Then comes along the next Republican president to attack the American economy, Reagan. He dropped the top marginal tax rate on those sickeningly rich scumbags trying to corrupt our government from 74% to 35%, while the Republicans in Congress were poking more and more loopholes in the laws JFK closed up. This had the short-term effect of making the economy look good but within a year we had Reagan’s first recession. And just a few years later, we had the second Reagan recession, the Savings and Loans disaster.

You may be wondering why taxes have anything to do with the economy and recessions. If you are, read the earlier posts describing how these interact. In short, taking spending money away from the government takes income away from government workers and the needy and thereby takes it out of the economy. Giving more money to the uber-rich puts more money in risky speculation. What follows are bubbles and crashes. On top of that, the Republicans were busy destroying the rules put in place to get us out of the past Republican Great Depression. The S&Ls were free to speculate and with billions in slush money from the Republican sponsors, the industry self-destructed.

Along comes Bush, Clinton, and Bush. I cringe at grouping Clinton in with the Party of the Uber-Rich, but he followed the same stupid ideals, reducing the size of government further, reducing the services to the needy, and removing safeguards on the risky investments. All this made us ripe for the next Republican Great Depression. By now, Bush Junior had reduced the average tax on the wealthy corporations to less than 7%, while the middle class workers (the actual financial engine) were paying as much as 35% and paying Alternative Minimum Tax on top of that.

The families of the 50s and 60s had almost 50% of their budgets available for discretionary spending, with a single bread winner. Today, the middle class family spends less than 25% on discretionary spending. The middle class pays more for taxes, more for health care, more for housing, and now needs two cars because both parents must work.

It’s simple. With less spendable money in the hands of the middle class, less money goes into the economy. The next step is to start relying on credit. The middle class went into hawk, up to their eyeballs. Rake up the credit cards, rake up the mortgage, charge your groceries when you can’t make ends meet.

Eventually, the middle class can no longer live off credit and spending grinds to a halt. That’s were we are today. All because of taxes and relaxed regulations.

Armed with this knowledge, how do we devise a solution to this mess? Obviously going back to the 90% tax rate for anything over 3 million dollars is a good start. Those who benefit the most from our country should pay the most back into it. Those who own Wall Marts and make billions of dollars while their workers go hungry must repay those stolen dollars back to society. It’s easy and it’s fair.

But, leveling the playing field by taxing the rich isn’t enough in iteself. Higher taxes on the rich will automatically translate to more money for the workers, barring the Republican generated loopholes. But this is still the trickle-down approach and the Conservatives have proven to us that this approach doesn’t work. The higher taxes on the sickeningly rich must be ballanced with a higher average wage for the workers, yes the engine of the economy. Our minimum wage must be increased to above the poverty level. A good start is $30,000 per year. A rising tide lifts all boats and this will translate to better compensation for all workers and will mean a stronger economic engine.

Sure, the billionaires will still make more money than a normal person can spend, but they will just have to deal with it.

I can almost hear the Conservatives groaning in disbelief. “What? You mean tax the rich? It’ll kill any incentive to make money!”

What are they thinking? Let me ask you. Would you be happy to invent something to make $3,000,000.00? This would actually increase innovation because there would be more people able to be innovators rather then working two and three jobs at below poverty wages.

So, how do we get there from here? We can’t just change the tax laws overnight. And, we can’t continue to borrow the money to pay for this recovery. We need to pay as we go. We need to implement a change as quickly as possible. This means a two-pronged approach. The first approach is the re-implement the Paris Hilton tax. There’s no reason for any estate to carry billions of dollars from one generation to the next to the next while others starve. The income from insurance policies and from inheritance should be taxed at the same rates as any other income. Anything over three million dollars get taxed at 90%.  Just by turning back on the estate taxes, we will have enough tax money to pay this recovery package as we go. During the coming 5 years we can gradually re-implement the 90% tax on anything over three million dollars.

One more big shot in the arm is to open up Medicare to all Americans. If we can buy better insurance through Medicare than we can get by paying billions of dollars to the CEO’s of the big insurance companies, the businesses will have more money to pay for wages and other benefits, or they can pay for the 90% tax if they prefer.

Derivatives and the Coming Bust
by
David Schlecht

There is a serious and gravely overlooked disaster staring us in the face, one that is part of the current financial crisis but has the potential to completely destroy America’s and the world’s economy, for good. This disaster is the Derivatives Market.

The Republican Congress of the 90s (with the help of Clinton) destroyed the safeguards that prevent our banks from becoming casinos and betting on anything and everything. Today, many of our financial institutions own lots and lots of derivatives that they will soon find to be worthless.

What are derivatives? In simple terms, they’re bets, multi-billion-dollar-bets. Remember how the banks bundled up the risky mortgages, into securities, thereby masking the true risk of the investment. Derivatives as when investors bet that a particular stock or security or commodity would go up or go down. These derivatives were “derived” from the value of the original investment. Then, the next “master of the universe” would bundle these derivatives again, adding more bets. As you can see, $100 worth of investment can be resold endless times by bundling and by creating derivatives.

If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme to you, you’re right on the money. It’s a scam, but it’s bundled so the investors don’t really know what they’re getting.

You may be wondering how pervasive the derivatives market really is. If you guess it must be pretty darned big in order to be bigger than our existing crisis. then you’d be right. The total investment in all the derivatives is more than 100 times greater than all the Gross Domestic Product on the entire planet. When they go down in flames, there won’t be enough money in the world to bail them out.

Until we see how other countries deal with this, it’s impossible to say just how bad things will get. Common sense, however, indicates that this could be the event that causes the entire world to re-invent our financial systems. It could be that the only way we can survive this coming crash is to let all the investors that bought the bad derivatives jump out of their windows and start up the investment systems from scratch.

This could be a good change in the long run but it is not a good time to be getting this news and it will be many years of bad times, fighting with the Always-Been-Wrong Republican Party’s obstruction getting this fixed.

Deregulation and our Current Crisis
by
David Schlecht

Before we begin, let me suggest that you take a quick trip to Devilstower’s page and get a black and white list of America’s accomplishments over the past 8 years and beyond. It’s impressive, to say the least.

Continuing from our discussion of credit’s effect on the economy, let’s look at the disastrous effect deregulation had on the current mess.

A quick trip down memory lane, or down the pages of Google, will remind us of the rigid and difficult changes that were necessarily implemented to lift us out of the last Great Depression. Of the many regulations implemented, most were geared towards reducing risk in the banking industry.These regulations helped usher in decades of safe and reasonable prosperity for America.

Before the last Great Depression, the banks were freed up to speculate to their hearts’ content. That was Free Markets at it’s height. Many banks had invested heavily in the real estate boom of the 20s. When home prices fell, like they did here the past 8 years, many of these institutions began to falter. At that time, many of the banks were closed for a banking-holiday and restructured to stop the run on the banks and to allow the banks to understand and make changes for the new regulations.

Also, at that time, the government stepped in and guaranteed the bank accounts, helping to restore some trust in the banking industry. Many of the banks were simply bought by our government and restructured and then sold when they were, again, profitable. It worked.

Nobody ever accused George Bush or the Republican party of being intelligent, but they could have at least consulted with someone who knew how to read history books. Instead, what they did was flood the faltering banks with billions of our tax dollars and never asked the banks to make a single change in their greedy and risky ways. Herbet Hoover all over again. Bush never even asked them what they were going to do with our money or even asked the banks to report on their progress. Sounds like a scam to me.

So, what are they doing? They’re buying up other banks (speculating) and giving themselves and their investors the money, billions of dollars. Does that sound like a scam to you?

When our banks start to falter and crumble like the 30s, Americans won’t panic quite as bad since our government is insuring our savings accounts. But they will still panic and we may be looking at another “Bank Holiday” to help prevent another run on the banks.

There is one more crutial aspect of this that needs to be addressed. The people who caused this mess, besides the Republicans who deregulated the banks, are a small group of greedy financiers, who prefer to be called “master of the universe,” who have made billion and billions of dollars off of this disaster. The money didn’t just disappear. These “masters” need to be investigated, their proceeds returned to the public, and criminal punishment rendered.

You must be wondering, by now, exactly what happened to all those regulations put into place after the last Great Depression. Remember all the cries for Let The MARKET Decide? Remember, all the huffing and puffing about “The FREE Market will fix it”? There have been numerous safeguards loosened up and many more just plain ignored by the Bush Administration, but the worst thing was actually done by a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. He allowed the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act which allowed the banks to get back into doing the same greedy things they did in the 20s and they have gotten stinking rich while our economy crumbled.