Kind of like our entertainment industry, making heroes out of the scum of the earth. (My comment, not Robert Scheer’s)

“Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to
reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between
investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger
of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of
the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers.”

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners
are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for
tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for
the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy
of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy’s proclaimed “230-plus year history of
recognizing some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists,
writers, artists, and civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.”
George Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein must be
rolling in their graves at the news that Weill, “philanthropist and
retired Citigroup Chairman,” has joined their ranks.

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to
reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between
investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger
of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of
the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill
was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on
the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible
restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great
Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of
Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided
to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S.
Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling
legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan
Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the
merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World … and Then Nearly Lost It All,
a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a
Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and
informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging
up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United
States an insider.”

The fix was in to repeal Glass-Steagall, as The New York Times
celebrated in a 1998 article: “… the announcement on Monday of a
giant merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group not only altered the
financial landscape of banking, it also changed the political landscape
in Washington. … Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement,
lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with
Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure
that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial
banking from Wall Street and insurance, to make it more politically
acceptable to more members of Congress.”

At the signing ceremony Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens
he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming,
“Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry,
tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new
authority.” What a jerk.

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed has had the
honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a
disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you
compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak,
the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally
speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and
equity.”

Instead, all such compartmentalization was ended when Clinton signed
the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in late 1999. In his memoir Weill brags that
he and Republican Sen. Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called
the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.”

Gramm left the Senate to become a top executive at the Swiss-based
UBS bank, which like Citigroup ran into deep trouble. Leach — former
Republican Rep. James Leach — was appointed by President Barack Obama
in 2009 to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where his
banking skills could serve the needs of intellectuals. Robert Rubin, the
Clinton administration treasury secretary who helped push through the
Citigroup Authorization Act, was the most blatant double dealer of all:
He accepted a $15-million-a-year offer from Weill to join Citigroup,
where he eventually helped run the corporation into the ground.

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage-based
securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and
a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid
bankruptcy.

Weill himself bailed out shortly before the crash. His retirement
from what was then the world’s largest financial conglomerate was
chronicled in The New York Times under the headline “Laughing
All the Way From the Bank.” The article told of “an enormous wooden
plaque” in the bank’s headquarters that featured a likeness of Weill
with the inscription “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.”

That’s the man the American Academy of Arts & Sciences now
honors, among others, for “extraordinary accomplishment and a call to
serve.” Disgusting.