John Wittneben simmered as he listened to Hillary Rodham Clinton defend her ties to Wall Street during last weekend's Democratic debate. He lost 40 percent of his savings in individual retirement accounts during the Great Recession, while Clinton has received millions of dollars from the kinds of executives he believes should be in jail.
"People knew what they were doing back then, because of greed, and it caused me harm," said Wittneben, the Democratic chairman in Emmet County, Iowa. "We were raised a certain way here. Fairness is a big deal."
The next day, he endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the presidential race.
This was the opening of the article “Clinton Battles Image Of Being Soft on Wall St.” that appeared on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times.
As Wittneben watched the debate, listening to Clinton cravenly grope then desperately reach into the disgraceful Republican bag of tricks to pull out “9/11, he “simmered.” The implications of Hillary’s intent, not lost upon this the Democratic county chairman and so many others watching in that moment, were so obvious as an attempt to shut down the conversation by invoking a sort of American political kyrptonite, which instead for this viewer conjured up images of a forgotten era when dissenting voices were vulnerable to being solicited to appear in front of the House on Un-American Activities. In many ways, we still have that same aversion to dissent today in a country perhaps even more jingoistic than ever.
He lost 40% of his savings, to the Economic Terrorists of Wall St who took his money and ran. We all know the story by now. They then brazenly paid themselves exorbitant bonuses and further solidified their positions in the Financial/Insurance/Real Estate markets, which has set FIRE anew to an economy already disfigured with the present day’s over-inflated housing bubbles and ever more risky casino gambling. The destruction Wall St has wrought is not an abstraction to him or to many, many folks in this country.
The point is I don’t believe this Iowan is an outlier. But this disconnect-with-reality continues with Hillary’s defenders here. There’s a huge moat in understanding between the folks who defend Clinton’s close ties to Wall St and then flail away attempting to explain that it’s “no biggie,” while the unresolved feelings of anger, betrayal, and distrust among the vast majority of Americans who in one way or another have been negatively impacted by their deceit and unpunished criminality have not subsided. Our Neoliberal pals are merrily whistling past the graveyard. The heavy-handed defensiveness touting her experience and qualifications, however, belies the real concern there. Try to ignore it but these attributes fell flat for Democratic primary voters who in 2008 wanted change and not more of the same. Obama may have or may not have kept the ship from sinking, but as far as the economy people feel very much like they’ve gotten a raw deal. Folks still slogging through this economic depression, no matter what the GDP and stock index might say, are very uneasy that the architects of this ongoing unresolved crisis are her chief financial campaign donors.
In the primaries, Clinton's advisers privately concede that she will lose some votes over her Wall Street connections. They declined to share specific findings from internal polls, but predicted the issue could resonate in Democratic contests in Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Michigan, where many people have lost homes and businesses to bank foreclosures.
I think many believe the economic downturn is wider and deeper than commonly reported. And the concern that Clinton is both one of the economic royalists FDR spoke about, winning him landslides, and their patron defender, is an anxiety working people are not likely to get over.
And to that end, and especially to those who may insist this may be overblown, I implore you to do a little self-inventory:
- Since the crash of 2008, have you or anyone in your immediate family lost money in their retirement pensions?
- Lost a job because of company cutbacks?
- Had health insurance payments increased?
- Now work longer hours, for the same or less money?
- Had an increase in job responsibilities with no increase in pay?
- Have difficulty keeping up with the alarming rising costs of living?
- Have trouble paying their electric bill, rent or mortgage?
- Have been juggling a life of austerity while bringing up children, forced to forgo things never dreamed you’d have to?
Headlines from other articles like this, “Clintons Earned $30 Million in 16 Months, Report Shows,” which states their money was earned “mainly from giving paid speeches to corporations, banks, and other organizations,” just cement voters’ concerns of a lack of trustworthiness, being beholden to and in the end incapable of reeling in these same bad perpetrators. The Clinton campaign may think people will forget about things like this and vote for her anyway because they’ve only got one other choice, but it doesn’t appear so. There’s another scenario. Voters may choose instead to stay home if she’s the candidate. Dartagnan found a stunning discovery that dispels the myth that people often vote against their own interests, “The Most Important Article You’ll read Today About the Democratic Party.”
Another eye-opening article from Slate Magazine shows three rungs of influence peddling they’ve been involved with since President Bill Clinton left office, “Hillary is in too deep: Why she’ll never be able to extricate herself from Wall Street.” It details a litany of bank funds flowing in and how she also thwarted legislation and investigations of them.
Seven years on and we’re still seeing everyday more and more horror stories of deprivations visited upon the innocent, the hard-working, the needy. The greed and avarice of Wall St, and the selfishness of a wealthy class at large, tells the 99% that quite frankly, they just don’t give a shit. They’re not going to go to jail. They are immunized from the rule of law.
To wit, have a look at another article in yesterday’s Times reminding us of that. “Stingy Users Fined in California Drought, While The Rich Soak.”
APPLE VALLEY, Calif. — Outside her two-story tract home in this working-class town, Debbie Alberts, a part-time food service worker, has torn out most of the lawn. She has given up daily showers and cut her family’s water use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons per person each day.
A little more than 100 miles west, a resident of the fashionable Los Angeles hills has been labeled “the Wet Prince of Bel Air” after drinking up more than 30,000 gallons of water each day — the equivalent of 400 toilet flushes each hour with two showers running constantly, with enough water left over to keep the lawn perfectly green.
Only one of them has been fined for excessive water use: Alberts.
One is left in 2015 with a distinct feeling that the system is rigged — the tables have been turned. And what is staring us hard in the face in this era of seemingly unending greed is the fact that the American justice system is on par with that of a banana republic.
For instance, right now, black kids in East New York, Brooklyn are routinely being corralled by the police for low-level, non-violent crimes both real and imaginary, and thrown into a vicious grinder of a Dante-esque criminal justice system that is literally destroying communities, all in the name of “law and order” and being “tough on crime.” Perhaps the most egregious example of this was in the deeply tragic case of Kalief Browder.
Tough on crime appeasement strategies and anti-welfare sentiment were employed by Neoliberals like the Clintons to get white suburban votes. Furthermore, they parlayed it into draconian legislation in the 90’s such as the Three Strikes law and cutting welfare.
Meanwhile, a few miles away in downtown Manhattan, driven by the bloodlust of unbridled capitalism, the Economic Terrorists of Wall St are betting on this school-to-prison pipeline and trading shares of private prisons, just one infinitesimal sleeper cell in a galaxy full of deviant scams. They are only all-too-happy to know the local evening news begins each night’s broadcast, as sure as there will be another day tomorrow, video footage a young black male in handcuffs or accused of something, making sure the public is sufficiently distracted, while at the same reinforcing scared white people with stereotypes. While the media instructs the casual viewer to look over there and stay scared, the financial terrorists go on raping and pillaging the public coffers with no opposition, because the public has been purposefully misinformed and deviously distracted by the mainstream media. We are being subconsciously preyed upon and artfully entertained by a media owned by concentrated wealth, through many more consolidated mergers and acquisitions, by politicians who permit this as quid pro quo favors to the Wall St and corporate donors who pay for their elections.
The poor go to jail and are withered by a merciless system.
The rich keep gaming the system by buying the politicians and rarely ever worry about being brought to justice. They can just pay a nominal fine, and it’s back to business as usual. Or in the case of the California drought, the two-tiered justice system is again on full display.
Our neighborhoods continue to be remade in their images. Gone are the small businesses, mom and pop stores, inter-generational family-run storefronts. Replaced by endless corporations of drug store and fast food franchises, who can generate the biggest profits for the ever-hungry shareholders who need to be paid too. Banks now occupy the most visible and coveted corners and main street’s prime real estate; these eyesores are an attempt to both distract from all the vacant real estate that would be there if the banks weren’t, while at the same time an attempted public relations ploy to remake their image as your friendly neighborhood business as their logo becomes imprinted favorably in your memory.
It’s complete and total dystopia. More precisely, it is Inverted Totalitarianism or a “corporate coup d’etat,” as expressed brilliantly by recently-passed Sheldon Woolin. If you can look at all these conditions in your own community or the large and small privations visited upon your own circle of family and friends and not understand this, you are not paying attention.
There are also some here who are stuck in that kind of willful ignorance, which ultimately will betray them.
Mark Twain, who had some of the clearest and most humorous thoughts on human nature, clears the air with his views on the kind of political expediency folks around here are using to defend their candidate. From a delightful essay called, “Corn-pone Opinions”:
“A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.
Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.
And so it goes.
A faction of Neoliberals here are prone to corn-pone opinions. That was pretty much what super-delegate Alma R. Gonzalez was getting to when she said this:
"My parents had a saying in Spanish "Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres'" which means, ‘Tell me who you're hanging with and I'll tell you who you are,’ said Alma R. Gonzalez, an uncommitted superdelegate from Florida. "A lot of my Democratic friends feel that way about Hillary and Wall Street.
"Are the working people in this country going to be able to count on hard decisions being made by President Hillary Clinton with regard to her Wall Street chums?" Gonzalez continued. "Will she be another President Clinton who appoints a Treasury secretary from Wall Street? These are major concerns."
And still another:
"She was waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 to defend herself, which we're accustomed to seeing with demagogues on the right, and it just didn't feel quite right," said Kurt Meyer, a co-chairman of the Mitchell County Democrats in Iowa, who has not endorsed a candidate. "She connected two things, 9/11 and her ties to Wall Street, that I didn't like her sewing together."
One cannot help wondering what may happen to such party insiders who dared to offer up such scathing indictments of the presumptive nominee, whose campaign in the past was not above exacting vindictive revenge on perceived betrayers.
The rumblings from the ground are starting. I think there are many of voters for whom “cut it out” just won't cut it.
Hillary invoking “9/11” to explain her ties to Wall St stung people deeply. It was crude, desperate and revealing.
And that's going to linger.