Tuesday, May 05, 2009
What America needs is another “Pecora Commission,” argues Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. Ferdinand Pecora, the lead counsel for the Senate Banking Committee in the early 1930s, led the charge to uncover all the shady Wall Street actions that helped crash the stock market in 1929. At a time when the country suffered greatly because of the greed and arrogance of bankers, Pecora went after the likes of J.P. Morgan Jr. and other financial heavyweights, all with the blessing and encouragement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
But Barack Obama is not FDR. In the words of Kuttner, “Rather than channeling and affirming public indignation as Roosevelt did, Obama sees populist backlash as a dangerous force to be damped down.” The President’s economic team has too many former Wall Street buddies, like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Timothy Geithner, to want to go after those who wrecked the financial system. Kuttner writes that “Obama's economic team is working hand in glove with the same investment banking firms and commercial banks that invented and underwrote the financial products and subterfuges that created the collapse.”
“By refusing a Roosevelt-scale break with Wall Street, the administration embarrasses itself,” Kuttner contends, further adding. “…We need a latter day Pecora Committee to arouse the public and the back-benchers in Congress. Otherwise, the reform moment will pass, and we will revert to something very much like business as usual.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky
Reviving Pecora's Ghost (by Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post)
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