Whodunnit

Here's the opening from an excellent May 2009 article in the Washington Post by Manuel Roig-Franzia:

Friends nudge the woman who saw the catastrophe coming.

They want Brooksley Born to say four words, four simple words: "I told you so."

Ah, but she won't -- not at legal conferences or dinner parties. Not even in a quiet moment in her living room, giving her first interview with a major news organization since last fall's economic collapse.

She just smiles, perched ever so properly in an upholstered armchair at her Kalorama home.

"More coffee?" she asks daintily, changing the subject.

A little more than a decade ago, Born foresaw a financial cataclysm, accurately predicting that exotic investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could play a crucial role in a crisis much like the one now convulsing America. Her efforts to stop that from happening ran afoul of some of the most influential men in Washington, men with names like Greenspan and Levitt and Rubin and Summers -- the same Larry Summers who is now a key economic adviser to President Obama.

She was the head of a tiny government agency who wanted to regulate the derivatives. They were the men who stopped her.

The same class of derivatives that preoccupied Born -- including the now-infamous "credit-default swaps" -- have been blamed for accelerating last fall's financial implosion. But from 1996 to 1999, when Born was the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. economy was roaring and she was getting nowhere with predictions of doom.

So, upstairs in the big house in Kalorama, Born tossed and turned. She woke repeatedly "in a cold sweat," agonizing that a financial calamity was coming, she recalled one recent afternoon.

"I was really terribly worried," she said.

What bugs me is the whistle-blower, Brooksley Born, is the one who was turfed, while those who rigged the system to benefit the rich and let the system collapse so that the rest of us subsidized (paid welfare?) to the rich to cover up their mistake are still in power: Summers & Rubin (the other two, Greenspan & Leavitt, have "retired"). None of them has paid a price for their evil actions. Instead it was Brooksley Born who was forced to walk the plank.

What I don't understand is how Obama, a smart dude, fails to see this and fails to clean house. My only conclusion: he like these other "insiders" is in the pay of Wall Street. The famous quote of Upton Sinclair applies to Obama: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

For more, go here.