Forum Post: Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 13, 2011, 9:04 a.m. EST by enough
(587)
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f we have learned anything from the greatest recession since the Great Depression, it is that Wall Street requires strictly enforced regulations and close oversight. We learned from hard experience that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led directly to the economic malaise we now face. The big banks lobbied congress and the president to repeal this law, which had protected us for 65 years. This colossal mistake effectively allowed Wall Street to police itself and the results were predictable. Wall Street banks became too big to fail and too big to jail. Last year, Wall Street lobbyists put a full-court press on congress and made sure our spineless representatives passed a toothless financial regulation bill. This ensures that Wall Street banks would be bailed out when your ravenous greed gets you into trouble again, as it surely will. Main Street will not rest until Glass-Steagall is reinstated.
Exactly, with the exception that repealing Glass-Steagall, over the LONG TERM, would hurt our cause, but a SHORT TERM repeal is certainly warranted, which is why what we most immediately need is a comprehensive strategy, and related candidate, that implements all our demands at the same time, and although I'm all in favor of taking down today's ineffective and inefficient Top 10% Management System of Business & Government, there's only one way to do it – by fighting bankers as bankers ourselves. Consequently, I have posted a 1-page Summary of the Strategic Legal Policies, Organizational Operating Structures, and Tactical Investment Procedures necessary to do this at:
http://getsatisfaction.com/americanselect/topics/on_strategic_legal_policy_organizational_operational_structures_tactical_investment_procedures
Join
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/StrategicInternationalSystems/
if you want to be 1 of 100,000 people needed to support a Presidential Candidate – such as myself or another you'd like to draft – at AmericansElect.org in support of the above bank-focused platform.
I think maybe many people do not know that restoring Glass-Steagall is sitting (languishing) in committee in Congress as we speak.
On April 12, 2011 Marcy Kaptur introduced H.R. 1489 to restore Glass Steagall. It states "To repeal certain provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and revive the separation between commercial banking and the securities business, in the manner provided in the Banking Act of 1933, the so-called "Glass-Steagall Act", and for other purposes." There are currently 30 co-sponsors.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-1489
(from wikipedia)
Thanks. Any bill that restores Glass-Steagall is a step in the right direction. Let's hope the powerful Wall Street lobbyists do not water it down like they usually do so that the legislation is toothless. They do this all the time so congress can make believe it is reining in the banks and the banks can make believe they are being reined in. Bust up crony capitalism. Remove the nexus between elected officials and Wall Street at its roots.
If anyone goes searching for the original Glass-Steagall, it can be a bit difficult to get. Here it is:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Banking_Act_of_1933
Not light reading by any means, but interesting to skim through.
I posted this in two other threads. Here it is again:
Do you think they are actually going to do the right, logical, sensible, moral and feasible thing and let the “to big to fail” banks fail like they should?
Put a firewall between the JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and HSBC's $238 TRILLION dollars in derivative exposure, and normal banking functions, like your savings, business loans, etc. Let the casinos fail; they are already bankrupt many times over by rational accounting. We are all serving the insane casino system as it is now.
It could be done in, say, 5 days, during an imposed bank holiday.
That's the target. That is where the "Occupy Wall Street" movement worldwide has to go.
Doing this with Obama in residence is almost certainly impossible, so he has to get out.
So there you have it.
Personally, I think Nov 2012 is a time marker that just serves denial of the real situation. Before that date we will experience transatlantic vertical hyperinflation or financial system explosion/disintegration.
I just posted similarly and think it should be considered as our first demand as the detractors say we have none. It should be brought to table by the GA and discussed.
Absolutely.
If we have learned anything in the last 65 years it is that the boards of directors of capital will work tirelessly and ingeniously to dismantle any regulation that hampers their pursuit of profits. Re-regulating will led us back to Great Depression 3. Re-regulating capitalism is ultimately useless. We need to make the move out of capitalism, from a system with the single objective of amassing business profits to an economic system whose essential objective is meeting the basic needs of its people and . Re-regulating is asking for the same nightmare of fear, misery, and inequality for people who must depend upon trading their time in the labor markets of capitalism for mere survival.
We need to take understandable, well-defined steps to undo the damage caused by unbridled greed. Restoring Glass-Steagall is a well-defined step in the right direction that everyone can understand. There is a direct relationship between the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the economic meltdown we face today. Separate investment banking from commercial banking. Never allow investment banks to gamble with our bank deposits again. It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.