“The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9246.html

 

Let me see if I have this right.  On December 15, 2000, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Former Senator Phil Gramm, representing the “foxes,” slipped a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the omnibus spending bill.

 

Years of unceasing effort to beat down Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms had come to a successful conclusion, and set off a wave of merger mania with a return to the halcyon pre-Depression days of unregulated and unfettered manipulation of banking and the stock market.

 

The foxes had succeeded in defeating most of the protections the “farmer” (responsible government) had erected around the “henhouse” (our much-vaunted capitalism) in an effort to prevent the abuses that resulted in the Great Depression.

 

Not to push the allegory too hard, now all of those chickens have come home to roost.

 

And, the Administration wants to put the foxes in charge of 700 billion dollars ($7,390 per U.S. family) to save the henhouse from total collapse.

 

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!