Courtesy of Pam Martens.
President Obama Walking in Cross Hall at the White House. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.)
Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.)
The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign stop that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Sanders is also regularly stating on the stump that one of his top priorities as President will be to break up those Wall Street banks that would require another taxpayer bailout if they should fail.
Would Wall Street actually be brazen enough to try to censor the message of a sitting U.S. Senator? Back in March of last year, Reuters reported that representatives of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America “have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including [Elizabeth] Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street.” The article noted that withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats was one option that was on the table at the Wall Street banks.
Wall Street’s guns were out for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown because both were mincing few words about the serial corruption on Wall Street. Senator Warren is also a lead sponsor of legislation to separate insured deposit banks from investment banks and brokerage firms that speculate in stocks, bonds and derivatives, thus restoring the Glass-Steagall Act that successfully protected the country’s financial system for 66 years until the Bill Clinton administration repealed it in 1999. Just nine years after its repeal, Wall Street imploded in a fashion similar to the 1929 crash – the reason that the Glass-Steagall Act was enacted in the first place in 1933.
Senator Sherrod Brown had raised eyebrows on Wall Street with his hearings that rooted out the unfathomable levels of physical holdings of oil, metals and other commodities that a negligent Federal Reserve had allowed Wall Street banks to take ownership of and control, unilaterally repealing decades of banking law with no Congressional input or even awareness. Those hearings triggered an in-depth investigation and more outrageous disclosures in 2014 of an out-of-control Wall Street by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, then chaired by Senator Carl Levin, another Senator that refused to be silenced by Wall Street. Levin’s Subcommittee found that Wall Street banks had set up secret shell companies to gain control of a stunning amount of the nation’s industrial commodities – such as oil, aluminum, copper, natural gas, and even uranium – on a scale that “appears to be unprecedented in U.S. history,” according to a 400-page report released by the Subcommittee.
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