This op-ed in the New York Times was sent in by Kelly Cowan, our spy in the house of love. It’s called The Other Plot to Wreck America, by Frank Rich. Here are a few snips.
Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed.
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It’s against this backdrop that this week’s long-awaited initial public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are so critical. This is the bipartisan panel that Congress mandated last spring to investigate the still murky story of what happened in the meltdown. Phil Angelides, the former California treasurer who is the inquiry’s chairman…gets it. But he has a tough act to follow: Ferdinand Pecora, the legendary prosecutor who served as chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the 1929 crash as F.D.R. took office.
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The reckless Citi executives of our day may not have given themselves interest-free loans, but they often walked away with the short-term, illusionary profits while their employees were left with shredded jobs and 401(k)’s. Among those Citi executives was Robert Rubin, who, as the Clinton Treasury secretary, helped repeal the last vestiges of Glass-Steagall after years of Wall Street assault. Somewhere Pecora is turning in his grave
Rubin has never apologized, let alone been held accountable. But he’s hardly alone.
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If Citi, among the most egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.
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If Citi, among the most egregious of Wall Street reprobates, feels it can get away with business as usual, it’s because it fears no retribution. And it got more good news last week. Now that Chris Dodd is vacating the Senate, his chairmanship of the Banking Committee may fall next year to Tim Johnson of South Dakota, home to Citi’s credit card operation. Johnson was the only Senate Democrat to vote against Congress’s recent bill policing credit card abuses.
If they all skate away yet again by deflecting blame or mouthing pro forma mea culpas, it will be a sign that this inquiry, like so many other promises of reform since 9/15, is likely to leave Wall Street’s status quo largely intact. That’s the ticking-bomb scenario that truly imperils us all.
Hi Miss Linda, thank you for your kind attention to my rantwork. 🙂
Hi Kelly — I said Whoville by accident but I’ve decided I’m digging the metaphor. The Grinch that stole Christmas, and he’s in a business suit with a massive pointy chin, climbing down chimneys and stuffing his sack with Jennie-o turkeys and enormous walmart inflatable snowmen ( why?).
I’m going to demur, though, on the question of our cocreation of this system. I don’t think we’re to blame. I mean Kelly if somebody gets you to invest in Enron and then they disappear with some percentage of the landmass of Northern America plus your life savings, that seems more like getting hosed than cocreating your reality.
But there is no doubt now it’s our responsibility, the way it’s anyone’s responsibility to help a sinking boat they’re on to get to shore.
My plan works something like this: I want every taxpayer to be named a shareholder in America Inc. I want quarterly statements. I want a working email address that will be answered, and an 800 number with people on the other end who will explain this shit to me and a protocol for escalating my complaint.
I want regional committees to attend shareholder meetings every quarter and I want to be at that table, and I want your Dad there, and my brother and my aunt and yours, all sitting in the room there receiving quarterly reports from those men who, since they don’t have much to do all day, should be spending their time making their machinations entirely public, to the public.
After all, they work for us now.
ginblossom, thank you for your observations. You are no crackpot. I am sure, however, many get uneasy hearing your views.
The Commission most likely will not get to the whole truth. For me, the real value in this process will be in the questions that are asked. That is what I will be watching. There should be no boundaries as to the questions asked. The answers are pretty much expected. I believe the process itself, can and will reveal critical pieces of information, even if it does it inadvertently.
This Commission is an attempt to call to account the architects of our financial system. This is our record. This is our story. This is the story we tell ourselves; the story we will tell each other. This is the story we tell the world. And most importantly this is the story we will tell future generations. This is the record we will leave.
We all helped to create Whoville. We need to recognize this so we can change the system. It will change one way or another as it is not sustainable. The question is this, will we change it for the better.
Ginblossom:
Thank you for the great rave – you are no crackpot, you are just a little more awake that most.
(Standing ovation from wet, humid Sydney)
Linda
Well, Eric.
When I talk about this stuff people usually look at me like they can’t decide which authorities to call. I get reactions varying from unease to disengagement. Most people I know are in their forties, and they spent their whole lives terrified but in love with the stock market, compliant with banks and in broiling pursuit of the American Dream, which, if you want to know the truth now that they have it looks totally suffocating to me.
I talk about how banks and multinationals are the new feudals and plantation owners. I tell people that credit cards are an invitation to rent money; that participating in the credit economy as a consumer is the same thing as being a sharecropper. I look at people the same way your cat looks at you, gazing at the middle distance, when they tell me they’re about to purchase a five hundred thousand dollar condo with a 5 year ARM.
I don’t even know what to say when I hear that some neighborhood kid has been accepted to Purdue and will be paying two hundred thousand dollars for his education; one hundred and fifty of which is borrowed; fifty of it by his parents.
We all know no one is going to find anything out that will change our banking system. Even if they try they’re going to be compromised, and distracted by dire predictions such as: if we do not support the banks, then no one will be able to borrow any money.
All right…but…if we don’t give *them* any money, we won’t have to *borrow* any. It’s so specious, it’s like the Grinch: without banks, there would be no business. Okay well, tell you what, you get the hell out of Whoville and we’ll see how we manage with you, okay?
Most people I know really want me to shut up. They were scared fifteen years ago and never bought Microsoft, stayed at their jobs and bought the housing bubble too late. They want their educations to mean something and their houses to be worth something, and the lie that their companies are matching their savings dollar for dollar to be true. If you spend your whole life believing something, it almost doesn’t matter if it isn’t true.
I could go on and on and on. But alas, I’m just a crackpot on the internet.
So – no comments on the banking piece; comments on everything else. I think we would be wise to parse out some of the psychology involved; to get a grasp on the emotions and fears underneath the issue. Remember that unlike something like gay marriage, this is a massive, almost incomprehensible threat to peoples’ survival and a betrayal on a colossal scale. A karmic trust has been violated: recall how many banks had the name ‘trust’ in their name, for how long; a central or community trust. Nobody thinks it’s weird when a lawyer is disbarred for mixing escrow funds with personal funds; but we don’t know what to do when a bank steals all our money and gambles it away.
I think that, like with many spiritual issues — i.e., things involving forces larger than ourselves, deep fear, the potential for chaos and survival issues — we have to take it really easy and learn the mental/emotional landscape. Say what you will about debt; people who work at a job almost always work hard, they know they are being taken advantage of to some degree, and if they manage to have $2,000 in their checkbook to pay the bills and that’s sitting in Chase or BOA and the bank makes off with the money, that is disgusting and infuriating. And when something is that egregious, one needs a special approach. There seems to be no power to speak truth to. There seems to be nothing one can do; no action piece: though two have been suggested.
One is to boycott credit card payments to TARP banks; another is to divest and put positive balances into smaller community banks. One thing we need is a source of info on good banks. But there is more; there is the repeated violation of trust by the ‘trusts’, and this needs to be broached – but I’m not sure how. And I would need to understand why on a deeper level, to get my energy fully behind the idea.
The last piece is: this is major Pluto in Cap. I was talking about this stuff two years ago before I had a shred of a clue what the issues were. That makes it 2012 stuff. We need to get a handle on the very large context, and use Uranus Pluto to invent something better, something revolutionary: but what?