The country would have been infinitely better off had the most influential economics reporter over the last three decades been Bill Greider, and not Jim Cramer, or Erin Burnett, or the Bob Bartley Memorial Home For The Economically Infirm at the Wall Street Journal. Greider has been on top of the slow march toward corporate oligarchy for longer than just about anyone else. And now, he has a few questions he'd like to ask Hillary Rodham Clinton about what went on back when her husband was president.

Yet Hillary Clinton asserts in her Times op-ed that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with it. She claims that Glass-Steagall would not have limited the reckless behavior of institutions like Lehman Brothers or insurance giant AIG, which were not traditional banks. Her argument amounts to facile evasion that ignores the interconnected exposures. The Federal Reserve spent $180 billion bailing out AIG so AIG could pay back Goldman Sachs and other banks. If the Fed hadn't acted and had allowed AIG to fail, the banks would have gone down too.

Greider goes on to quote a former Citigroup CEO named John Reed, who makes an interesting point about what happened within the culture of banking after the walls of Glass-Steagall were removed.

"Mixing incompatible cultures is a problem all by itself," Reed wrote. "It makes the entire finance industry more fragile…. As is now clear, traditional banking attracts one kind of talent, which is entirely different from the kinds drawn towards investment banking and trading. Traditional bankers tend to be extroverts, sociable people who are focused on longer term relationships. They are, in many important respects, risk averse. Investment bankers and their traders are more short termist. They are comfortable with, and many even seek out, risk and are more focused on immediate reward." Reed concludes, "As I have reflected about the years since 1999, I think the lessons of Glass-Steagall and its repeal suggest that the universal banking model is inherently unstable and unworkable. No amount of restructuring, management change or regulation is ever likely to change that."

Nobody who sat in the Supreme Court last week and listened to the oral arguments would come out of there as a Democratic purist, unwilling to vote for HRC under any circumstance in a general election. However, except for whatever role it played in the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the theft of the world's economy never has been truly litigated within the court of American politics. The Republicans simply are going to ignore it and hope that everybody forgets about it. (Unless you buy the fictions that Marco Rubio is a crusader for the middle class, or that He, Trump gives a damn one way or the other.) It's going to have to be litigated within the Democratic primaries, which is to say between Bernie Sanders—and, to a lesser extent, Martin O'Malley—and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has more baggage on this one than just about anyone else in the field. It may be an uncomfortable debate, but it's a more than necessary one.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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