NBC Freaks Out over Glass-Steagall, Cancels Posting of Senator Warren Interview Because of "Copyright Violations"
Wall Street's dictatorship was in full view on Friday when NBC took supposed "legal action" over copyright issues, and pulled the YouTube video off the Internet of a combative interview where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) smashed CNBC hosts on the issue of Glass-Steagall. In the first couple of days after the July 13 interview on CNBC's Squawk Box, Warren's own YouTube website had over 700,000 hits, and news of her KO'ing the CNBC team was going viral.
Senator Warren's YouTube has dozens of videos, but the Squawk Box appearance now has a black screen with the words, "This video contains content from NBC Universal, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. (sorry about that)"
One blog run by progressive Pat Cunningham was entitled "Elizabeth Warren Makes CNBC Hosts Look Like the Ninnies They Are," and reported, "The Internet has been afire in the past few days with accounts of how Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fools of her inquisitors on CNBC in a discussion of the Glass-Steagall Act, a measure regulating banks. Cunningham's blog is one of the dozens of websites that still have the five-minute-plus feisty interview video available.
At one point, CNBC's Brian Sullivan began yelling at Warren that she is covering up the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois, which happened before Glass-Steagall was repealed. After Sullivan gave a lying, fractured version of the Conti story, Warren shot back, "No! that is just wrong. Look at the history."
The Cunningham site and others have also transcribed excerpts of the interview, provided below:
ELIZABETH WARREN: From 1797 to 1933, the American banking system crashed about every 15 years. In 1933, we put good reforms in place, for which Glass-Steagall was the centerpiece, and from 1933 to the early 1980s, that's a 50 year period, we didn't have any of that, none. We kept the system steady and secure.
And it was only as we started deregulating, you start hitting the S&L crisis, and what did we do? We deregulated some more. And then you hit long-term capital management at the end of the '90s, and what did we do as a country, this country continued to deregulate more. And then we hit the big crash in 2008.
You are not going to defend the proposition that regulation can never work, it did work.
CNBC's BRIAN SULLIVAN: I didn't say regulation never worked, Senator. By far and away, and I agree, there were fewer bank failures in that time after Glass-Steagall.
WARREN: Fewer, as in of the big ones, zero!
