Obviously, no one ever
promised a piece of legislation would “end” hate and injustice. Anyone even
notionally sincere about battling the prejudices and cognitive dissonances that
oligarchs and overlords have forever promulgated to divide and conquer humanity
understands that “racism” and “sexism” are not forces you can arrest with a
pen.
Then there are the banks, the
biggest and rottenest of which have been with us for more than two
centuries. To want to see them curtailed is to have absorbed more than enough
history to understand that such things don’t happen “tomorrow.”
When I finally caved and read
the full speech, I found a veritable orgy of straw men, each catering
to some crucial segment of the Democratic coalition. It wasn’t just racism
and sexism that would persist in a landscape of smaller banks, according to
Hillary Clinton. “Gerrymandering and redistricting” would also persist, as
would discrimination against immigrants and gays.
Something about the line just
screamed “Bill.” Not shit-eating-grin President Bill Clinton at the height of
his virility/virulence, but the Clinton of today who is occasionally given to
weirdly bitter rants that are simultaneously nonsensical and illuminating, like
a warped decoder ring for understanding how the Democratic Party could maintain
its monopoly on self-righteous rhetoric while selling short the New Deal and
Great Society constituencies that got out the vote all those years: Just remind
Democratic voters that Republicans want to outlaw affirmative action and
abortion and quarantine everyone diagnosed with AIDS.
The thing is, we were never
dumb enough to sign on to this gutted, soulless, leveraged-buyout version of
the Democratic platform. Bill Clinton eked out a White House win with only 43
percent of the popular vote. His triumphant job performance as president is a
fiction in which Democrats have been inculcated because his surrogates have so
effectively marginalized anyone who dares acknowledge history.
But when the going gets tough,
as it conspicuously has, Hillary (like Obama in 2009, alas) falls back on what
worked for Bill, the old New Dem coalition strategy: getting the black
community leaders and abortion lobby to get out the vote, the bank lobby to pay
for the ad buys and the eternal GOP majority to prevent anything from
transpiring that might alienate the bank lobbyists.
Today, as in 1992, this
strategy only works by sacrificing a thing that Hillary now maligns as
eggheaded “economic theory” but what Sanders supporters see as coherence.
If it felt a bit hyperbolic to
identify Hillary’s true nemesis as “coherence,” well, it wasn’t. The
Clintonists don’t want the electorate to make sense of the world—or to link
cause and effect.
If they did, they might begin
to see breaking up massive unaccountable money syndicates as a vital step
toward achieving racial tolerance and gender equality.
At some point between the
financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of Occupy in 2011, Americans began to
understand that predatory lending was the cornerstone of modern finance.
Usurious interest rates, extortionate fees and vicious cycles of ever-inflating
indebtedness were a phenomenon that united black retirees in Detroit with
Mexican day laborers in Hollister, Calif.; underemployed Vassar grads with
underemployed University of Phoenix grads; the evaporating coffers of Jefferson
County, Ala., and Harvard’s $36 billion endowment. The mechanics and fine print
might differ case to case, but the business model was identical, needing two
critical ingredients to thrive: a culture efficient at dehumanizing victims,
and legal impunity.
First, at Washington
Mutual—picked off for pennies on the dollar in 2008 by TBTF bank
JPMorgan—subprime mortgage salesmen who didn’t sell enough predatory
negative-amortization mortgages were assigned “trainers” whose first words
were, “Do not feel sorry for ‘these’ people.” At Wells Fargo, where mortgage
executives called minorities “mud people” and “niggers,” salesmen were directed
to solicit new customers at African-American churches. Sexual harassment was
indisputably rampant in the industry. “Mortgage sluts” peopled a 2008 Business
Week cover story. Is there a more vivid embodiment of rape culture than
the photos of the 2010 Halloween party held by staffers of the Steven J. Baum
foreclosure mill?
Second, no major financial
institution is as singly responsible for the “mainstreaming” of predatory
lending as Citigroup. No other institution has employed as many veterans of the
Clinton administration. Merely listing the relevant names could fill the better
part of a book, but here are three: Peter Orszag, Jack Lew and Michael Froman.
By 2007, Citi’s balance sheet was the biggest on Wall Street—when you included
all its off-the-books assets, in any case—and in 2008 Citi became the recipient
of the single biggest bailout.
If any corporate monstrosity
was worthy of a breakup, it was Citi.
Celebrated analyst
Meredith Whitney said so, FDIC chairman Sheila Bair said so, TARP overseer
Elizabeth Warren said so and former Citi exec Sallie Krawcheck said as much
after she was fired by (serial sex-discrimination lawsuit defendant) Vikram
Pandit.
No one listened. Warren and
Bair were marginalized—dismissed for failure to be seen as “team players” by
the Clinton/Citi alums who infested the Obama White House. Nevertheless, a lot
of powerful men came around, including Larry Summers and then (unbelievably)
former Citi CEOs Sandy Weill and John Reed, both of whom wrote op-eds arguing
that Glass-Steagall needed to be reinstated and their old bank broken up.
Hillary thinks otherwise—that
we have not yet reached the hypothetical in which “they deserve it.” Could that
be because Citi, in its current and apparently invincible state, is the second
biggest donor to her campaign?
Reference:
see remarks by Moe Tkacik at
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