AUDIO: Robert Scheer Speaks
With Nomi Prins About the Connection Between Washington and Wall Street
Read the transcript below.
—Adapted from KCRW by Alexander
Reed Kelly.
RS: Hello. I’m Robert Scheer,
and welcome to Scheer Intelligence, my podcast in collaboration with KCRW in
which I talk to people I consider to be American originals. My guest today is
Nomi Prins, definitely an American original. She started out working on Wall
Street, worked for Goldman Sachs at one point, and then has emerged as one of
the major critics of the big banks and what they did to bring about the Great
Recession. She is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Public Policy
Think Tank DEMOS; she is also the author of several books, including “It Takes
a Pillage” and, most recently, “All the President’s Bankers.” And, full disclosure,
she served on Senator Bernie Sanders’ Federal Reserve Advisory Council. I’m
going to ask you what that’s all about. But I want to get an objective
appraisal of this democratic election, because we’re being frightened with some
image of the greater evil of the Republican Party, and there’s a lot of evil
there to talk about. But once again, we’re being urged to think uncritically
about the Democrats. And I want—you know, your, “It Takes a Pillage” is, after
all, a play on Hillary Clinton’s “It Takes a Village”; it’s a terrific book, I
use it in teaching in my job at USC, and I’ve had you in my class, and I have
great respect for your analysis. So why don’t we begin there? You were working
at Goldman Sachs, and what has brought you to this place, and what is your
evaluation of the choices we face?
NP: First of all, thanks a lot
for having me, Bob. I did work in Goldman Sachs, and did leave to become a
journalist and an author. And mostly that was because of what was my own moral
obligation percolating within me to leave a very corrupt environment and seek
the reasons for it, and also to share the analysis of what I could bring from
my experience to the rest of the world. And at the time I left, it was in the
wake of the Enron crisis, which at this point’s an old crisis; but a lot of the
reasons for that crisis had to do with banks, had to do with how financing
works in this country, and it has only gotten much worse and, as we know,
more—because of the banking system and the political system that allows it to
have become what it is—than ever before, with the financial crisis of 2008 and
now what we see as what will be a prolonged global crisis.
RS: Let me jump in there,
since you brought up Enron, which a lot of people forget about. But the
collapse of Enron destroyed the life savings of all sorts of people, quite a
few who worked for Enron and one of its subsidiaries, but also, and their
investors who thought, my goodness, this big company—which was extremely
well-connected in Washington, and not only to the Bush administration, but
before that to the Clinton administration. And in fact, it should have come up
recently in the news, because in the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders and—it came up when Hillary accused Bernie Sanders of having voted for
this terrible piece of financial deregulation, which is known as the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act. And it’s true Sanders voted for it, as did everybody
else except four members of the House, libertarian Ron Paul; but they did so
because it was tucked into an omnibus bill, and it was written by Bill
Clinton’s administration, it was signed by Bill Clinton; it was Bill Clinton’s
legislation. The reason I’m bringing it up now is there is something called the
“Enron loophole” in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that Clinton signed
as a lame duck president. And that loophole allowed Enron to go absolutely
berserk in marketing energy derivatives and so forth. And so maybe you could
begin there, because it’s all part of a whole; it’s manipulating the financial
system to benefit Wall Street and screw Main Street, is of course, not only the
slogan, but it’s an accurate description, and it’s been done by Republicans and
Democrats. And so why don’t we begin with the Democrats and the financial deregulation
that happened under Bill Clinton?
NP: Sure, I will unpack that.
And also, the “Enron loophole” and how it was created was not just by Enron; it
was by bankers at the time. In fact, during the period of the Clinton
administration in the late nineties, when energy deregulation had just occurred
in 1996—which effectively allowed energy companies to become bigger than they
were and take on little energy companies and control more of the energy
environment than they had before, of which Enron was a major recipient—the
financial element of that, where they got to also trade in energy futures and
derivatives and all sorts of complex financial securities that had nothing to
do with extracting and distributing oil or creating an energy flow for a population;
it had everything to do with trading and simply making money off of speculative
transactions. Goldman Sachs, which is the company I worked for, had been a part
of fighting for that “Enron loophole” during the Clinton administration years,
as well as had Enron. So here you had a company that was run by Republicans,
who had a big bank that was, at the time, run by a Republican, Hank Paulson;
but you also had people on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans,
pushing for this idea of ensuring that derivatives that were associated with
energy would not have to be transparent to anyone else who was examining the
markets. So effectively they were deregulated; they were taken out of the
purview and control of regulators. And what this meant was, not just Enron but
its banking partners like Goldman Sachs, like Merrill Lynch at the time, which
became later part of Bank of America during the last financial crisis, were
able to basically be copartners in creating a very opaque trading environment
around energy.
RS: Well, so opaque, as anyone
who has seen the movie “Smartest Guys in the Room,” Alex Gibney’s movie on the
Enron collapse—I mean, they were actually phony companies, and people went to
jail over it, and so forth. But it’s interesting, you mention that Hank Paulson
at that moment was the head of Goldman Sachs, and then he of course became
Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush. But let’s not forget Bill Clinton
picked as his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who had been one of the top guys
at Goldman Sachs, and certainly had been there during a lot of the mischief of
that company. Now, you know, some people have written very persuasively about
Goldman Sachs, and you know, yet I don’t think we really quite understand, what
is it, the cynicism of these folks. That’s the only way I can explain it. And
to take it full circle, here’s Hillary Clinton who now says she wants for
everyone what she has for her grandchild. Well, that would mean every
grandchild in this country would have to have a father who was funded in a
hedge fund by Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs. It would have to
mean, you know, all of us would have to have one of these top-choice jobs like
he has, where he can lose lots of money and still make lots of money. That’s
what they do. So maybe we should begin by giving us the ethos of Goldman Sachs
and how bipartisan it is. It’s something people—you know, it’s all easy to
blast the Koch brothers and the evil right-wing forces, but if you think about
who really runs this country, it’s not the Koch brothers. Goldman Sachs is much
closer to the center of power. And one thing people seem to have forgotten is
that with the great meltdown—you know, and the ending of Glass-Steagall, ending
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great restrictions on greed done in response to
the Great Depression—Goldman Sachs was allowed, when it got in trouble over
these derivatives, to go from being an investment bank to a commercial bank and
get public funding as a result. You know, so that, not only did that legislation
benefit Citigroup and Bill Clinton gave the pen he, one of the pens he used to
sign to Sandy Weill, the head of Citigroup, and Robert Rubin left the Clinton
administration and worked for Citigroup for 10 years at 15 million bucks a
year. So these people are—what are they? Are they totally without ethics? You
have smelled them [laughter]; you have rubbed shoulders with them. You have
been in their world, Nomi Prins. You’ve done an excellent job in your books,
but now share that with people listening to this. Are these people, do they
have any kind of a moral sensibility?
NP: To these people, morality
is basically, to them, money. It’s a greed for profit, it’s a greed for
hierarchy, it’s a greed for power. And that’s all associated together; it’s not
like just the idea of being a billionaire, which Lloyd Blankfein now almost is,
or is, depending on where his stock is at the moment. It’s about being able to
control what’s going on in the company, in Goldman Sachs; what’s going on in
the government, and basically to buy and sell power. That’s really what it is.
And it’s like that, it was like that—and that was one of the reasons I left in
tremendous indignation, and I kind of turned my back on all the money of it.
Because the money of it, the power of it, the struggling—now this is my trade,
now that’s my trade, now let me get Hank Paulson to like me, now let me get a
promotion—all of that sort of manifestation of what happens on a day-to-day
basis, in terms of the internal struggles of people within an environment like
Goldman Sachs, has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. It has nothing
to do with how people, ultimately most people in the world are betrayed by what
happens in these financial hierarchies, and particularly because of how they control
and collude with—I shouldn’t even say it’s just the Goldman Sachs bankers that
control the government. It’s a welcomed control; these people are friends. So
when Bill Clinton becomes the president because Robert Rubin was one of his
chief fundraisers in Washington in the early nineties, and then he turns around
and thanks Robert Rubin by offering the most powerful banking position, really,
in the country, which is the Treasury Secretary spot in his
administration—that’s the kind of collusion and collaboration that’s at the
core of our financial-political structure, and that is, as you said, that’s not
just on the democratic side or just on the republican side; that is on the side
of the power of those two components working together. So when Robert Rubin
leaves Goldman Sachs to ultimately become a vice chairman at Citigroup—and for
a little bit he was even chairman during the financial crisis, when Chuck
Prince was kicked out, and there was a dislocation going on there in
chaos—that’s an indication that this power circle has multiple decades and
generations and associations that continue through the administrations of any
one president. So by the time we got to Obama—well, by the time we stopped for
George W. Bush and had Hank Paulson, who was the head of Goldman Sachs and then
became the Treasury Secretary for George W. Bush during the financial crisis,
whereby he helped architect help to the largest financial institutions, which
are predominantly larger today than they were before the financial crisis, as
well as helping his old firm Goldman Sachs—and then relinquish that position to
Tim Geithner, who had been an Assistant Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton
and who was now, then reemerged in Obama’s administration—you see this, like,
multiple increase of individuals who continue to maintain their political and
financial power through administration and through party. So when we look at
Hillary Clinton running now, and trying to disassociate herself in some just
abstract manner from Wall Street, it’s ridiculous if you consider the depth and
the intricacies of the relationships between not just the Clintons but the
parties, the families in power, with the individuals who are in power and the
financial institutions, how they continue to stay linked throughout the years
and throughout the different administrations. It’s illogical—and Bernie Sanders
pointed this out, as do many people in America see this—to assume she is not
connected to this infrastructure. Not simply because she is funded by it, not
simply because her husband was funded by it, but because these are associations
that exist for the purpose of maintaining that financial and political power
structure.
RS: This is Robert Scheer and
I’m talking to Nomi Prins, who is an American original in many ways. But one
that’s quite interesting, because she defies what Lawrence Summers said in his
misogynist manner as head of Harvard, that women can’t learn the intricacies of
math and economics and so forth, and it’s been a male territory. And you have
really called these people out, I think as effectively as anyone. Instead of
drinking the Kool-Aid and going for all the money—because we’ve had women
executives before; we’ve had women rise to the top of these big corporations
and banks—you turned your back on them and you called them out. And you’ve done
so very effectively, and they’ve attacked you for it. What got you to play,
really, one of the leading roles in challenging these—what are they, these
banksters?
NP: These are megalomaniac
banksters. At my core, money wasn’t a motivating force relative to the sense of
injustice that the entire system had. So I think—and I didn’t start out
thinking about justice; what I started out, as I left the banking sector, was
to—was to call, yes, to call out these people. Because no one else was. You
know, and it wasn’t like I set out to be a whistleblower or anything else; I
know there’s been different titles that have been put on me, and other people
have done similar things. I mean, it was really a sense of, look, there is
something going on here, and it isn’t clear to most people; and it was clear to
me. And it was sort of like, well, if I don’t talk about this, you know, who
is? And I mean, it’s weird, because it wasn’t like I felt that I was
responsible to educate the world or anything; I don’t have that kind of sense.
But I did feel that someone had to, and I was in the position where I could.
And I did try to call out practices within the firm, but that was not the place
to do it; I was talking to people who were basically set in their ways in their
power structure, and all I could do was see what was going on. And I felt much
better about myself and sort of my life, and the purpose or whatever, having
not been in that environment, which was also quite toxic and coveted the wrong
things, I think, the wrong values; I don’t think money is a value. Money is
money. I think justice is a value, I think equality is a value, I think
morality is a value, I think how we treat each other and how we teach each
other is a value. And I would not have thought that, you know, 15 years or
whatever it is that I, after I left the industry, I would necessarily still
have to be talking about the same things, and they’ve gotten so much worse.
RS: That is what is so
depressing. As you know, I’ve also written a book about this, and a lot of
columns and so forth. And you would really think, after these people just case
so close to destroying not only the American economy but the world
economy—let’s just be clear, the consequence of what Robert Rubin and Lawrence
Summers and Bill Clinton and Phil Gramm on the republican side—plenty of
Republicans; after all, this was basically a Republican cause that was going
nowhere. Ronald Reagan had to tighten regulation because he had the savings and
loan crisis in his administration; it remained for Bill Clinton to reach out,
you know, on the urging of Wall Street, to the Republicans and say ‘Let’s see
what we can do to triangulate this issue and bring the Democrats into the good
graces of Wall Street.’ That was really the contribution of Bill Clinton. So
they pull off what no one had been able to pull off on either side of the aisle
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt; put good rules of the road in. And you talk
about a culture—these people, you know, it’s nice to think, oh, the bad guys,
they’re just cigar-chomping out somewhere in the Midwest and they’re, you know,
robbing widows and they’re—no. These folks present as very enlightened, liberal
people; Robert Rubin presents as a concerned, decent, liberal person. You know,
Lawrence Summers, all these folks—and you just have to wonder, you know, how do
they keep functioning this way? And they always survive. So doesn’t it drive
you a little bit nuts that there’s no accountability?
NP: Absolutely. I mean, it
drives me nuts every day. I think that’s why—well, and you, too, I’m sure; this
is why we continue to do what we do. Because I have to believe that at the
core, there are, you know, thinking people out there who continue to realize
that something’s dramatically wrong with the system. And whether they think of
that system as even knowing who Robert Rubin is, or just simply recognizing how
difficult it is for them to get by—whatever their place in the system, they
realize there is something wrong. And yeah, we can talk about this on public
radio, and we should; these people don’t have the accountability gene that
would behoove the positions of the power that they have in, I don’t know, a
sort of normally just society. Which, our society is quite unequal by
definition of these people going around getting all of the accolades and the
positions and the media coverage and everything else. They also don’t have a
sense of being in touch with actual people, and this is also a definite problem;
Robert Rubin does not live in a world of real people, Hank Paulson does not
live in a world of real people. This does not mean they don’t contribute
charitably to good causes, but the idea of actually being an empathizer with
what is happening in the world is not something that their level of behavior
dictates they are doing at all. And this is part of the problem; when they do
have the ear of, whether it’s candidates or presidents—and again, it’s a
collective, collusive group of individuals who validate each other’s opinions
as to what should be done and how it should be done, and they’re simply wrong
in their thinking. Because to, for example, have an entire multitrillion-dollar
business that is opaque and that is not subject to regulation in and of itself
is illogical; it does not create systemic stability in any way. So even from a
logical thinking perspective, they are outside of the realm of what they should
be doing. And we see this in that, you know, many of the institutions that were
involved in many trades that were not transparent have had to pay fines; the
U.S. banking system in particular, the biggest six banks that paid over $130,
$140 billion in fines and settlements since the financial crisis, on crimes
from everything from rigging libor, rigging interest rates, to rigging foreign
exchange rates, to things that they did evilly with subprime related loans and
securities that were associated with those loans. And they still function. No
one said ‘I’m sorry.’ No one has said ‘I’m going to leave because this is
completely screwed up, and I will forgo the money.’ I mean, when I talk about
this stuff, and I think I’m more enraged more recently because it’s become
such—I see this global crisis happening again—I’m not talking from a position of
being holier than thou. I did leave that money, and I did decide to talk about
it from the other side; it can be done.
RS: We never really talk about
the consequence. And it’s interesting, in the debate between, where Hillary
blasted Bernie Sanders, was in South Carolina; it was in preparation—and you
know, states where there’s a large number of black people and brown people and
so forth. And you know, we had the Federal Reserve of St. Louis had a study
that black and brown people who graduated from college lost, in the case of
African-Americans, 70 percent of their net worth because of this Great
Recession. Brown people closer to 60, or between 55 and 60 percent. That’s the
people who graduated from college. If we look across the board, yes, there were
a lot of whites got hurt; but it particularly wiped out the civil rights gains
for minority communities, OK? And here was a thing where the Black Caucus was
sponsoring it, and there was not one moment to address the cost of the Great
Recession in terms of the growing inequality in America, the loss of real
wages—I mean, the human misery. And in this country, let alone throughout the
world. What happens when you are in these panels, you’re in these debates, you
are being interviewed and you meet some of these folks? Do they have any angst
about it? Do they have any feelings?
NP: I spoke at the Federal
Reserve at an annual meeting of central bankers throughout the world that was
held by the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank this summer. And the
topic of the conference was basically about how to get Wall Street to work for
Main Street, but in sort of Fed speak, it was how to create, you know, sort of
more stability in the system. And before I spoke, there was a cardinal who
spoke, and he basically looked at this room full of bankers and he said, you
know, ‘Your first priority should be to help the poor.’ That’s what he said;
you know, he gets—he was an old guy, you know; he gets up, he’s sort of hunched
over, and he just, he very quietly looks at everyone and says, ‘You know what?
Your first responsibility is to help the poor; it’s sort of like the doctor’s
oath should be, you know, do no harm.’ And we spoke about that, but what I
sensed was this disconnect between the people that actually ran the powerful elements
of the Federal Reserve and had the media attention on them, which was ‘We are
doing what we’re supposed to be doing; you know, we’ve decreased rates, so
that’s supposed to create, you know, more credit into the economy; that’s
supposed to help people create jobs and get jobs—’ and all of these sort of
buzz-speak things that didn’t actually materialize, but they sort of stand back
and say, ‘But we did the right thing.’ But they’re still questioning why banks
aren’t doing it as well, and what I said to them was, why would they? Why would
an institution that is not created to be sort of a moral dispensary of equal
wealth, run by people who have even less of an obligation or sense to do that,
in any way shape or form, without being required to do so, use the power of
their structure to help benefit greater society or more people on the ground?
And that’s the fundamental disconnect, is why, you know, this idea that why
would these institutions do anything they’re not being made to do, if you’re
just giving them cheap money on a platter? And so going back to how does that
affect real people on the ground—well, if you look at an economy as sort of
what they call in game theory a zero sum game, meaning that’s where the one
percent versus 99 percent sort of terminology can be applied—if you look at an
economy as this, you know, a hundred percent of something, and it’s all going
to the top—well, someone else is losing. I mean, it’s really that simple. If
there’s nothing to increase the size of that economy, if it just functions, and
the institutions and the individuals who are running it are extracting the
most, then by definition everyone else is getting less. And that’s the system
that we have, and that’s where inequality both in our country continues to grow
and inequality on a global basis continues to grow. Because the elements of
power, whether they’re financial or political, are keeping a status quo that
suppresses the ability of most people to do better than where they are.
RS: So I want to ask you about
their culture. Because you lived a bit, you worked at Goldman Sachs, you lived
in that world. How do these people sleep at night? How do they handle their
own—you know, why don’t people, when they walk into a room, shun them?
[Laughter] Right? That would be the traditional thing. Robert Rubin walks into
a room, whether it’s a charity event and everything—people should turn their
back! Right? They should refuse to talk to the guy. You know? Until he goes
through some kind of soul-searching. They don’t; they actually are given great
rounds of applause at charity events.
NP: Yeah, and they make a lot
of money in speaking engagements, because—because they have money. I mean, this
goes back to what we were talking a little bit in the beginning, that the idea
of power and money and the relationship between the two means that people feel
good about being associated with Robert Rubin because he’s rich and successful.
And so that means anything he’s saying must be true. And in his circles, that
concept continues to validate itself. And also, since these people have, you
know, I mentioned before, an accountability deficit, they also are remorseless.
They don’t look at the damage—and they have caused tremendous damage by their
decisions. I mean, Robert Rubin before Glass-Steagall was repealed—and he
wasn’t physically there when it was repealed, at this point; he waited ‘til it
was voted to be repealed in the Senate, and then he got a job at Citigroup, so
he wasn’t there when it was officially—
RS: He got a—let’s be clear.
He—this was called, it was called the Citigroup Financial Reform Act or
something. The—Citigroup was illegal, because it was a merger of Travelers
Insurance and Citibank of an investment—
NP: And Solomon Brothers.
RS:—and Solomon
Brothers—investment bank and commercial banking, in violation of a law that FDR
had put in place. So it remained for Bill Clinton to challenge that law. And
then now, when, you know, Hillary Clinton says no, we’re not going to, we don’t
have to revisit it, that thing—well, that was the reason you had Citigroup, and
Citigroup had to be bailed out at an enormous cost by the government, and
Robert Rubin gets a job.
NP: While Citigroup was
illegally merged as an entity that could be backed by the FDIC, whose
depositors had their deposits insured by the government, and who could then use
those deposits as collateral to make all sorts of speculative bets, which was
what ultimately the repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed it to do—but it superseded
that repeal by being an illegally constructed entity. Robert Rubin, before he
left to become vice chairman of Citigroup and benefit, as you mentioned, $50
million a year from that position, was actively engaged in getting before
Congress—and I actually have lots of this testimony, as well as his
conversations with Clinton, in my latest book, in “All the President’s
Bankers”—he was actively using the fact that this company had superseded the
law as a reason to change the law. Literally, it was like he was saying, look,
Citigroup is going to do this anyway—hey, by the way, it did—do let’s just
ratify it. That was the argument, the fact that it had done something
[illegal]. And he made it seem like this would be good for America. And this is
where people get embroiled in all this, the populations get embroiled in all
this; because you have people like Robert Rubin who clearly benefited
enormously from the entire arrangement, from Goldman to Clinton to Treasury
Secretary to Citigroup; you know, from a power and money and status position
globally—but he argued this would be better for the population.
RS: This is a good last
question for me to ask you. You’ve written these books; they are terrific, I
recommend them to anybody who wants to get a grasp on the situation. And I have
basically two questions for you. One, you are inclined—you worked with Bernie
Sanders, and I don’t know whether you support him or not. But one of the issues
is going to be, it’s time for a woman president, and Hillary Clinton is such a
woman. And that’s—you know, yes; on the other hand, we’ve had an example of
women whistleblowers. And so when we talk about, you know, women leadership,
the sad thing here is we’re being now presented with a female candidate who has
actually been party to bringing a lot of misery to a lot of women, as well as
men and children. What is your approach? Because you’re a strong woman; you
obviously would like to have women in more prominent positions, and maybe we
can conclude on that. And also maybe bring in your current book; what have you
learned historically about all this?
NP: I do think it would be
great to have a female president. And as you mentioned, there have certainly
been women who have taken this notion of injustice and obfuscation of
information, and the rise of some people to power that have by definition hurt
others, hurt large swaths, millions of people in the process. I don’t think
that female is Hillary Clinton or should be Hillary Clinton. And I mostly am
disappointed, though I understand her position in the hierarchy of the
establishment in which she operates—the, Bill Clinton’s establishment, the
Obama establishment; the establishment of maintaining predominantly the status
quo that will perpetuate inequality economically, going into the future. For her
to have said at the debates that her plan, for example, to push back Wall
Street was better than Bernie Sanders’ plan to reinstate a modern-day
Glass-Steagall was just ludicrous. I mean, I was just, like, yelling at the TV
set, like, and I tweeted—I don’t usually tweet in capital letters, but I had to
tweet with capital letters about this. Because she was just so wrong. She threw
in the buzzword of shadow banking, and this idea that investment banks like
Lehman Brothers that did collapse weren’t like the big banks like Citigroup
that didn’t—well, Citigroup and the big banks were, they got a lot of
government support in that process. And to divide the two just shows a lack of
understanding for how finance works. Which will mean that that’s what we would
get from her if she were in office, not to mention all the people that were
involved in those decisions along the way that have been her advisors and would
probably be her appointees in significant positions of power. So I do not think
she would be good for America, and certainly not good for the stability of the
financial system as it impacts the real economy.
RS: You are an American
original. And that’s a sad comment to make. We should have lots of people who
speak up about what they learn working at Goldman Sachs, or what they’ve
learned from studying the economy. You should not be this rare bird, you know,
flying above the lies. And it’s really quite stunning. But on a bipartisan
note, because we’ve bashed Hillary a bit, isn’t one of the points—and this will
be my last question—isn’t one of the points of your own writing is that they
all sell out? And if you look at it, the passage of the deregulation, you had
people who considered themselves wildly progressive; I mean, Barney Frank
played a terrible role, and he was head of the House Banking Committee and so
forth. And so is it really the issue here not to find just the one right
candidate, but really to do something about the power imbalance in this
country, in which the banks get to run everything no matter who’s president?
NP: Yeah, I mean, one of the
main points—I’ve actually said in the beginning of my writing, my first book,
“Other People’s Money,” that I wrote right out of banking, I didn’t take any
one political view as better than the other. I simply looked at the system, and
what Republicans and Democrats alike had done in collaboration with the major
financial players. And it wasn’t one leading the other; it was a collaboration,
it remains a collaboration. So from a systemic perspective, it doesn’t matter
currently what party is in power; what matters is that the power is a
political, financial collaboration that does not benefit the majority of the
population. And that is what needs to change.
RS: Thank you, Nomi Prins. And
more to come. That’s it for Scheer Intelligence, and once again, the
intelligence came from my guest, in this case Nomi Prins, the author of really
important books on the banking meltdown. Producers are Josh Scheer and Rebecca
Mooney. Thanks to NPR West for providing the recording facilities. Kat Yore is
the engineer. I’ll see you next time.
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