Guillotines ‘R’ Us
You know how I know the protests thrown by the Service Employees International Union here last week were ineffective in pressuring Wall Street traders to accept any meaningful reform for their government-proped zone? It was partially because the attendees of the American Bankers Association at the conference were from small, community banks that took little, if any, of the bailout funds from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Unions’ Astroturf Falls Short Of Wall Street’s Beheading
CHICAGO, Ill. — You know how I know the protests thrown by the Service Employees International Union here last week were ineffective in pressuring Wall Street traders to accept any meaningful reform for their government-proped zone?
It was partially because the attendees of the American Bankers Association at the conference were from small, community banks that took little, if any, of the bailout funds from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Bob Schmermund, executive vice president of ABA membership, told the member bankers:
“What the protesters may not realize is who’s attending this meeting. This room is literally filled from stem to stern with traditional bankers whose life’s work is dedicated to serving the needs of their communities.”
According to Brian Sullivan’s Fox Business blog, only two of ABA’s hundred-plus member banks took bailout money, Bank of America and Citigroup. Wrote Sullivan on his blog:
“In fact, many of the ABA’s members would likely agree with the protesters’ position on bailouts, since not only did the bailouts help larger banks at the expense of smaller ones, but also the cost to the FDIC from the now 106 failed banks is forcing the FDIC to push a multibilion dollar prepayment plan for agency insurance, hurting banks’ balance sheets.”
Sure, the ABA was an appropriate target for the reasons claimed by Andrea Frye, communications director with the nonprofit National People’s Coalition.
“They’re standing in the way by spending billions of dollars to fight meaningful rules,” she told Reuters.
Still, those little banks weren’t Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, who wouldn’t have survived their near-fatal crash had it not been for the federal government’s trillion dollar capital injections last fall.
Actually, it was mainly because the propaganda the 5,000-plus union protesters waved in the air outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers for the “Showdown in Chicago” was tame.
There were cutouts of JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon, retiring Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, and Wells Fargo & Co. CEO John Stumpf.
There were grim reapers with signs that read, “Greed Kills.”
There were more signs that said “Reclaim America,” “Bust Up Big Banks,” “Hold Banks Accountable,” “No Bonuses For Big Banks,” and “Foreclosures Ruin Communities.”
There were “Wanted” signs for those deemed “Wall Street Robber Bankers.”
There were chants of “Shame On You!” directed at the ABA bankers.
Yeah, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois spoke in solidarity to the protesters on behalf of more regulation in the financial services sector.
Also, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair told the protesters that she backed President Barack Obama’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
There was even a prayer vigil.
Plus, when the protesters advanced on the downtown offices of financial giant Goldman Sachs, they offered a hand-delivered protest letter — yes, a piece of paper!
Moreover, the protesters allowed a representative from Goldman Sachs take the letter without harming his person. In fact, the G-Sachs representative reportedly shook hands with the protesters. Reported the The Wall Street Journal:
“A spokeswoman at Goldman Sachs said the bank’s security office in Chicago had received a copy of the letter. She didn’t comment further. The group then marched down the street to the Chicago offices of Wells Fargo. There they also attempted to hand-deliver a letter to Mr. Stumpf, the Wells Fargo CEO. Officials at Wells Fargo couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.”
Fox’s Sullivan suggested that the ABA and the SEIU should have shared a beer instead.
As such, Gary Younge writing for The Guardian/UK highlighted the notion that the agitprop of not only the unions but also the Obama administration has been a distraction to true reform on Wall Street’s financial trading sector.
Younge said that resentment for the bonuses for executives at AIG, Goldman Sachs, and the Royal Bank of Scotland is “both justified and predictable.”
However, there is a major difference between “class envy and class struggle,” he noted.
“The former is rooted in the popular antipathy towards the rich on account of their wealth; the latter, meanwhile, targets the system that makes some people rich by making others poor. Envy can lead to struggle. But it doesn’t have to,” Younge wrote.
In other words, when the Twitter feeds of National People’s Action and the SEIU point to the ABA’s “Roaring ’20s”-themed cocktail party, that’s class envy.
But the “main dish,” as Younge described, is the structure of the financial institutions, not the individuals running them.
So while the Obama administration’s compensation czar, Kenneth Feinberg, offered to cut the paychecks by 90 percent of those CEOs whose institutions took bailout money, the separation of commercial banking and investment banking (i.e. The Glass-Steagall Act) remained a pipedream.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed out this facet in a recent column promoting the $200,000 CEO pay cap as “a good first step.”
“In most cases, the really big earners are traders — people who bet successfully on oil futures or some other financial asset. This sort of speculative trading should not be taking place at a government-protected bank, and until the deregulation of the last two decades, it would not have been,” Baker wrote.
But through all of this talk, there have been no torches lit. No pick-axes sharpened. No guillotines dusted off and tested. How can you reform populist anger without guillotines, the Italian Mannaia, the Scottish Maiden, or the Halifax Gibbet?
Such was the argument behind Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch.org piece “All the Populism Money Can Buy.”
In it, Cockburn recounted a recent anti-war protest in his adopted California hometown in which he spoke to a crowd in front of a guillotine erected by the daughter of Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.
The political journalist said he first questioned the effectiveness of employing such a political symbol, before taking the deadly instrument of the French Revolution seriously as had writer Mark Twain in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”
“Here, in America, the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor, juror or ballot box. If corporate lawbreakers felt that somewhere along the line the retribution of the guillotine might await them, it would concentrate their minds marvelously, and cow them into lawfulness,” he wrote.
And even after the unions’ staged protest last week, the following observation by Cockburn still stood:
“This amazing bailout for the existing corrupt system — as if Lenin had used the October revolution to restore the Romanovs — has been engineered without significant opposition from organized labor or the left-liberal end of Obama’s own party.”
It’s not like the hoi polloi have waited to feel the weight of the boot on its neck.
Mark Ames of AlterNet reported that Wall Street’s immoral behavior has stretched thin the physical and mental capacities of the residents of Alabama last March.
With the help of JP Morgan, Pilgrim’s Pride leveraged such a huge buyout of its competitor that the chicken processor eventually declared bankruptcy protected from creditors and lawsuits. But while the Pilgrim family made off with handsome treasure, its workers were left shortchanged and desperate, Ames noted.
As a result of this corporate corruption, the rural areas where Pilgrim’s chicken plants ruled could not sustain its own municipal services, including that of its police force.
This situation caused the U.S. Army to violate the Posse Comitatus Act by allowing federal troops from a nearby fort to patrol the streets of Samson, Ala. after 27-year-old Michael McLendon shot 11 people across three Alabama towns before taking his own life.
McLendon’s hit list included Pilgrim’s Pride, the former company for which his mother and others had a pending lawsuits, as well as Reliance Metals, the company whose employees bullied him with the nickname “Doughboy” due to his weight.
Ames suggested that McLendon’s shooting rampage fits a wider national pattern caused by what he terms “Great Depression 2.” He wrote last March:
“For years, these shootings were considered ‘random acts’ committed by people who ‘snapped for no reason.’ Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They’re reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to ‘snap’ and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone’s wealth.
“Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there’s a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats’ legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share,” he concluded.
