Reminder: Dismissing Bernie’s Supporters as “a Mob” and the Great Recession as No Big Deal
* Frank-Dodd does not have the necessary strength Clinton is peddling.
William K. Black
February 23, 2016 Bloomington, MN
In an unintentionally hilarious piece evincing exceptional moral blindness, Mr. Womack, a journalist, writes to Bernie.
Senator, you are forming a mob of angry, misinformed people and then turning it on the likely Democratic nominee. That, Senator, is a dangerous and destructive game. Does your campaign honestly wonder why it has become synonymous with nasty online invective?
Gosh, I would have thought that “nasty online invective” might call tens of millions of Americans “a mob of angry, misinformed people” who were “dangerous” because they were backing a candidate for the nomination who is not “the likely Democratic nominee.” The idea that in an electoral nomination contest one is not allowed to criticize the current leader in delegates is, to be gentle, novel. It is certainly not the approach that either then Senator Sanders or then Senator Clinton took when they trailed each other at various points eight years ago.
The journalist’s libel of progressive voters is similar to President Obama’s infamous slander of the American people when he was talking to the Nation’s most powerful banksters. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” That was a slander because the American people wanted justice, not a mob lynching. Womack uses the same mob meme to slander people who make up the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
The journalist thinks Wall Street, the Fed, and the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) are working great because there are “stress tests.” The implication is that this means the SDIs will not fail. Here is a partial list of SDIs that passed stress tests – often weeks before they collapsed.
Fannie
Freddie
Lehman
Bear Stearns
AIG
The three giant Icelandic banks
The biggest and worst Irish banks
WaMu
IndyMac
As the journalist says, he has no expertise in economics, banking, regulation, or white-collar crime. He also is plainly deliberately selective and deceptive. For example, he makes a big deal of the fact that Bernie’s plan begins by identifying the SDIs, because we are already in the process of creating such a list. Bernie’s plan calls for getting rid of the SDIs because the way you make that list (which is currently euphemistically called “systemically important”) is because when (not “if”) the next one fails the experts believe it is likely it will cause a global financial crisis. Womack simply ignores that substantive point and tries to make it sound bizarre that Bernie’s plan calls for the completion of identifying the SDIs.
The journalist is an unconstructed Wall Street/”New Democrat” even at this juncture – fearful that the Fed will lose its “independence” if subjected to a full audit the way other agencies are typically audited. This is after he saw Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke (reappointed in both cases by Democratic Presidents, Clinton and Obama, respectively) destroy effective financial regulation and refuse to act against the most destructive fraud epidemics in history. The Fed is not “independent.” It is a dependency of the Wall Street. The Fed is anti-democratic and faces few of the normal controls designed to prevent abuse. But the journalist is determined to fight against any reform of the Fed.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/02/dismissing-bernies-supporters-mob-great-recession-no-big-deal.html
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