Fall Of The Republic: The Presidency Of Barack H, Obama Page #5

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within the ethic guidelines I had

as Secretary of the Treasury and when it became...

when it became clear that...

that we had some very significant issues

with Goldman Sachs and with... with...

Why didn't you recuse yourself then?

...with... with Morgan Stanley. What I did then...

It would have been very wrong for me to recuse myself.

What I did was I went and got a waiver from

the ethics agreement because when we had concerns...

Who is in charge of the ethics agreement?

What?

Who is in charge of the ethics agreement

that you got a waiver?

We... we... we have... we have a office of...

of ethics at Treasury and we have a White House ethics office.

So you got it from the legal counsel from the White House?

We... we... we got it from the... the...

the government ethics office.

So we had Snow, we had Paulson, now we have Geithner;

all these people cut from the same bolt of cloth.

These are not independent Treasury Secretaries.

They're part of the problem, not part of any solution,

and it would have been nice to see President Obama

effect some change in Treasury, but he...

of course he went and got a Wall Street insider

as his Treasury Secretary.

Everything that's speculative, parasitical, cancerous,

bloated, from all these administrations going back

to Carter and even beyond,

comes together in the Obama administration.

With Volker, with Summers,

who's part of the economic crimes under Clinton:

the guy who brought you derivatives

and the abolition of the Glass-Steagall firewall.

You could not have gotten a more perfect setup

for a takeover from a previous government,

the Bush regime and then the Obama regime.

Now there are some authors out there

already saying that it's the same bunch, and it's true.

It's... it's the same bankers who put the same boys forward.

Obama, far from helping the public

and giving them something new,

or giving them more power and say over their own affairs,

has actually sided immediately with the bankers

who, once again... once again have robbed the public blind

and now they must get bailed out by your tax money.

Obama does it all with left cover.

He makes you think that he's somehow different from Bush,

that this is somehow benevolent,

that he cares about the poor.

And in reality, this is the cruelest hoax

and the most bogus sham.

Obama is 1,000% devoted to Wall Street interests.

When Wall Street says, "Jump," Obama jumps.

And again, it's about 30 to 40 dollars for the bankers

for every dollar that ever reaches an unemployed person

or somebody who's on food stamps

or some infrastructure building for highways.

The hope with the Obama administration

was that it would move us beyond this.

But, unfortunately, what we're seeing more and more

is that Obama has brought in many of the economists

who bought into this system in the past that...

Larry Summers is a... is a very good example.

And... and... and... and so many of his economists,

many of the people there; you can really almost,

at this point, relate Obama to Hoover,

who did something similar in his presidency,

as opposed to Franklin Roosevelt, for example,

who brought in a very fresh team.

So, the concern here now is that Obama's falling into

this trap of bringing in the same people who put us

in the position that we're in today and other people

who buy into the same theories that brought us here:

this mutant form of capitalism.

Presumably, what most politicians want to come in and say,

"Hey, the problems of the past?

They're due to the old guy, and I'm cleaning house

and I'm gonna bring in a new team,

and don't blame us for the things we've inherited."

Can't say, "You know, those policies of the past,

that came before were insane,"

because you've got the guy that was

one of the key architects of those policies.

People need to stop having allegiance to their political party.

They need to have allegiance to the Bill of Rights,

the Constitution, and what has made our Republic so special:

the basic human rights and dignity

that every citizen of this country inherently has.

Not because it's some right given to us by government,

but because our Bill of Rights, our Constitution, enshrines

that these are inalienable rights given to us by God,

that we inherently have as sentient, free, conscious beings.

But instead the public cheers on the Republicans

as they win or cheers on the Democrats

as they defeat the Republicans.

It's an endless, staged, gladiatorial event.

Special interests own both parties

and they project this false left-right paradigm up

as like a movie screen and behind that, behind the throne

the establishment is able to control our society

and engineer it into this high-tech police state.

If you try to let the finance oligarchs

who created the crisis turn around and say they're

the doctors who are gonna get you out of the crisis,

they will dig you deeper and deeper into the

bottomless abyss of world economic depression,

financial collapse, and disintegration.

The Democrats have really done more to destabilize

the American economy and to help the big banks

on Wall Street than the Republicans have done.

I would imagine that the Republicans know

a little bit more about finance and markets;

enough that when someone like Goldman Sachs asks

the Congress to change laws as they did in the 90s

to do away with position limits on the futures contracts,

the Republicans would have said,

"No way. That's completely inconsistent with

any notion of a fair market."

But the Democrats, I have a feeling, are just

not financially literate enough to say, "No."

And I think that Goldman has very shrewdly positioned

themselves with the Democrats because the Democrats

typically, like in many NGOs that I've run into,

they seem to have a... a complete inability to comprehend

these issues of markets and finance

and how it relates to social justice.

So under the Democrats we also

saw the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

Glass-Steagall said there's an inherent

conflict of interest between the commercial banking side,

which is the lending side, and the investment banking side,

which is taking an ownership position.

And we have to end this conflict of interest

by separating these two entities.

You can have investment banks

and you can have commercial banks,

but they have to be separate.

Do you think that the repeal of Glass-Steagall

was a tragic mistake?

No, I don't think so.

You could be a commercial bank like Chase Manhattan

or you could be an investment house like JP Morgan.

Or, a bank like Bank of America

or an investment house like Merrill Lynch.

But you couldn't be both.

And as the 90s went on the... the screaming hyenas

of Wall Street were demanding that this prohibition,

this regulation, be abolished.

This was an illegal and inappropriate form of casino.

The derivatives were being used

and they were being unregulated

and the people were getting 30:1, 40:1, 50:1

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