(from "GREEDY BASTARD$, How We can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry" by Dyland Ratigan, Simon & Schuster, New York, Copyright © 2012 by Dylan Ratigan)
". . . When it comes to influencing legislators; votes, nothing is more powerful than the threat of cutting off whatever resource an industry supplies to voters. Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trade Commission from 1996 to 1999, a small agency charged with regulating futures markets, saw the danger of the "swaps" market long before the financial collapse of 2008 and warned the CTFC to regulate it before problems snowballed. Michael Greenberger, former CFTC director of trading and markets told the 2009 PBS Frontline program "The Warning" that when Born proposed the new rules, which would have increased visibility and price integrity for the investment banks selling CDO monster bonds, then deputy secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers called to tell her to stop. Summers had thirteen bankers in his office at that minute with a lot to lose if her rules were put into effect. As Greenberger recollected, Summers told Born that all the bankers agreed that regulating "swaps" would "cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II." Those bankers had the leverage to say: stop what you want to do, or the system will go down and the voters won't forgive your party for decades.
Ten years later, after a series of financial crises like those Born had warned about, banksters were still using the same threats to protect their profits. Sheila Bair, chair of the FDIC from 2006 to 2011, to the New York Times Magazine as her term was ending, "They would say, 'You have to do this or the system will go down.' If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times. 'Citi is systemic, you have to do this.' No analysis, no meaningful discussion. It was very frustrating. . . "
". . . "If you don't give me what I want, I can meaningfully disrupt the flow of something that your constituents can't live without. . . "
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