To the editor:

In reply to Mary Ann Mansfield (Record, Sept. 26), these excerpts from Wikipedia may clarify the role of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

“[GLB] repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 … [which] prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and/or an insurance company.”

“Citicorp … merged with Travelers Group … in 1998 to form the conglomerate Citigroup, … combining banking, securities and insurance services. This combination, announced in 1993 and finalized in 1994, would have violated the Glass-Steagall Act if not for a temporary waiver process. GLB was passed to legalize these mergers on a permanent basis.”

“Also prior to the passage of the Act, there were many relaxations to the Glass-Steagall Act. For example, a few years earlier, commercial banks were allowed to get into investment banking, and before that banks were also allowed to get into stock and insurance brokerage. Insurance underwriting was the only main operation they weren’t allowed to do, something rarely done by banks even after the passage of the Act.”

“Republicans agreed to strengthen provisions of the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act [because?] the Clinton Administration stressed that it ‘would veto any legislation that would scale back minority-lending requirements.’” [Think sub-prime.]

Also Ms. Mansfield gave “a definition of fascism” quite at odds with Webster’s and Random House dictionaries.

Both mention state control of corporations, not the other way around. But consider this, a libertarian definition of fascism in “The Market for Liberty”: Fascism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals, but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, fascism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism.

Sounds familiar to me.

Jon D. Berg

Freeland