Do you like inadvertent humor? I do and William Greider had me buckled over in side splitting laughter with his latest column in
The Nation titled "
Hillary Clinton is Whitewashing the Financial Catastrophe". He's always unwittingly funny - for years at Rolling Stone and now at The Nation - in presenting seeming heterodox, but ultimately orthodox, Leftist perspective on US economic and political happenings. But last week he dove into turbulent waters to save something or someone, what it was I must confess is a mystery to me - perhaps it was Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas Warren or the "truth" as he perceives it - and drowned himself by uselessly flailing around and grabbing at rocks and branches that gave way with every tug of reason. I thought watching him glub, glub, glub was funny, anyway. Get a load of this opening:
"Hillary Clinton’s recent op-ed in The New York Times, “How I’d Rein In Wall Street,” was intended to reassure nervous Democrats who fear she is still in thrall to those mega-bankers of New York who crashed the American economy. Clinton’s brisk recital of plausible reform ideas might convince wishful thinkers who are not familiar with the complexities of banking. But informed skeptics, myself included, see a disturbing message in her argument that ought to alarm innocent supporters."
Could Hillary "STILL" be beholden to those NYC mega-bankers? Hahaha. "Wishful thinkers" think not, but they're "innocent". I mean, do I have to go any further into this routine - tears of laughter are streaming down my cheek as I write these word. How stupid are the folks who read The Nation anyway? Hey, they're not stupid, just "innocent". So why did her carpetbagging highness write the Times Op-Ed?
"In roundabout fashion, Hillary Clinton sounds like she is assuring old friends and donors in the financial sector that, if she becomes president, she will not come after them."
Yes, it "sounds like" that because
that is what she's doing (i.e. don't pay any attention to the unmitigated bullshit I say over the next 12 months in an effort to win the Presidency because I'm just saying it to secure the votes of wishful thinkers and innocents). Commence the Greider lesson on what caused the financial collapse which principally was a result of repealing New Deal regulation and greedy bankers - it's pretty simple really - and it's the same story the NYTimes, WAPO and the Network News cast tell. Bankers strong armed good honest politicians into repealing the Glass-Steagall Act for no reason except to exploit the system and steal everyone's money and the system is so corrupt that those bankers have payed no penalty for the chicanery. Now these bankers come in two varieties 1. Traditional Bankers who are friendly and guard peoples money and 2. Investment Bankers who take risks and steal peoples money. Mixing these two types of bankers doesn't work - it's inefficient and leads to something called the "universal banker" who creates subprime mortgages and derivatives to "sell" the debt to "investors" (ya know, pension funds, 401Ks and saps overseas). It all makes a lot of sense UNLESS you've ever met a real life walking, talking, breathing banker.
The typical Nation subscriber might not have ever lived with, dined with, partied with, vacationed with one of these Uber-Bankers who are too big to fail, but I have and let me tell you something - the multicultural, internationalist, new world order banker is a near perfect embodiment of what The Nation, the NYTimes and every other Lefty propaganda journal hold out as a model global citizen. Their politics are, as a rule, impeccably liberal, tolerant and free thinking. They don't just put a coexist bumper sticker on their Bentley - They live it brother and they make a hell of a lot of money doing it. They're white and brown and yellow - Strait, gay and hedonistic libertine - Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Socialist. Most of them are smart as you can imagine - not the brainiacs like you find in R&D or even the analyst shops, but quick thinkers with broad interests and surprisingly deep knowledge of many subjects - like modern day renaissance men and women with platinum credit cards. They're well read and incredibly talented in astonishing ways - most of them speak several languages and they'll do something crazy like play concert quality piano or write published poetry or design low income housing on the side (not unusual that they do all three) and they do it better than YOU ever could even if you did nothing but focus all your attention and effort on doing their hobby. Honestly, it's sort of intimidating, like being in a room full of fashion models you can't help but feel that you just don't measure up - and speaking of that it should also be noted that these bankers are (almost) all extremely attractive on top of being smart and talented. Also, they work like demons doing some of the most excruciatingly detailed analysis and calculations imaginable, working 12 to 20 hours a day, Saturday morning conference calls, taxiing downtown to the office on a Sunday night at 10PM to review presentations for a few hours before catching the early morning flight to LA or Dubai or Tokyo. Most important in terms of Greider's skepticism, these bankers have no interest, as in ZERO interest, in destroying the US economy or global financial system. But there is a profession that thrives in times of financial turmoil and exploits fear, uncertainty and "crisis" to their advantage and it's not bankers.
To understand Banking the way Hillary "understands" banking you have to jump in the
Whitewater, not the Whitewash. What Ms. Rodham learned early on in Arkansas was that bankers need the support of government to do business and GOVERNMENT can strong arm banks into doing almost anything - like, say, giving
Susan Mcdougall $300K in a government backed loan so she could give some of that money to the politician who got it for her. Do that in Little Rock and you're a fuss-bucket lawyer in a backwater State gaming the political system to hedge your "investments" but move that ethos to Washington DC and implement it on a grand scale and you will (and did) collapse the entire house of cards. The wishful thinkers and innocents who read The Nation often complain that
none of the evil bankers that destroyed the worlds financial system ever went to jail for there crimes and the US Tax payer was forced - FORCED - to bail them out, but there's a very good reason for why the bankers got a pass and it's because the bankers had direct links (meaning EVIDENCE) to Big Government "influence" (meaning coercion) on all their decisions. The Feds couldn't prosecute the bankers with out putting themselves in jail too - Mexican Standoff - so they took the easier, softer path of screwing the taxpayer.
Greider closes out with this howler:
This might sound hopelessly naive, but the Democratic Party might do better in politics if it told more of the truth more often: what they tried do and why it failed, and what they think they may have gotten wrong.
If they ever told the truth and admitted what they "got wrong" the people of America would murder them - not figuratively at the ballot box, but literally with pitchforks and axes submerging the Washington Mall in blood.
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