Educate the Underdogs

Slavoj Žižek: The Cologne attacks were an obscene version of carnival

http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2016/01/slavoj-zizek-cologne-attacks
  

 

Were the recent Cologne sex attacks a deliberate assault on western values and a middle-class sense of decency?

By Slavoj Zizek

Who are the “hateful eight” in Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name? The ENTIRE group of participants - white racists and the black Union soldier, men and women, law officers and criminals – they are all equally mean, brutal and revengeful. The most embarrassing moment in the film occurs when the black officer (played by the superb Samuel L. Jackson) narrates in detail and with obvious pleasure to an old Confederate general how he killed his racist son, who was responsible for many black deaths. After forcing him to march naked in cold wind, Jackson promises the freezing white guy he will get a warm cover if he performs fellatio, but after the guy does so, Jackson reneges on his promise and lets him die. So there are no good guys in the struggle against racism – they are all engaged in it with the utmost brutality. And is the lesson of the recent Cologne sex attacks not uncannily similar to the lesson of the film? Even if (most of) the refugees are effectively victims fleeing from ruined countries, this does not prevent them from acting in a despicable way. We tend to forget that there is nothing redeeming in suffering: being a victim at the bottom of the social ladder does not make you some kind of privileged voice of morality and justice.

But this general insight is not enough – one has to take a close look at the situation which gave birth to Cologne incident. In his analysis of the global situation after the Paris bombings1, Alain Badiou discerns three predominant types of subjectivity in today’s global capitalism: the western “civilised” middle-class liberal-democratic subject; those outside the west possessed by the “desire for the west le desir d’Occident,” desperately endeavouring to imitate the “civilised” life-style of the western middle classes; and the fascist nihilists, those whose envy at the west turns into a mortal self-destructive hatred. Badiou makes it clear that what the media call the “radicalisation” of Muslims is Fascisation simple and pure:

“this fascism is the obverse of the frustrated desire for the west which is organized in a more or less military way following the flexible model of a mafia gang and with variable ideological colorisations where the place occupied by religion is purely formal.” 

The western middle class ideology has two opposed features: it displays arrogance and belief in the superiority of its values (universal human rights and freedoms threatened by the barbarian outsiders), but, simultaneously, it is obsessed by the fear that its limited domain will be invaded by the billions outside, who do not count in global capitalism since they are neither producing commodities nor consuming them. The fear of its members is that they will join those excluded.

The clearest expression of the “desire for the west” are immigrant refugees: their desire is not a revolutionary one, it is the desire to leave behind their devastated habitat and rejoin the promised land of the developed west. (Those who remain behind try to create there miserable copies of western prosperity, like the “modernised” parts in every third world metropolis, in Luanda, in Lagos, etc, with cafeterias selling cappuccinos, shopping malls, and so on).

But since, for the large majority of pretenders, this desire cannot be satisfied, one of the remaining options is the nihilist reversal: frustration and envy get radicalised into a murderous and self-destructive hatred of the west, and people get engaged in violent revenge. Badiou proclaims this violence a pure expression of death drive, a violence that can only culminate in acts of orgiastic (self)destruction, without any serious vision of an alternate society.

Badiou is right to emphasise that there is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it claims to be: it is a phenomenon strictly inherent to the global capitalist universe, its “hidden phantom”. The basic fact of fundamentalist fascism is envy. Fundamentalism remains rooted in the desire for the west in its very hatred of the west. We are dealing here with the standard reversal of frustrated desire into aggressiveness described by psychoanalysis, and Islam just provides the form to ground this (self)destructive hatred. This destructive potential of envy is the base of Rousseau’s well-known distinction between egotism, amour-de-soi (that love of the self which is natural), and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others in which a person focuses not on achieving a goal, but on destroying the obstacle to it:

“The primitive passions, which all directly tend towards our happiness, make us deal only with objects which relate to them, and whose principle is only amour-de-soi, are all in their essence lovable and tender; however, when, diverted from their objects by obstacles, they are more occupied with the obstacle they try to get rid of, than with the object they try to reach, they change their nature and become irascible and hateful. This is how amour-de-soi, which is a noble and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, that is to say, a relative feeling by means of which one compares oneself, a feeling which demands preferences, whose enjoyment is purely negative and which does not strive to find satisfaction in our own well-being, but only in the misfortune of others.”2

An evil person is thus not an egotist, “thinking only about his own interests”. A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence – be it the Oklahoma bombings or the attack on the Twin Towers. In both cases, we were dealing with hatred pure and simple: destroying the obstacle, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Twin Towers, was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society.3

Such a fascisation can exert a certain attraction to the frustrated immigrant youth which cannot find a proper place in western societies or a prospect to identify with – fascisation offers them an easy way out of their frustration: an eventful risky life dressed up in a sacrificial religious dedication, plus material satisfaction (sex, cars, weapons…). One should not forget that the Islamic State is also a big mafia trading company selling oil, ancient statues, cotton, arms and women-slaves, “a mixture of deadly heroic propositions and, simultaneously, of western corruption by products”.

It goes by itself that this fundamentalist-fascist violence is just one of the modes of violence that pertains to global capitalism, and that one should bear in mind not only the forms of fundamentalist violence in western countries themselves (anti-immigrant populism, etc), but above all the systematic violence of capitalism itself, from the catastrophic consequences of global economy to the long story of military interventions. Islamo-Fascism is a profoundly reactive phenomenon in Nietzschean sense of the term, an expression of impotence converted into self-destructive rage.

While agreeing with the overall thrust of Badiou’s analysis, I find three of its claims problematic. First, the reduction of religion, the religious form of fascist nihilism, to a secondary superficial feature: “Religion is only a clothing, it is in no way the heart of the matter, only a form of subjectivisation, not the real content of the thing.” Badiou is totally right in his claim that the search for the roots of today’s Muslim terrorism in ancient religious texts (the “it is all already in Quran” story) is misleading: one should instead focus on today’s global capitalism and conceive Islamo-fascism as one of the modes to react to its lure by way of inverting envy into hatred. But is, from a critical standpoint, religion not always a kind of clothing, rather than the heart of the matter? Is religion not in its very core a “form of subjectivisation” of people’s predicament? And does this not imply that a clothing IS in some sense the “heart of the matter”, the way individuals experience their situation – there is no way for them to step back and see somehow from outside how things “really are”… Then, the all too fast identification of refugees and migrants with a “nomadic proletariat”, a “virtual vanguard of the gigantic mass of the people whose existence is not counted prise en compte in the world the way it is”. 

Are migrants (mostly, at least) not those most strongly possessed by the “desire for the west”, most strongly in the thrall of hegemonic ideology? 

Finally, the naïve demand that we should:

“go and see who is this other about whom on talks, who are they really. We have to gather their thoughts, their ideas, their vision of things, and inscribe them, and ourselves simultaneously, into a strategic vision of the fate of humanity”.

Easy to say, difficult to do. This other is, as Badiou himself describes, utterly disoriented, possessed by the opposing attitudes of envy and hatred, a hatred which ultimately expresses its own repressed desire for the west (which is why hatred turns into a self-destruction). It is part of a naive humanist metaphysics to presuppose that beneath this vicious cycle of desire, envy and hatred, there is some “deeper” human core of global solidarity. Stories abound about how, among the refugees, many Syrians are an exception: in transition camps they clean the dirt they leave behind, they behave in a polite and respectful way, many of them are well-educated and speak English, they often even pay for what they consume... in short, we feel they are like ourselves, our educated and civilised middle classes. 

It is popular to claim that the violent refugees represent a minority, and that the large majority has a deep respect for women… while this is of course true, one should nonetheless cast a closer look into the structure of this respect: what kind of woman is “respected”, and what is expected from her? What if a woman is “respected” insofar (and only insofar) as she fits the ideal of a docile servant faithfully doing her home chores, so that her man has the right to explode in fury if she “goes viral” and acts in full autonomy?

Our media usually draw a distinction between “civilised” middle-class refugees and “barbarian” lower class refugees who steal, harass our citizens, behave violently towards women, defecate in public... Instead of dismissing all this as racist propaganda, one should gather the courage to discern a moment of truth in it: brutality, up to outright cruelty towards the weak, animals, women, etc, is a traditional feature of the “lower classes”; one of their strategies of resisting those in power always was a terrifying display of brutality aimed at disturbing the middle-class sense of decency. And one is tempted to read in this way also what happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne – as an obscene lower-class carnival:

“German police are investigating reports that scores of women were sexually assaulted and mugged in Cologne city centre during New Year’s Eve celebrations, in what a minister called a ‘completely new dimension of crime’. According to the police, those allegedly responsible for the sex attacks and numerous robberies were of Arab and north African origin. Over 100 complaints were filed to police, a third of which were linked to sexual assault. The city centre turned into a ‘lawless zone’: between 500 and 1000 men described as drunk and aggressive are believed to have been behind the attacks on partygoers in the centre of the western German city. Whether they were working as a single group or in separate gangs remains unclear. Women reported being tightly surrounded by groups of men who harassed and mugged them. Some people threw fireworks into the crowds, adding to the chaos. One of the victims had been raped. A volunteer policewoman was among those said to have been sexually assaulted.”4

As expected, the incident is growing: now over 500 complaints have been filed from women, with similar incidents in other German cities (and in Sweden). There are indications that attacks were coordinated in advance, plus right-wing anti-immigrant barbarian “defenders of the civilised west” are striking back with attacks on immigrants, so that the spiral of violence threatens to be unleashed… And, as expected, the politically correct liberal Left mobilised its resources to downplay the incident in the same way it did in the case in Rotherham.

But there is more, much more, to it: the Cologne carnival should be located in the long line whose first recorded case reaches back to Paris of the 1730s, to the so-called “Great Cat Massacre” described by Robert Darnton5, when a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find, including the pet of their master’s wife. The apprentices were literally treated worse than cats adored by the master’s wife, especially la grise (the grey), her favorite. One night the boys resolved to right this inequitable state of affairs: they dumped sack-loads of half-dead cats in the courtyard and then strung them up on an improvised gallows, the men delirious with joy, disorder, and laughter... Why was the killing so funny?

During carnival the common people suspended the normal rules of behavior and ceremoniously reversed the social order or turned it upside down in riotous procession. Carnival was high season for hilarity, sexuality, and youth run riot, and the crowd often incorporated cat torture into its rough music. While mocking a cuckold or some other victim, the youths passed around a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl. Faire le chat, they called it. The Germans called it Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats. The torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. The power of cats was concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chatte, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as “pussy” does in English, and they have served as obscenities for centuries.

So what if we conceive of the Cologne incident as a contemporary version of faire le chat? As a carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs? It wasn't the simple urge for satisfaction of sexually starved young men – this could be done in a more discreet, hidden way – it was foremost a public spectacle of installing fear and humiliation, of exposing the “pussies” of the privileged Germans to painful helplessness. There is, of course, nothing redemptive or emancipatory, nothing effectively liberating, in such a carnival – but this is how actual carnivals work.

This is why the naive attempts to enlighten immigrants (explaining to them that our sexual mores are different, that a woman who walks in public in a mini skirt and smiles does not thereby signal sexual invitation, etc.) are examples of breath-taking stupidity – they know this and that's why they are doing it. They are well aware that what they are doing is foreign to our predominant culture, but they are doing it precisely to wound our sensitivities. The task is to change this stance of envy and revengeful aggressiveness, not to teach them what they already know very well.

The difficult lesson of this entire affair is thus that it is not enough to simply give voice to the underdogs the way they are: in order to enact actual emancipation, they have to be educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom.

Ontological Incompleteness

Koch, the Evil Thing

Wall Street and the Economy

January 5, 2016

by Bernie Sanders

https://berniesanders.com/statement-by-senator-bernie-sanders-on-wall-street-and-the-economy/

Speaking a few subway stops away from the epicenter of the global financial crisis, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to remake the financial system to serve America’s working families. Below are his prepared remarks. Watch the live stream here.

The American people are catching on. They understand that something is profoundly wrong when, in our country today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and when the 20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans – half of our population. They know that the system is rigged when the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, while 58 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.

They also know that a handful of people on Wall Street have extraordinary power over the economic and political life of our country. As most people know, in the 1990s and later, the financial interests spent billions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to force through Congress the deregulation of Wall Street, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the weakening of consumer protection laws in states.

They spent this money in order to get the government off their backs and to show the American people what they could do with that new-won freedom. Well, they sure showed the American people. In 2008, the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street nearly destroyed the U.S. and global economy.

Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings.

While Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world with no strings attached, the American middle class continues to disappear, poverty is increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. And Wall Street executives still receive huge compensation packages as if the financial crisis they created never happened.

Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today.
So, to those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation. And, here is a New Year’s Resolution that I will keep if elected president. If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.

We will no longer tolerate an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest Americans in this country at the expense of everyone else.

While President Obama deserves credit for improving this economy after the Wall Street crash, the reality is that a lot of unfinished business remains to be done.

Our goal must be to create a financial system and an economy that works for all Americans, not just a handful of billionaires

Ending “Too Big To Fail”

That means we have got to end, once and for all, the scheme that is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street, the policy of “too big to fail.”

We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy – making loans at affordable rates to small- and medium-sized businesses so that we create decent-paying jobs. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making huge profits and assured that, if their schemes fail, the taxpayers will be there to bail them out.

In 2008, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because we were told they were “too big to fail.” Yet, today, 3 out of the 4 largest financial institutions (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) are nearly 80 percent bigger than before we bailed them out. Incredibly, the six largest banks in this country issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages. They control more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits. Their assets are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of our GDP. Enough is enough.

If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. When it comes to Wall Street reform that must be our bottom line. This is true not just from a risk perspective and the fear of another bailout. It is also true from the reality that a handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country.

If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say “break ‘em up.” And he would be right.

And, here’s how I will accomplish that.

Within the first 100 days of my administration, I will require the secretary of the Treasury Department to establish a “Too-Big-to Fail” list of commercial banks, shadow banks and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.

Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy as authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.

And, I will fight to reinstate a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act to clearly separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurance services. Let’s be clear: this legislation, introduced by my colleague Senator Elizabeth Warren, aims at the heart of the shadow banking system.

In my view, Senator Warren, is right. Dodd-Frank should have broken up Citigroup and other “too- big-to-fail” banks into pieces. And that’s exactly what we need to do. And that’s what I commit to do as president.

Now, my opponent, Secretary Clinton says that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the financial crisis because shadow banks like AIG and Lehman Brothers, not big commercial banks, were the real culprits.

Secretary Clinton is wrong.

Shadow banks did gamble recklessly, but where did that money come from? It came from the federally-insured bank deposits of big commercial banks – something that would have been banned under the Glass-Steagall Act.

Let’s not forget: President Franklin Roosevelt signed this bill into law precisely to prevent Wall Street speculators from causing another Great Depression. And, it worked for more than five decades until Wall Street watered it down under President Reagan and killed it under President Clinton.

And, let’s not kid ourselves. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department didn’t just bail out shadow banks. As a result of an amendment that I offered to audit the emergency lending activities of the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis, we learned that the Fed provided more than $16 trillion in short-term, low-interest loans to every major financial institution in the country including Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, not to mention large corporations, foreign banks, and foreign central banks throughout the world.

Secretary Clinton says we just need to impose a few more fees and regulations on the financial industry. I disagree.

As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has said and I quote: “Giant Wall Street banks continue to threaten the wellbeing of millions of Americans, but what to do? Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking. Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully … Hillary Clinton’s proposals would only invite more dilution and finagle. The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down – busting up the biggest banks and resurrecting Glass-Steagall.”

Secretary Reich is right. Real Wall Street reform means breaking up the big banks and re-establishing firewalls that separates risk taking from traditional banking.

My opponent says that, as a senator, she told bankers to “cut it out” and end their destructive behavior. But, in my view, establishment politicians are the ones who need to “cut it out.” The reality is that Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street. Wall Street, its lobbyists and their billions of dollars regulate Congress. We must change that reality, and as president I will.

Ending Too-Big-To-Jail

It is no secret that millions of Americans have become disillusioned with our political process. They don’t vote. They don’t believe much of what comes out of Washington. They don’t think anyone is there representing their interests. In my view, one of the reasons for that deep disillusionment is the widespread understanding that our criminal justice system is broken and grossly unfair – and that we do not have equal justice under the law. The average American sees kids being arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana or other minor crimes. But when it comes to Wall Street executives, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, whose illegal behavior caused pain and suffering for millions – somehow nothing happens to them. No police record. No jail time. No justice.

We live in a country today that has an economy that is rigged, a campaign finance system which is corrupt and a criminal justice system which, too often, does not dispense justice.

Not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy.

That will change under my administration. “Equal Justice Under Law” will not just be words engraved on the entrance of the Supreme Court. It will be the standard that applies to Wall Street and all Americans.

The business model on Wall Street is fraud

It seems like almost every few weeks we read about one giant financial institution after another being fined or reaching settlements for their reckless, unfair and deceptive activities.

Some people believe that this is an aberration: that we have an honest financial system in which, every now and then, major financial institutions do something wrong and get caught. In my view, the evidence suggests that would be an incorrect analysis.

The reality is that fraud is the business model on Wall Street. It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule. And in a weak regulatory climate the likelihood is that Wall Street gets away with a lot more illegal behavior than we know of.

How many times have we heard the myth that what Wall Street did may have been wrong but it wasn’t illegal?
Let me help shatter that myth today.

Since 2009, major financial institutions in this country have been fined $204 billion. $204 billion. And that takes place in a weak regulatory climate.

Here are just a few examples of when major banks were caught doing illegal activity.

In August 2014, Bank of America settled a case with the Department of Justice for more than $16 billion on charges that the bank misled investors about the riskiness of mortgage-backed securities it sold in the run-up to the crisis.

In November of 2013, JP Morgan settled a case for $13 billion with the Department of Justice and the Federal Housing Finance Agency over charges the bank knowingly sold securities made up of low-quality mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In June of 2014, BNP Paribas was sentenced to five years’ probation and was ordered to pay $8.9 billion in penalties by a U.S. District Judge in Manhattan after this bank pled guilty to charges of violating sanctions by conducting business in Sudan, Iran and Cuba.

Let me read you a few headlines and you tell me how it makes sense that not one executive was prosecuted for fraud.

CNN Headline, May 20, 2015: “5 big banks pay $5.4 billion for rigging currencies.” Those banks include JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup.

Headline from the International Business Times (February 24, 2015): “Big Banks Under Investigation For Allegedly Fixing Precious Metals Prices.” The Banks under investigation included Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

Headline from The Real News Network (November 26, 2013): “Documents in JPMorgan settlement reveal how every large bank in the U.S. has committed mortgage fraud.”

Headline from The Washington Post (March 14, 2014): “In lawsuit, FDIC accuses 16 big banks of fraud, conspiracy,” which included Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.

Headline from the Guardian (April 2, 2011): “How a big U.S. bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs.” This article talks about how Wachovia (which was acquired by Wells Fargo) aided Mexican drug cartels in transferring billions of dollars in illegal drug money. Here is what the federal prosecutor (Jeffrey Sloman) said about this: “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.”

Yet, the total fine for this offense was less than 2% of the bank’s $12.3 billion profit for 2009 and no one went to jail. No one went to jail.

And, if that’s not bad enough, here’s another one.

Headline: The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2011: “J.P. Morgan Apologizes for Military Foreclosures.” Here is a case where JP Morgan Chase, the largest bank in America, wrecked the finances of 4,000 military families in violation of the Civil Service Members Relief Act, yet no one went to jail.

And, when I say that the business model of Wall Street is fraud that is not just Bernie Sanders talking. That is what financial executives told the University of Notre Dame in a study on the ethics of the financial services industry last year.

According to this study, 51 percent of Wall Street executives making more than $500,000 a year found it likely that their competitors have engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to gain an edge in the market.

More than one-third of financial executives have either witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.

Nearly one in five financial service professionals believe they must engage in illegal or unethical activity to be successful.

Twenty-five percent of financial executives have signed or been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement that would prohibit reporting illegal or unethical activities to the authorities.

Here’s what one banker from Barclays said in 2010, when he was caught trying to price-fix the $5 trillion-per-day currency market: “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

Here’s what an analyst from Standard & Poors said in 2008, “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.”

This country can no longer afford to tolerate the culture of fraud and corruption on Wall Street.

Under my administration, Wall Street CEOs will no longer receive a get-out-of jail free card. Big banks will not be too big to fail. Big bankers will not be too big to jail.

As president, I will nominate and appoint people with a track record of standing up to power, rather than those who have made millions defending Wall Street CEOs. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration.

Tax on Wall Street Speculation

And, if we are serious about reforming our financial system, we have got to establish a tax on Wall Street speculators. We have got to discourage reckless gambling on Wall Street and encourage productive investments in the job-creating economy.

We will use the revenue from this tax to make public colleges and universities tuition free. During the financial crisis, the middle class of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to help the middle class.

Reforming Credit Rating Agencies

We cannot have a safe and sound financial system if we cannot trust the credit agencies to accurately rate financial products. And, the only way we can restore that trust is to make sure credit rating agencies cannot make a profit from Wall Street.

Investors would not have bought the risky mortgage backed derivatives that led to the Great Recession if credit agencies did not give these worthless financial products triple-A ratings – ratings that they knew were bogus.
And, the reason these risky financial schemes were given such favorable ratings is simple. Wall Street paid for them.

Under my administration, we will turn for-profit credit rating agencies into non-profit institutions, independent from Wall Street. No longer will Wall Street be able to pick and choose which credit agency will rate their products.

Cap Credit Card Interest Rates and ATM Fees

If we are going to create a financial system that works for all Americans, we have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees.

In my view, it is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM.

It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.

The Bible has a term for this practice. It’s called usury. And in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates.

Today, we don’t need the hellfire and the pitch forks, we don’t need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law.

Today, we need to cap interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15 percent.

In 1980, Congress passed legislation to require credit unions to cap interest rates on their loans at no more than 15 percent. And, that law has worked well. Unlike big banks, credit unions did not receive a huge bailout from the taxpayers of this country. It is time to extend this cap to every lender in America.

We must also cap ATM fees at $2.00. People should not have to pay a 10 percent fee for withdrawing $40 of their own money out of an ATM.

Big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders.

Allow Post Offices to Offer Banking Services

We also need to give Americans affordable banking options.

The reality is that, unbelievably, millions of low-income Americans live in communities where there are no normal banking services. Today, if you live in a low-income community and you need to cash a check or get a loan to pay for a car repair or a medical emergency, where do you go?

You go to a payday lender who could charge an interest rate of over 300 percent and trap you into a vicious cycle of debt. That is unacceptable.

We need to stop payday lenders from ripping off millions of Americans. Post offices exist in almost every community in our country. One important way to provide decent banking opportunities for low income communities is to allow the U.S. postal Service to engage in basic banking services, and that’s what I will fight for.

Reforming the Federal Reserve

Further, we need to structurally reform the Federal Reserve to make it a more democratic institution responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans, not just the billionaires on Wall Street.

When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Federal Reserve acted with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system. We need the Fed to act with the same boldness to combat unemployment and low wages.

In my view, it is unacceptable that the Federal Reserve has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating. I think the American people would be shocked to learn that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, served on the board of the New York Fed at the same time that his bank received a $391 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve. That is a clear conflict of interest that I would ban as president. When I am elected, the foxes will no longer be guarding the henhouse at the Fed. Under my administration, banking industry executives will no longer be allowed to serve on the Fed’s boards and handpick its members and staff.

Further, the Fed should stop paying financial institutions interest to keep money out of the economy and parked at the Fed. Incredibly, the excess reserves of financial institutions that are sitting in the Federal Reserve has grown from less than $2 billion in 2008 to $2.4 trillion today. That is absurd.

Instead of paying banks interest on these reserves, the Fed should charge them a fee that could be used to provide affordable loans to small businesses to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Conclusion

Finally, let me tell you what no other candidate will tell you. No president, not Bernie Sanders or anyone else, can effectively address the economic crises facing the working families of this country alone. The truth is that Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and wealthy campaign donors are just too powerful.

What this campaign is about is building a political movement which revitalizes American democracy, which brings millions of people together – black and white, Latino, Asian-American, Native American – young and old, men and women, gay and straight, native born and immigrant, people of all religions.

Yes. Wall Street has enormous economic and political power. Yes. Wall Street makes huge campaign contributions, they have thousands of lobbyists and they provide very generous speaking fees to those who go before them.

Yes. They have an endless supply of money. But we have something they don’t have. And that is that when millions of working families stand together, demanding fundamental changes in our financial system, we have the power to bring about that change.

Yes, we can make our economy work for all Americans, not just a handful of wealthy speculators. And, now more than ever, that is exactly what we must do.

And so my message to you today is straightforward: If elected president, I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again.

Will they like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.

Will they like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.

Thank you and I look forward to working with the most powerful force in our great nation, not the Barons of Wall Street but the people our government was created to serve.