Working Life

Every day, if you pay attention, we can get a teachable moment. Today’s teachable moment gives us this: if you are a CEO of a bank, a CEO who makes millions of dollars, and you are in financial trouble — trouble of your own making — you can ring up the White House and, presto, the coffers of the Federal Reserve open up to extend you loans in the billions of dollars. On the other hand, if you are a worker making a modest income, or you are now retired, and you live in a city ravaged by the so-called “free market”, a city that files for bankruptcy, and you ask the White House for help, you are told, “sorry, buddy, you are on your own.”

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For a very long time, I’ve been critical of the unwillingness of the government to put bankers behind bars. Unless some of these guys end up in jail, another crisis will happen because fines — ultimately paid by shareholders and customers — are not a deterrent to the big boys.

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The inexorable march to another big financial crisis takes another baby step every day. The banks, hey, they just keep spreading their muscle and graft everywhere to make sure that nothing changes. To wit.

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Ah, Don Corleone, you would wish for these days. You would never worry about running a crooked business, breaking the law, or shaking down your customers. Because, if the government came after you, you’d have a ready-made defense, a tested defense handed you by the big banks, and their apologists: don’t indict me and my associates because we’d be out of business.

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When I come back in my next life, I want to be a banker or a hotshot on Wall Street. Because it’s the kind of work where you can do anything you want, break any laws, never get punished and make a huge amount of money. And the best thing is: you make someone else pay for your fuck-ups. That is the upshot of the settlement reached today with the banks. Another day, another sham.

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So, it’s easy to capture our predicament today–though you’d never get that from the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”). Here is is neatly summed up: we’ve been robbed, only little fish are being held accountable for relatively small crimes and, even more to the point, in a political rhetorical world where shareholders are revered, the shareholders are being left to pay the bill.

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Really, I can’t tell whether people who work at the major banks moonlight as comedy writers for The Daily Show, or they are so immune to public shame or punishment that they just don’t give a damn.

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   I have maintained for a long time that nothing is changing in the financial system–we are being left with the same basic game and the same people who are running the game. And, indeed, led by J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon–who was, for a very long time, a go-to guy on Wall Street for the […]

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   People sometimes repeat certain phrases because they’ve heard them used repeatedly when they actually want to say something else, even if they aren’t conscious. Or, put another way–if you want to know why Democrats lost the special election in New York, I’d argue it has a lot to do with the Obama Administration’s failure […]

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    I often fear I am going to be injured–a victim of the adult "shaken head" syndrome. It’s the syndrome I think many of us are afflicted with–you wake up every day and read some stupid-ass comment or proposal by political leaders of both parties and…you shake your head. I’m telling you, it’s dangerous.   […]

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