The Nation: Toxic Advisors ( by Robert Scheer)

[amborin]

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"Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage. Sanders gets right to the point: "Mr. Gensler worked with Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in US history."

Sanders' hold will not stop the Gensler nomination, because Congress and the president, recognizing the nation's mood, want to give Wall Street whatever it wants to make the stock market go up. And Gensler is a reassuring figure to the moguls of finance; he was a partner at Goldman Sachs before being brought by Goldman honcho Robert Rubin to the Clinton Treasury Department.

After Rubin left to take a $20-million-a-year job at Citigroup, which he helped run into the ground, Lawrence Summers, his protege and replacement at Treasury, elevated Gensler to be an undersecretary. Gensler then performed as Summers' point man in advocating for deregulation legislation that enabled the current debacle.....

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.....In congressional testimony supporting the radical deregulation of the financial derivatives market, Gensler had insisted with great enthusiasm that "OTC derivatives directly and indirectly support higher investment and growth in living standards in the United States and around the world." As to the many trillions of dollars in credit swaps that now afflict the world economy, Gensler specifically called for freeing swaps of this kind from existing government regulation in the Commodity Exchange Act, which regulated other futures such as wheat sales. He said, "...wap transactions should not be regulated under the CEA. ..."

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<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/scheer?rel=hp_currently>