Supporters of Barack Obama for President of the United States are now challenged to honestly assess his decisions in office. Within the first 100 days of a new administration, much attention must be given to the people hand-picked to surround and counsel a new President in a wide range of matters. We at Imagine A Great Election have noted a few points that deserve increased public awareness. President Obama has surrounded himself with many of the same people who years ago championed deregulation and the exotic derivatives market and are now racing to bail out Wall Street’s resultant debts to the tune of trillions of dollars. Not only did these people champion damaging policies while in public service, but they profited from those same policies in the private sector. The term “Rubin-esque” is being widely used to refer to Robert Rubin disciples, a number of whom are now in the Obama administration. Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, has a long history as a top executive at Citigroup as well as Goldman Sachs, where he worked for more than 25 years. Despite a significant legend regarding Rubin and his work with his former Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers (now director of the National Economic Council) and with former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin and his peers are now credited with the creation of the dot.com bubble that began to implode with the Enron scandal of 2002, and with the housing bubble that ultimately led to the meltdown of international markets. While in Clinton’s administration, Democrats Rubin and Summers joined with Republicans to repeal the Glass-Steagall act which had been adopted during the Great Depression to ensure the regulation of lenders and to guarantee Americans another depression “would never happen again.” According to investigative journalist James Ridgeway in MotherJones.com, the Glass-Steagall act “imposed firewalls between commercial banking and investment banking, and between the banking, brokerage, and insurance industries. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ‘Eager to create financial supermarkets that peddle everything from checking accounts to auto insurance, the three industries for years…lobbied Congress to streamline regulatory hurdles that bar(red) such (comprehensive) operations.’” Finally in November 1999, Rubin brokered a deal between the Clinton administration and Congress that resulted in the Gramm-Leach-Biley act, a bill that was heralded as “modernizing regulations.” What it did was remove prohibitions set in place by the Glass-Steagall act on mixing banking, securities, and insurance business, in effect putting ultimate trust in the vultures (eminent American banks) to self-regulate. As proponents of the repeal said at the time, “ultimately time will tell.” Very soon after the passage of the Glass-Steagall act, Rubin went to work at Citigroup, which then “went on to embark upon mergers that would have been rendered illegal under Glass-Steagall,” according to Ridgeway. Ridgeway quotes the New York Times as stating: “Rubin would be leading ‘what has become the first true American financial conglomerate since the Depression’—a conglomerate that could exist only because of legislation he had just shepherded through Congress.” Members of the Obama administration with direct ties to Robert Rubin include:
For more details regarding the people populating the inner circles of the Obama administration, visit the Obama Cabinet and Key Staff section of Imagine A Great Election. There you’ll find individual pages devoted to each Cabinet and Cabinet-rank position of the administration (with special emphasis given to those on the powerful National Economic Council), and to additional influential positions in the White House.