*"LISTEN LIBERAL! OR WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE?" By Thomas Frank
Kansas City native son and political writer Thomas Frank's book talk on his newest work, "Listen, Liberal! Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People" at the Kansas City, MO Public Library, March 24, 2016. VIDEO, 38 mins., and well worth it. Excellent discussion, Rating A.
Author and Kansas City native son Thomas Frank returned to his hometown to talk about what's wrong with the Democratic Party in support of his new book "Listen, Liberal!." Following on the tradition of his popular book "What's the Matter with Kansas" which carefully chronicled how the Republican Party of Lincoln has been seduced and deliberately taken over by extremist ideologues of the far right, Frank now makes the case that the DEMOCRATIC PARTY has also been taken over by a type of CONSERVATIVE ideology that, while not promoting ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, certainly rationalizes it.
While Republican "establishment" figures revere the accumulation of wealth as a sign of 'winning' which somehow makes them automatically somehow qualified --or entitled-- to govern, The DEMOCRATIC "ESTABLISHMENT" believes that the world is a 'meritocracy' where the elites of the 'professional class' are best suited to govern based on their superior educational attainment and connections.
Frank asserts that the two political parties dominated by societal ELITES have systemically failed the WORKERS in America, resulting in a space for POPULISM to naturally grow into.
The Democratic Party under the leadership of President BILL CLINTON turned its back on its working class and middle class roots while attempting to expand and capture the professional class. Claiming that 'THEY HAVE NO PLACE ELSE TO GO', the Democrats have also been responsible for policies that increased INCOME INEQUALITY and increased the economic insecurity of white working class people. Some of these people have found a new place to go. They have now left the building. Many of them can now be seen following a pied piper named TRUMP.
The broken two party political system that has largely seen the hereditary moneyed elites-- who thought they could control the working class with a mix of social conservatism, phony fiscal fears and tax voodoo, and foreign fear mongering-- fight with the intellectual professional class elites who thought they could control the working class because 'they have no place else to go', is giving way to an authoritarian populism embodied by a narcissistic reality TV caricature of success likely to be the next Republican Presidential nominee.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And that's all I need.
So I write you all off. In the meantime, GO HILLARY!!!!
Emo Progressive (or "emoprog"
is a self-described liberal or progressive, often with libertarian leanings, whose political orientation is to be angry, dissatisfied and unhappy with the state of the nation at any given time, because in their view, liberal policies are not being implemented quickly or forcefully enough. They have particular contempt for Democratic presidents.
Emoprogs are ideological purists who disdain compromise and incremental change, which they see as "selling out" liberal ideas like full employment, an end to all wars, state secrets, and liberal social policy.
Emoprogs dislike Republicans but reserve their greatest disdain for Democratic presidents, whom they relentlessly attack for not meeting a set of ideological goal posts that are constantly adjusted to ensure that the president will be deemed a disappointment, "not progressive enough" or "just like a Republican" no matter what policy achievements are made.
Emoprogs routinely dismiss or ignore congress' role in making or impeding policy, believing presidents can simply "use the bully pulpit" and "fight" in order to overcome constitutional or legislative obstacles.
Emoprogs have a strong affinity for 3rd party politics as a way to punish Democratic presidents. They are especially hostile to President Obama and deem anyone who expresses a lack of ill will toward him to be "Obamabots" and enemies of liberalism.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Emo%20Progressive
As Tommy Frank pointed out. Thank heaven, there should be a commemoration/honor- a plaque or something for "The Intervention"!
I was younger and stronger during the last one, and it was rough. But now...wow. 
met in secret meetings held at the White House to work on PRIVATIZING SOCIAL SECURITY. The major Social Security program to provide safety and protection for people in old age and those unable to work was established by FDR in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Clinton's Plan was to transfer the over $2 Trillion Funds in the Social Security Trust to the private hands of financiers on Wall Street for use on the stock market to gamble. From the late 1980s, New-DLC-Third Way Democrats were committed to allying with the banks for campaign support and to disband FDR's NEW DEAL reform legislation implemented to preserve the US from another economic crisis like the Crash of 1929 that caused the Great Depression, and to create strong laws to protect and maintain the economy, society, workers and the middle class.
Since its creation SOCIAL SECURITY has been a popular program and a hallmark back bone of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
In January, 1998 Clinton stated the plan to *"REFORM SOCIAL SECURITY" in his speech at the State of the Union Address, but then fate stepped in when the MONICA LEWINSKY scandal broke soon afterwards. Fortunate timing for the American people. Otherwise the process to privatize the Social Security Trust Funds would have succeeded and ended up on Wall Street. With the coming collapse of the subprime mortgage housing bubble and the 2008 Financial Crash nine years later, millions of Americans lost homes, jobs, pension funds, retirement savings, and Social Security might have been in real trouble if an enormous amount of the funds would have been lost by the banks.
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In 1999 the next year, Clinton continued deregulating more rules on bank operations that the financial industry had supported with millions in lobbying, by enacting the
*1999 GRAMM-LEACH-BLILEY ACT which repealed GLASS-STEAGALL, the BANKING ACT of 1933. Glass-Steagall was FDR's landmark New Deal financial reform law that essentially separated checkbook commercial banks from investment bank speculation. *For 75 years, the firewall of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Banking Act prevented another major US financial crash, from the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression until 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/05/business/congress-passes-wide-ranging-bill-easing-bank-laws.html?pagewanted=all
-1999 Clinton Signs GRAMM-LEACH-BLILEY-ACT, Repeal of 1933 GLASS-STEAGALL BANK ACT Act Key Provisions
-FDR Signs GLASS-STEAGALL BANKING ACT 1933, Co-Sponsors Sen. Carter Glass (D-VA), Rep. Henry Steagall (D-AL)
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The year 2000, Clinton's last in office saw enactment of the *2000 COMMODITIES FUTURES MODERNIZATION ACT*, a bill which Congress rushed through in Dec. 2000 during a lame duck session of Congress, that favored deregulation in the finance industry's derivatives and credit-swap obligations instruments while the country was focused on the outcome of the contentious Gore v. Bush election results.
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..The saga of the COMMODITY FUTURES MODERNIZATION ACT begins in 1998. At the time, the economy was booming, stocks soared, and new instruments of trading were found to make more money while evading the oversight of regulatory bodies. Two of those growing instruments were financial DERIVATIVES and CREDIT-DEFAULT SWAPS. *As these new financial instruments emerged a debate began over whether or not to REGULATE THEM.
The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC) *BROOKSLEY BORN issued a first call for her regulatory commission to have power to oversee financial derivatives. While previous legislative attempts had been made earlier, Born’s efforts were the most direct and threatening to the financial industry. >During an April 1998 meeting of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, Federal Reserve chairman Alan GREENSPAN, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert RUBIN (and later Secretary Larry SUMMERS), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman ARTHUR LEVITT opposed Born’s efforts and attempted to derail her.
-BROOKSLEY BORN, attorney, Chairman of the CFTC (Commodities Futures Trading Commission) knew in the late 1990s the dangers of derivatives, MBS and CDO financial products and in 1998 tried to convince key govt. regulators, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt of the high risk they posed for major Economic Crisis. *See the excellent PBS FRONTINE Program, "THE WARNING" (2009).
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-warning-brooksley-borns-battle-with-alan-greenspan-robert-rubin-and-larry-summers-2009-10
*BORN felt that an unregulated derivatives market that spawned the LTCM bailout could “pose grave dangers to our economy.” In the end, Born lost her battle and, in May 1999, asked to be replaced as CFTC chairman. The new chairman, William Rainer, was more amenable to the positions of industry leaders and the major government officials Summers, Greenspan, and Levitt. Later that year, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets released a report calling for “NO REGULATIONS"” of DERIVATIVES AND SWAPS and began crafting a program to make that possible. Meanwhile in Congress, lawmakers were still up-in-arms over Born’s attempts to regulate the financial derivatives market and began working to pass their own set of deregulatory language. Leading the charge in Congress were *SENS. PHIL GRAMM (R-TX) and RICHARD LUGAR (R-IN) and Rep. THOMAS EWING (R-IL). In May of 2000, Rep. Ewing introduced his Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Throughout the better part of the year Gramm, Lugar and Ewing worked with the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets—most specifically, Treasury Secretary Summers, CFTC Chairman Rainer and SEC Chairman Levitt—to strike a deal on the bill.
- SEN. PHIL GRAMM (R-TX), Champion of Financial Deregulation: Chairman of Senate Banking Committee (1995-2000)
The final language, which the public was hardly aware of, contained some new sections not in the original Ewing bill that, for all intents and purposes, exempted swaps and derivatives from regulation by both the CFTC, which had already implemented rules that it would not regulate swaps and derivatives, and the SEC. Also, hidden within the bill was an exemption for energy derivative trading, which would later become known as the “ENRON LOOPHOLE" - this loophole would provide the impetus for Enron’s nose dive into full blown corporate corruption. *Ultimately, while the unregulated market in derivatives and swaps did not cause the economic downturn itself, it was a propellant of the crisis, accelerating the collapses of major financial companies across the globe.
As of June 30, 2008, the GLOBAL DERIVATIVES MARKET had exploded to $530 trillion, while credit default swaps had grown from mere insignificance to $55 billion. *When the credit crisis and the mortgage meltdown began to take hold, major firms found out the swaps made their investments far riskier than they could handle.
>Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and American International Group (AIG) all collapsed due to problems with the unregulated market of credit default swaps. The MAJOR BANKS were also heavily involved with credit default swaps. A report from the Comptroller of the Currency recorded in the third quarter of 2007 that the top banks in the credit default market were JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wachovia. Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia after it collapsed. Bank of America has received approximately $45 billion in TARP funds from the Treasury Department, mostly to offset losses from its acquisitions of Countrywide Financial in 2007 and Morgan Stanley in 2008. Citibank’s parent company Citigroup faced a complete MELTDOWN during the end of 2008, received $50 billion in TARP funds from Treasury, and is breaking apart into smaller companies. JP Morgan Chase, while weathering the crisis far better than the other banks, still received $25 billion in TARP funds. *CONSENSUS is nearly universal that the FAILURE TO REGULATE financial derivatives trading and the subsequent explosion of credit default swaps, BY PASSING THE COMMODITIES FUTURES MODERNIZATION ACT, WAS A MISTAKE. Deregulation supporter Chris Cox, a former SEC chairman under President George W. Bush and congressman from California, called the swaps *“the fuel for what has become a global credit crisis.” According to Bloomberg, ALAN GREENSPAN “acknowledges he’d been ‘partially’ WRONG to oppose regulation of such instruments.” Former SEC chairman LEVITT stated that if given the chance for a do-over he “would have pushed for some way to give greater transparency to products which turned out to be injurious to our markets.”
htttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-blumenthal/how-congress-rushed-a-bil_b_181926.html_________
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Banking Act of 1933, commonly called Glass-Steagall, June 16, 1933, by Julia Maues, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
*THE BANKING ACT OF 1933, Commonly Known as GLASS-STEAGALL for Congress Members Who Co-Sponsored the Bill.*
The emergency legislation that was passed within days of President Franklin Roosevelt taking office in March 1933 was just the start of the process to restore confidence in the banking system. Congress saw the need for substantial reform of the banking system, which eventually came in the BANKING ACT of 1933, or the GLASS-STEAGALL ACT named for the Congress member co-sponsors. The bill was designed *“to provide for the safer and more effective use of the assets of banks, to regulate interbank control, to prevent the undue diversion of funds into speculative operations, and for other purposes.” The measure was sponsored by Sen. Carter Glass (D-VA) and Rep. Henry Steagall (D-AL). Glass, a former Treasury secretary, was the primary force behind the act. Steagall, then chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee, agreed to support the act with Glass after an amendment was added to permit bank deposit insurance..
Some background: In the wake of the 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH and the subsequent GREAT DEPRESSION, Congress was concerned that commercial banking operations and the payments system were incurring losses from volatile equity markets. An important motivation for the act was the desire to restrict the use of bank credit for speculation and to direct bank credit into what Glass and others thought to be more productive uses, such as industry, commerce, and agriculture.
In response to these concerns, the main provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 *effectively separated commercial banking from investment banking. Senator Glass was the driving force behind this provision. Basically, commercial banks, which took in deposits and made loans, were no longer allowed to underwrite or deal in securities, while investment banks, which underwrote and dealt in securities, were no longer allowed to have close connections to commercial banks, such as overlapping directorships or common ownership.
..Prior to the passage of the act, *there were no restrictions on the right of a bank officer of a member bank to borrow from that bank. Excessive loans to bank officers and directors became a concern to bank regulators. In response, the act prohibited Federal Reserve member bank loans to their executive officers and required the repayment of outstanding loans..Following the passage of the act, institutions were given a year to decide whether they would specialize in commercial or investment banking. Only 10 percent of commercial banks’ total income could stem from securities; however, an exception allowed commercial banks to underwrite government-issued bonds.*The separation of commercial and investment banking was not controversial in 1933. There was a broad belief that separation would lead to a healthier financial system.
*It became more controversial over the years and *in 1999 the GRAMM-LEACH-BLILEY ACT repealed the provisions of the Banking Act of 1933 that restricted affiliations between banks and securities firms. Con't.
Read More: http://www.federalreservehistory.org/Events/DetailView/25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Banking_Act
Last edited Fri Apr 22, 2016, 03:44 PM - Edit history (1)
Four denizens in the world of high-finance predict the credit and housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s, and decide to take on the big banks for their greed and lack of foresight.
Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Charles Randolph (screenplay), Adam McKay (screenplay) | 1 more credit »
Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling | See full cast & crew »
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short_(film)
