Today the Trump Administration is going after the Dodd-Frank law and a regulation designed to force retirement advisers to work in the best
interest of their clients called the fiduciary rule. Trump want to claim to the the champion of the common man, but both these changes only benefit the very wealthy at the expense of the common man. Dodd-Frank was create to offset some the deregulation of Depression Era legislation that was design to prevent a recurrence of the Great Depression. Within 10 years of the repeal Glass Steagall Act from the Depression Era, this country experienced the Great Recession of 2008 which took the majority of middle class wealth from the middle class, and put it the portfolios wealthy bankers and other financial con men.
October 29, 1929 (aka Black Tuesday) is a dark day in the history of the United States and all the rest of the world. It is the day that officially marked the end of some several years of wild speculation and unbridled economic debauchery and heralded a decade of the worst economic times in modern history. The descent into this Great Depression started in the United States on Black Tuesday and smothered the world with devastating effects that lasted for years.
October 29, 1929 (aka Black Tuesday) is a dark day in the history of the United States and all the rest of the world. It is the day that officially marked the end of some several years of wild speculation and unbridled economic debauchery and heralded a decade of the worst economic times in modern history. The descent into this Great Depression started in the United States on Black Tuesday and smothered the world with devastating effects that lasted for years.
The postmortem of this financial disaster identified many
causes with irregularities in the banking sector at the top of the list. A number of legislative measures were enacted
to prevent the recurrence of these problems, and among them was The Banking Act
of 1933 (better known as the Glass-Steagall Act). Years of stable banking followed the passage
of Glass-Steagall, but some thought that certain provisions in the
Glass-Steagall Act were unreasonable and have lobbied for its repeal in all the
years since. These efforts were largely
successful on November 12, 1999 when President Clinton (D) signed the Gramm
(R)-Leach (R)-Bliley (R) Financial Modernization Act of 1999 into law gutting
some of the major provisions of the Glass-Steagal Act. Nine years after this 'modernization', the
United States was the source of yet another wildly speculative banking/finance
scheme that brought the world to the brink of the worst financial crisis since
the Great Depression. Coincidence? I don't think so. The resulting financial crisis was all too
strikingly similar.
For the last 30 years, business interests have been busy
working an aggressive political agenda to roll back decades of business regulations
and corporate/personal taxes. They say
these regulations and taxes are an unreasonable obstacle for business that
hinders job creation. They say they want
to take us back to a Golden Age when capitalism was vital and unconstrained,
and everybody was in the queue to be fabulously rich. Though they are not terribly specific about
the exact time of this Golden Age, it appears to be the late 19th
century.
After the Civil War, this country experienced a very rapid
expansion of economic growth. Fortunes
were made, and empires were built, but in this financial feeding frenzy, it
became apparent that many of these fortunes and empires were acquired by less
than honorable means. Free markets were
manipulated, labor was exploited, politics and businesses were corrupted, and
the majority of people in this country (i.e. consumers and labor) were being
exploited for the profit of the few.
Instead of being a Golden Age, it become known as the Gilded Age taken
from the Twain/Warner novel The Gilded Age:
A Tale of Today which satirized the greed and political corruption
of that time. The gold of that age only
existed as a thin gilded layer over a much larger piece of base metal. It only had the appearance of gold from the
outside, much like the distribution of wealth in this country today.
The unfairness of this 19th century situation was
brought to light by a number of reform oriented thinkers many of whom were
writers like Twain and Warner. Their
thinking set the stage for the Progressive Era that followed during which a
number of legislative and policy measures were enacted to correct these social
inequities. Notable among these measures
are:
Free Market Manipulation: The Sherman
Antitrust Act (1890) was passed to prohibit certain business activities
(e.g. cartels and monopolies) that reduce competition in the marketplace and
establish a way for the United States federal government to investigate and
pursue business entities suspected of being in violation. The Clayton
Antitrust Act (1914) extended the Sherman Act by specifying particular
prohibited conduct, the three-level enforcement scheme, the exemptions, and the
remedial measures.
Political Corruption and Election Rigging: The Tillman Act (1906) was passed to
prohibit corporations from making direct money contributions to candidates
during elections. The Tillman Act was
extended with the Publicity Act (1910) (aka the Federal Corrupt Practices Act)
by adding and extending its range to include primary elections.
Food and Drug Safety: The Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906)
prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded food and drugs
creating the regulatory functions that in the 1930's became the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). Also in 1906, the Federal Meat Inspection Act was enacted
to prevent adulterated or misbranded meat and meat products from being sold as
food and to ensure that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed
under sanitary conditions.
These pieces of legislation and others were embellished and
supplemented with other legislation over the last 100 years to become a body of
works to protect free markets, minimize corruption, and protect consumers and
labor. These social revelations and the
legislation they spawned were not popular with much of the big money that was
benefiting from the status quo at that time. Simply put, some of the wealthy did not want to give up their
unfair advantages. The question ever
since for them has been how best to undo all this 'progressive' thinking that
happened after the last capitalist feeding frenzy of the Gilded Age.
These deregulation efforts were largely ineffective until the 1980's when these business interests formed an unholy alliance with religious extremists (aka the Christian Right) who were motivated to make abortion illegal and undermine the Constitution mandated separation of church and state so that they could declare themselves our state religion. This move brought many voters motivated by religious and anti-abortion fervor into blind aligence with the corresponding business agenda without question even though it in many case this business agenda was not in their best interests. This coming together of big money and big religion was not actually so surprising because the big religion business of fleecing the flock has made many 'religious' leaders very wealth. The wealthy religious leaders benefited from the entire Conservative Agenda religious and business (http://www.charitywatch.org/articles/Televangelists_Lack_Oversight.html ).
These deregulation efforts were largely ineffective until the 1980's when these business interests formed an unholy alliance with religious extremists (aka the Christian Right) who were motivated to make abortion illegal and undermine the Constitution mandated separation of church and state so that they could declare themselves our state religion. This move brought many voters motivated by religious and anti-abortion fervor into blind aligence with the corresponding business agenda without question even though it in many case this business agenda was not in their best interests. This coming together of big money and big religion was not actually so surprising because the big religion business of fleecing the flock has made many 'religious' leaders very wealth. The wealthy religious leaders benefited from the entire Conservative Agenda religious and business (http://www.charitywatch.org/articles/Televangelists_Lack_Oversight.html ).
The result has been a protracted, multi-front effort that 1)
acquired politicians through funding and base support, 2) stacked the courts
with persons sympathetic to their agenda, and 3) infiltrated and undermine
regulatory and policy generating agencies.
After 20 years of carefully conceived staging, the coup started in
earnest with the landmark gutting of Glass-Steagal in 1999, and a financial
feeding frenzy began that brought our economy to the worst financial crisis
since the Great Depression in less than a decade of elapsed time.
The simplest approach has been the direct purchase of
politicians with campaign funding and out right gifts of cash, merchandise, and
services. Properly primed (aka bribed)
politicians can generate legislation to eliminate or water down existing laws
and policy such as executive orders.
This simple approach has been hindered by the 1906 Tillman Act which was
enacted to stop the practices at the end of the Gilded Age.
Another more covert way of relaxing regulatory control has
been the infiltration regulatory agencies by persons sympathetic to business
interests. For example,
Finally when all else fails, it is important to stack the
courts with judge appointments sympathetic to business interests.
The separation of church and state was pure genius, and had
the business of the time been as large and meddlesome in the days of our
countries founding, business would have been separated from the state by
constitutional amendment in the Bill of Rights too.
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