Danny Schechter - ColdType

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islation that the panel helped draft last fall. Sen. Charles E.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) reported $18,000 to $95,000 in investments
in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bonds, and also that he sold at
least $15,000 in Fannie ‘step-up’ bonds at the end of last year.
The committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Richard C. Shelby
(Miss.), reported holding $260,000 to $850,000 in money market
and retirement accounts with Countrywide, Citigroup and
Wachovia.”
For years, the committees charged with regulating were
actually in the deregulation business. Deregulation was the
free market mantra promoted by many politicians and business
leaders. When they were successful, there were fewer
cops on the beat as economist Loretta Napoleoni explained in
her book Rogue Economics.
“What has happened really,” she told me, “is that the Chinese
walls which were then dividing the barrier between one
branch and the other branch of the same bank in order to prevent
insiders trading, in reality did not work as they should
have. And the reason why it didn’t work is because it is a sort
of self-regulating procedure. Soon, the government was no
longer controlling what was happening inside the bank.”
And that, she says led to an upsurge in corporate crime,
“the reason why the line between what is criminal and what is
not criminal has disappeared is because of deregulation. When
you remove all the restrictions, all the controls, then of course,
there is a blurring of what is legal and what is illegal.”
Of course this is a complicated story beyond the scope of
this book but elements of how they did it are becoming clearer
and clearer.
The Center for Responsive Politics released a stunning
report in March, 2009, detailing how Wall Street got its way.
Here’s part of their media release: