As much as I admire and enjoy his wit, I have been having big Barney Frank problems this week. Yes, at his town hall meeting this past summer Frank famously challenged a wacko tea partier to identify the planet she lives on, and that was really great. But here’s the deal: Barney himself lives on the (former?) planet Pluto. Pluto as in plutocracy. It’s a chilly and ruthless place, where cold cash plays for keeps.
Yesterday the House Financial Services Committee marked up a long-awaited financial reform measure. As the New York Times editorialized, there are two key pieces to watch: control of the “dangerously opaque” derivatives market and the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that will have real teeth to protect everyday consumers from gross abuses around credit/debit cards, mortgages, bank fees/surcharges, and payday lending.
The Times editorial didn’t say so, but the Committee’s chair—Barney Frank—is actually the lawmaker who is principally responsible for watering down the proposed consumer protection piece in a variety of ways. The Times itself has reported this, but Frank’s specific concessions to the bankers are also well-documented elsewhere, notably Jane Sasseen’s article in Business Week last month.
For public consumption, however, Barney continues to sound like the people’s friend, as when he inveighed against the big commercial banks (most of them taxpayer-subsidized) for jacking up fees in advance of likely new regulation.
It’s the old shell game the liberal Democrats play, but the corporate media almost never call them on it.
Insiders, especially industry lobbyists, like to say—as the mortgage industry’s Howard Glaser says in Sasseen’s piece—that legislators like Frank who cut sweet deals for well-heeled interests are merely “bowing to reality.”
Yes, but here is where some prophetic imagination is needed, because it is an unholy reality that these same insiders and lobbyists have created. What the lobbyists choose to call “political reality” translates into the reality of a Congress that is utterly beholden to them.
So it really doesn’t matter if the whole country knows that the bankers are self-dealing sharks, or if they are second only to health insurance executives in public contempt. Powerful pinstriped public enemies need have no fear of “tribunes” like Mr. Frank of Massachusetts. Even if everyday people demanded to see the bankers paraded through the streets in tumbrels, en route to the guillotine, their views still wouldn’t matter. The politicians, including many “liberals,” will not bite the hands that feed them, and feed them awfully well.
Maybe this ugly plutocratic reality is what inspired Frank’s cynical crack that this past weekend’s marriage equality marchers had nothing to offer—that the only pressure they would be bringing to Washington was pressure “on the grass.” After all, Barney himself has come to embody the deeply corrupt meaning of old line, “Money talks. Bullshit walks.”
