Tag: Chris Dodd

Dodd-Frank is the Obama presidency

The Dodd-Frank financial reforms are a year old and very little has changed in the banking system. As Matt Stoller points out, the bill was more about creating the illusion of a solution to the financial crisis than imposing the kind of financial restructuring needed to prevent future problems and begin a real stabilization of the economy.

After the immediate crisis was contained, losses were socialized, and profits returned to financial executives, Congress had to put together a “solution”. It would have a giant bite at the apple in restructuring our regulatory apparatus. But in order to perpetrate the oligarchic banking structure, it would be important that no structural changes to the industry be implemented. Not one regulator was fired for his or her part in the crisis. The Justice Department adopted a posture of legalizing financial control fraud by refusing to prosecute anyone involved in the meltdown, and continues to allow millions of cases of foreclosure fraud to continue. Ben Bernanke was renominated, and the administration fought a bitter below-the-radar battle to secure his confirmation. With a few modest exceptions, the risk-taking and leverage in our financial markets continues apace, and the deregulatory neoliberal mindset is still dominant. The Federal Reserve has been audited, but the system is now accountability-free for high level operatives in finance and politics. And now that Elizabeth Warren has been thrown overboard by the administration, the lockdown of the financial system is nearly complete.

And mostly, that’s what Dodd-Frank accomplished. It rearranged regulatory offices and delivered a new set of mandates, but effected no structural changes to our banking system. Congress never asked what happened, or why, or even, what kind of banking system do we want? And that’s because Obama’s Treasury Secretary already had the answers to these questions.

So, unemployment hovers at between 9 and 10 percent, the housing market remains in the dumper and consumer confidence remains low. The euphoria that followed the election of a Democrat who professed to be a reformer has abated once it was clear that he is nothing more than a brand (in Chris Hedges’ words) who talks a good game and shills for the establishment. So now, rather than the dawning of a promised progressive era, the November 2010 election brought us a Congress controlled by kooks and cranks who are more than willing to send the nation to financial default.

But the president and his supporters continue to praise his efforts, which they say prevented a full collapse. That may have been enough in the early part of 2009, but two years on, we have a right to expect more from him and from the Republicans who now control the House of Representatives.
 The sad fact, as Dodd-Frank hits its first birthday, is that it is a perfect representation of the Obama presidency.

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Exactly who are the cynics, anyway?

Glenn Greenwald makes a pretty salient point today in discussing the Beltway tendency to dismiss “anyone who aggressively objects to the Bush administration’s extremism, and especially its lawbreaking,” as “either fringe, unSerious, overly earnest losers,” or “simply pretending to be bothered by such things in order to rouse the rabble and exploit them for cynical political gain.”

Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable — anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking — is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.

Greenwald’s issue is with the manner in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, though a staffer, attacked Connecticutt Sen. Chris Dodd, a fellow Democrat, because Dodd refused to go along with Reid’s — and most of the rest of the Democrats’ — support for granting telecom companies immunity for their involvement in the Bush eavesdropping scandal.

After all, it can’t possibly be the case that Dodd actually believes in what he’s doing and saying. He can’t really care if telecoms are protected from the consequences of their years of deliberate, highly profitable lawbreaking. Clearly, Dodd’s just doing all of this to prop up his flagging presidential campaign, just a cynical ploy for attention, not because he has any actual convictions that there is something wrong with granting such an extraordinary and corrupt gift to lawbreaking telecoms. No Serious person would ever actually get riled up about anything like that.

Greenwald connects the Reid attack on Dodd to similar dismissals of Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, last year.

Feingold was one of the few voices on the national political scene who actually objected meaningfully to the fact that the President was deliberately breaking our laws in how he spied on Americans ever since October, 2001. Feingold spent the year espousing what ought to have been the uncontroversial proposition that for Congress simply to look the other way and to ignore these revelations of illegality would be to reward lawbreaking and eviscerate the rule of law. But his motives were impugned by the Beltway establishment exactly as they are doing now to Dodd.

In March 2006, when Feingold introduced his Resolution to censure the President for breaking our laws, the super-sophisticated punditocracy, GOP Bush apologists, and the highly responsible Betlway Democratic establishment all jointly scoffed at Feingold, oh-so-knowingly dismissing his little outburst as nothing more than a cynical ploy to shore up the “leftist base” as he prepared to run for President. After all, nobody could really take seriously the idea that Bush shouldn’t be allowed to break our laws. The only possible motive for pretending to care is that Feingold wanted to scrounge up support for his presidential campaign.

Feingold announced in November, 2006 that he wasn’t running for President, yet he continued to pursue these matters with exactly the same tenacity and intensity as before. There he was this week, standing with Dodd against warrantless surveillance and telecom immunity, even though — as a Senator from a far-from-blue state — there is little political benefit and some risk in his doing so.

So perhaps Feingold was sincere all along, maybe he does genuinely believe that the President and the telecom industry shouldn’t be permitted to break our laws with impunity. But that thought is beyond the reach of our Establishment guardians. Because they believe in nothing other than their own petty Beltway rituals, they assume everyone else is similarly barren and empty, bereft of any actual convictions about anything.

The point here is that the entire political culture of Washington has become enamored of its own cynical games. The folks at the center of it — the politicians of both parties, the media (both print and broadcast) and the various paid consultants, lobbyists and assorted hangers-on — have lost sight of what matters. Everything is about advantage, money and power and those politicians who are willing to act on something more noble like Dodd and Feingold — and like Ron Paul and Chuck Hagel on the Republican side — are deemed to be rabble rousers of the worst sort and shunted to the outside of the process.

Dodd’s quixotic presidential bid — you have to know that he knows he’s tilting at windmills — offers him a platform on which to make his case about FISA in the same manner in which Bill Richardson is using his platform to agitate for withdrawal from Iraq and John Edwards is using his to draw attention to the nation’s economic disparities.

Might there be ego involved? Of course. I have never met a politician at any level that did not have some inflated sense of himself. But there has to be more to it than ego and cynicism. And if there is not, then we are waging an unwinnable war to save our democracy.

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