As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September, Senator Charles E. Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping Congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.
The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.
“We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals,” one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer’s remarks. “We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust.”
The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.
He succeeded in limiting efforts to regulate credit-rating agencies, for example, sponsored legislation that cut fees paid by Wall Street firms to finance government oversight, pushed to allow banks to have lower capital reserves and called for the revision of regulations to make corporations’ balance sheets more transparent.
At times in Congress, Mr. Schumer has teamed up with Republicans, like former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who aggressively promoted a free-market agenda. Mr. Schumer pushed for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, passed in November 1999, which knocked down the walls between investment banks and commercial banks and allowed financial supermarkets to flourish.The law also weakened regulatory oversight by fracturing it among different agencies.
– From The New York Times article: A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits
Great way to start off the new year for the Democrats. New Senate Minority leader, and Wall Street mega-defender, Chuck Schumer just went on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show and warned Donald Trump that U.S. intelligence agencies could retaliate against him for disagreeing with their claims (based on no public evidence thus far) that Russia hacked the DNC/John Podesta and released it to Wikileaks with the intent of helping Trump win the election.
Here’s what he said courtesy of The Washington Examiner:
The new leader of Democrats in the Senate says Donald Trump is being “really dumb” for picking a fight with intelligence officials, suggesting they have ways to strike back, after the president-elect speculated Tuesday that his “so-called” briefing about Russian cyberattacks had been delayed in order to build a case.
“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday evening on MSNBC after host Rachel Maddow informed him that intelligence sources told NBC news that the briefing had not been delayed.
Now watch the clip for yourself. I’m certain the near permanent grin on his face will not be lost upon you either.
The exchange is especially disturbing given the CIA’s not so warm and fuzzy history, both internally and externally. For some light reading on the matter, I strongly suggest the following post, How America’s Modern Shadow Government Can Be Traced Back to One Very Evil Man – Allen Dulles. Here’s a brief passage to whet your appetite:
Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.
But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…
Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.
Threaten the U.S. President-elect with the CIA. How liberal.
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The National so-called Security Agencies need to be reeled in and made to understand that they are not autonomous, but should answer to the American people. Sadly, President-elect Trump has gone on record as having no problem for these agencies to continue to violate our Fourth Amendment rights by vacuuming up all electronic communications. All we need is a President Hitler to use all this information to round up the troublemakers before completing the new Reich. Sound crazy? The German people weren’t evil, but most people will do as they are told and Americans are no different. Sure, everyone says differently, but when you have a policeman saying he has orders to bring you in, exactly what are you going to do then? Human nature is the same, whether in Germany or the U.S. After all, you don’t believe that many in those agencies don’t realize they are violating the Fourth Amendment? Are they quitting their jobs? Enough said.
until the economy implodes and then all bets are off ,
You’re probably right about Dulles. But it might be more productive to focus on the current Director of the CIA, John Brennan.
He has politicized the Agency to a level unknown in modern American history. Brennan is using the Agency, in concert with PC-Progressives like Schumer, to threaten an American President elect.
This is unprecedented. Your analysis of Dulles is spot-on, providing details on his international meddling. But no DCIA, especially since the exposure of now quaint anti-subversive ops in the US during the 1960s, has ever meddling in domestic politics as Brennan is doing now.
Details:
http://intelctweekly.blogspot.com/2011/02/cairo-meddler-czar-brennan-needs-to-go.html
http://www.newsmax.com/KentClizbe/james-comey-fbi-john-brennan-cia/2016/10/13/id/753220/
Herr Shumer has forgotten to take his meds. We must have some compassion.
Those intelligence agencies are under the CIA w/c is under the Director of National Intelligence w/c is “subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligence
and thus could be replaced w/ other competent intelligence operatives.
I have to laugh at how these “progressives” are now huge fans of the Spooks because Hillary lost and it’s all the Russians fault.
So much for all of the outcry about the CIA and NSA using enhanced interrogation techniques when Bush II was in office. Now they’re acting as if the same agencies are all Boy Scouts trying to protect us from the evil Russians.
The Dems have hated the CIA with a vengeance since the Bay of Pigs. Now it seems all is forgiven, so long as they can be useful political tool against the GOP.
I’m tired of reading “there’s no public evidence the Russians hacked the Podesta emails”. I actually now a bit on the subject, I read the technical papers, and it’s pretty conclusive that Fancy Bear targets mostly issues of interest to Russia (including hacking Ukrainian Howitzers), and that Fancy Bear hacked Podesta’s emails. It’s true that there aren’t many details on how the leak arrived at Assange’s desk, and from Assange’s claims, it would appear they didn’t go to him saying: “We’re the Russian government and we want you to publish this”, but that could be simply because an intermediary was used.
The situation is:
(a) The evidence is pretty clear that Russia had the emails.
(b) Russia made no secret they’d like Trump to win.
(c) Russia has leaked hacked conversations in the past (Remember “Fuck the EU” Nuland?), so they certainly have no issues about doing this sort of thing.
(d) America regularly helps anti-Putin investigations, and doesn’t get involved in investigating the opposition.
So it seems pretty logical to conclude that the CIA is simply telling the truth when they say that they passed the hacked emails to Assange. I mean, why wouldn’t they?
As for Chuck Schumer’s statement, I agree the man looks slimy, I agree that the CIA is dangerous, and precisely because of that, I wouldn’t dismiss what he says as “a threat”. It’s more of a statement of fact. It’s true that you don’t want to mess with the CIA.