PRESS RELEASE
Nationwide Mobilization Presses Trump To Enact Glass-Steagall
Jan. 6, 2017 (EIRNS)—In their column today in Wall Street on Parade, Pam and Russ Martens highlight the nationwide campaign launched by "Our Revolution"—Northwest Ohio supporters of former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders—to demand that President-elect Donald Trump follow through on his campaign pledge to enact a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. The letter the group is circulating has been endorsed by the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and by "Ohio Revolution."
The Martens report that the campaign calls on other organizations to send it letters and to also use social media to ensure that Trump keeps his promise, noting that Glass-Steagall legislation "has been sitting dormant" in both the House and Senate for years. If enacted, they explain, Glass-Steagall would separate commercial banks from the "globe-trotting, high-risk trading casinos known as investment banks on Wall Street." It took only nine years after Glass-Steagall’s 1999 repeal, they add, "for Wall Street to blow up the financial system in a replay of 1929."
After quoting Trump’s Oct. 26 speech in Charlotte, North Carolina in which he pledged to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the Martens note that Sanders’ supporters have very good reasons to hold Trump’s feet to the fire, given the number of former Goldman Sachs executives he has named to key economic and advisory positions in his administration: Goldman veteran Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary; Cary Cohn (current Goldman Sachs president) as head of the National Economic Council, and former Goldman banker Stephen Bannnon as chief White House strategist. Although Trump’s latest appointee, Jay Clayton of Sullivan and Cromwell, to head up the Securities and Exchange Commission, is not a former Goldman Sachs employee, it turns out that his wife is currently a Goldman vice president.
