Franklin Raines, CEO, Fannie Mae

As the controversies involving Franklin Raines, CEO of Fannie Mae, who allegedly earned himself millions of dollars in bonuses by cooking that federally-chartered company's books, swirl around him, and threaten to derail his planned ascent to the post of Treasury Secretary in the Kerry Administration, should there be one, it may be instructive to go back into history to see just what kind of a person the polished, connected, powerful CEO is.

In the Spring of 1969, after dissident students had shut down Harvard University over issues now too obscure to recall (actually, the presence of ROTC on campus and, at the behest of the Socialist Workers Party, the expansion of Harvard Medical School into the community, but, really and basically, opposition to the Vietnam War) and matters were deeply polarized between the anti-war students and the tacitly pro-war administration, with the momentum being on the side of the students, many of whom had been savagely beaten by local police unleashed on them by the Administration, there miraculously arose a "third-force," never heard of before and embodied in "Students for a Restructured University," which was put together with the connivance of the Administration and which called for some cosmetic and insubstantial reforms that would channel students' strong desire for change into a meaningless round of bureaucratic machinations that would go on for years while leaving fundamental power in the hands of those who already possessed it.

The creator, implementer, and, to this day the beneficiary of "restructuring" was Harvard undergraduate Franklin Raines. With the strong support of the Administration, "Students for a Restructured University" defused the crisis and became the springboard for Raines' subsequent rise to power as a pillar of a grateful Establishment. Already then, as now, smart, aggressive, ambitious, talented, and smooth, he got as big a boost as ever was given by the grateful gang of Harvard administrators who so appreciated his subversion of the subversives at their highest tide.

After a long and successful career wielding greater and greater power, reaping greater and greater financial rewards, and now, as he faces charges that he manipulated the accounting at Fannie Mae to line his own already-stuffed pockets, Franklin Raines is still fundamentally the sneaky, conniving opportunist who did everything he could to stop a movement for social change with fancy words, faux-sincere expressions of concern, and a complete commitment to the bottom line of his own self-aggrandizement.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.