Courtesy of Pam Martens
Donald Regan, Former U.S. Treasury Secretary from Merrill Lynch
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
The reverberations from the New York Times OpEd last week, where an anonymous “senior official” in the Trump administration effectively described a coup taking place to stop the President’s mad impulses, are still shaking the nation.
But President Donald Trump, from the day he took office, has been little more than a titular figure head for the fossil fuels industry – with Koch Industries in particular calling the shots. The Trump administration took the unthinkable step of removing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and there is breaking news that the Environmental Protection Agency will ease rules on methane gas emissions for oil and gas companies like Koch Industries.
The only real difference between this coup and past coups is that Koch Industries and its front group, Freedom Partners, are so much more in your face than Wall Street’s highly finessed but equally predatory cabal.
Americans have had hard evidence of the Wall Street cabal’s control of the President and much of the legislative branch throughout history. There is the famous video in Michael Moore’s movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” where Treasury Secretary Donald Regan whispers in President Ronald Reagan’s ear while he is delivering a speech and barks at him to “speed it up” — like Reagan is merely an actor on the payroll of an invisible but powerful authority. The President doesn’t seem surprised or annoyed but acts as if he is accustomed to taking orders from this man.
Donald Regan had been the Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, the largest Wall Street brokerage firm in terms of stockbroker headcount throughout much of the last century. Regan first became Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and then his Chief of Staff and was viewed by many as the Acting President of the United States.
The Bill Clinton administration had Robert Rubin, a 26-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and former Co-Chairman, operating on behalf of Wall Street’s money trust – what it was called in the early 1900s. Rubin succeeded in pushing through the repeal of the depression era Glass-Steagall Act, which had kept the U.S. financial system safe for 66 years until its repeal in 1999, by barring banks holding Federally insured deposits from merging with speculating investment banks and brokerage firms. The financial system collapsed just nine years later in the same epic fashion as 1929 – when there also was no Glass-Steagall Act in place.
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