Born in Winter

"He caught her up reluctant on his golden car and bare her away lamenting. Then she cried out shrilly with her voice, calling upon Zeus, the Son of Kronos, who is most high and excellent. But no one, either of the deathless gods or mortal men, heard her voice,"- The Rape of Persephone

In 1997, Brooksley Born, then head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates options and futures trading warned Congress that the dangerous boom in derivatives trading was threatening to destroy the U.S. economy and hobble the world's financial markets.

Not only were her opinions dismissed and scornfully derided they were greeted with open hostility by the deified Alan Greenspan. Obama's bewildering picks for advisers, Robert Rubin and his sidekick, Larry Summers were no less contemptuous. As if to destroy the slightest respect the public might have for Ms. Born's finer virtues, Alan Greenspan, celebrated by his Wall Street lords as "The Oracle," spent his time pompously cheerleading the very disastrous products that has the global economy facing a prolonged recession and eventual collapse.

From the NYTimes: Summers, called Born to "chastise her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis. In June 1998, Greenspan, Rubin and the then head of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, Jr., called on Congress "to prevent Ms. Born from acting".

Here is what Rubin had his protege Summers say in response to Ms. Born's well-reasoned objections: "even small regulatory changes could throw the whole system out of whack." At his bidding the Securities and Exchange Commission then crafted a proposal to prohibit the CFTC from issuing any new rules regulating swaps or other "hybrid instruments."

Summers: " We understood ... [that to] question an independent agency's concept of its jurisdiction and then to propose legislation that would temporarily curtail that agency's ability to act is not something we do lightly."

"But grief yet more terrible and savage came into the heart of Demeter, [Persephone's mother] and thereafter she was so angered with Zeus, the dark-clouded Son of Kronos, that she avoided the gathering of the gods and high Olympus. Demeter vowed that she would never set foot on fragrant Olympus nor let fruit spring out of the ground until she beheld with her eyes her own fair-faced daughter."

We want to go merrily on pretending (as the Obama administration seems desperate to do) that the rape of Brooksley Born can be shunted down the memory hole and quietly forgotten. No, my esteemed Gods of High Finance, what your arrogant act has done has doomed us to a dark age of hunger and want. Only if Obama takes wisdom from wily old Zeus may greater suffering be averted-- the president must honor our innocent Brooksley Born again:

"All-seeing Zeus sent a messenger to bring back dark-cloaked Demeter to join the families of the gods : and he promised to give her what rights she should choose and agreed that her daughter should go down for the third part of the circling year to darkness and gloom, but for the two parts should live with her mother and the other deathless gods.

The goddess did not disobey; swiftly she rushed down to the plain of Rharos, rich, fertile corn-land once, but then in nowise fruitful, for it lay idle and utterly leafless, because the white grain was hidden by design of trim-ankled Demeter. Then Demeter went to the leaders of Eleusis and taught them all her mysteries ..."

If Winter comes can Spring be far behind? We shall see...