His father worked for a utility and had to sell at the bottom. Steve Bannon never got over this. He blamed someone else, of course.
Bannon’s origin story doesn’t add up
By Richard Cohen Opinion writer March 20, 2017
It is a story oft-repeated and, at first, quite moving. It is the story of Marty Bannon, father of the White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and how he lost much of his nest egg when the financial system cratered in 2008. He had worked for AT&T for 50?years, buying the stock when it was as safe as gold (only gold paid no dividend) and was now watching it go south at such an alarming rate that he decided to sell it. In a flash, the system turned on Marty and a lifetime of savings was gone. For his son Steve, it was an unforgettable lesson. It made him the revolutionary he is today.
The story
reappeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. “The only net worth my father had beside his tiny little house was that AT&T stock,” Steve Bannon was quoted as saying. “And nobody is held accountable? All these firms get bailed out. There’s no equity taken from anybody. There’s no one in jail.”
That day, that October day when Marty Bannon panicked and took Jim Cramer’s advice from the TV and sold his AT&T stock, was when Steve Bannon had an epiphany: “Everything since then has come from there,” he said.
The Problem with Steve Bannon’s Story About His Father
By Nicholas LemannMarch 21, 2017
Steve Bannon is the keeper of the secret formula—that peculiar and potent mix of aggressive bluster and selective empathy—that enabled Donald Trump to be elected. It’s worth remembering how unlikely the success of the formula seemed even a year ago. Before Trump got to Hillary Clinton, and when Bannon was an informal adviser, the candidate mowed down a long list of Republican opponents, without being the biggest spender or having the best organization. That was because the formula worked. It isn’t conventionally liberal or conservative, and it doesn’t have much in common with the standard views of either political party. Essentially, all of Trump’s Republican opponents were more pro-market, more pro-trade, and more anti-government than he was. And Clinton, by virtue of unexpected pressure from Bernie Sanders, had moved slightly in the direction of the Trump formula before she was nominated.
Last week, Bannon gave an
extended interview to the
Wall Street Journal, in which he offered an origin story about his (as the
Journal’s headline put it) “journey to economic nationalism.” He said that Marty Bannon, his ninety-five-year-old father, a devout Catholic whose education ended at the third grade, had, like
his father before him, worked at A.T. & T. for half a century, rising slowly from a blue-collar job to a white-collar one; his loyalty to the company was so great that he put all his savings into A.T. & T. stock. Then, in October of 2008, he was watching Jim Cramer on the “Today” show, and heard Cramer say that it was time to sell—so he did. Poof, a hundred thousand dollars of painstakingly accumulated savings were gone, even as the financial institutions that perpetrated the crisis were being bailed out. Bannon told the Journal, “Everything since then has come from there. All of it.”
This is political mythology, and it doesn’t stand up to strict rational analysis. Steve Bannon was well into his career as a conservative documentary filmmaker who sounded nationalist notes before the 2008 financial crisis. And, after watching Cramer on television, Marty Bannon had lots of better options than selling his stock. He neglected to consult his sons—two of whom, including Steve, had worked in finance—before selling. They would have told him not to. Had he not sold, he would not have lost any money, because A.T. & T. stock regained its value over time. There were many other, more prudent ways he could have invested his savings over the years than putting it all into a single company’s stock, like buying shares in a mutual fund. He had bought some of his A.T. & T. stock with borrowed money, which he should not have done.
“He’s the backbone of the country, the everyman who plays by the rules, the hardworking dad that delays his own gratification for the family,” Steve Bannon told the Journal. People like that were often treated like dirt during the early Gilded Age days of industrial capitalism in America; that situation was corrected by an expanded federal government, and Marty Bannon was the beneficiary. He lived under a social compact that was created during the two liberal heydays of the first half of the twentieth century, the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and that shaped the lives of many millions of Americans. Beginning in 1913, A.T. & T. was a heavily regulated, government-sanctioned monopoly. It was able to provide the rock-solid stability that the elder Bannon remembers because it had no competitors but did have passive and widely dispersed investors (for decades, A.T. & T. had by far the highest number of individual stockholders of any American company), as well as the heavy hand of the state pushing it to treat its employees generously, through unionization and other means.
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