The Battle for Obama’s Economic Soul by Robert Scheer

[Better Believe It]

October 22, 2008
TruthDig.com
The Battle for Obama’s Economic Soul
by Robert Scheer

The battle for Barack Obama's economic soul is on in earnest, and it has nothing to do with the "European socialism" that John McCain attempted to use as an epithet against him. The Republican quickly dropped that line of attack, perhaps because the European Union's brand of democratic socialism has proved more effective in regulating the rapacious financial markets at the heart of the economic meltdown. Besides, the socialist British Labor Party has been President Bush's most loyal supporter of the Iraq occupation that McCain has made the test of true patriotism.

It would be encouraging if the Democratic presidential candidate did indeed attempt to learn something from Europe's democratic, and barely socialist, governing left concerning the welfare of those who are not super-rich, i.e., how to provide quality health care and education for all -- but that is not what is happening. Instead, Obama has turned to the same American "free market" elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that crowd, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning.

Key among the good guys is former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who consistently challenged the radical anti-deregulatory crusade of Alan Greenspan, his immediate successor at the Fed. Greenspan's all-too-successful effort to give the banking lobby everything it had ever dreamed of was abetted by two Clinton-era secretaries of the treasury, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Unfortunately, the two, who should have mustered the grace to depart public life in deep contrition over their failed policies, are prominent in the Obama campaign.

Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale. What followed, thanks to a rare display of bipartisan teamwork, was a total dismantling of the regulatory regime that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had put in place during the New Deal, thus undermining the finest legacy of the Democratic Party. Under the guidance of Rubin and Summers, Clinton signed off on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Gramm's two key pieces of legislation, during his final two years in the White House.

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/22-5