Much of that inchoate anger that stemmed from the economic meltdown, the bank bailouts, and massive unemployment coalesced into the Tea Party movement, misguidedly aiming it all at the government for the bailouts rather than the banks for their pivotal role in the economic meltdown.
New York Times columnist William D Cohan reminds us not to let go of our anger, pointing to the recent rallies and demonstrations against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker over collective bargaining rights for teachers unions, wondering why Americans don’t seem to be doing much of anything against the banks who haven’t gotten so much as a slap on the wrist for their pivotal role in the current recession.
Cohan openly calls for the Justice Department to release the findings of their investigation to explain to the American public just why they are not bringing charges to any of the bankers involved in the meltdown (aside from those in Bear Stearns who were already found not guilty in court and Raj Rajaratnum, who was convicted of insider trading at Galleon Group, a hedge fund, which wasn’t an activity that had any impact on the economic meltdown as his crimes resulted in about $60 million, not the trillions that were lost and cost in the financial crisis).
I’d be curious to read that, but I don’t imagine that there’s anything to tell. Because the reality is that the problem wasn’t just by a few bad eggs: it was our entire economic system. With banks able to leverage so much capital – during the heyday before the collapse upwards of 30 times the amount of money they had on hand – there was no reason to not get overextended while people were making billions of trades. Of course the bottom dropped out and everything went to hell in a handbasket.
So, I don’t think that people are losing their anger. They just don’t know what to do about it. They feel powerless. Those who voice their vitriol find it easier to point to a political party or to a catchphrase like “big government” as the culprit than understanding the complex relationship between investment banks, deposit banks, the Fed, the Treasury, insurance companies, hedge funds, and mortgage-backed securities.
And even if you’re one of the few who do understand that intertwined network of money transfers that involve more zeroes than most people can even fathom, how do you protest an entire system? It’s not as if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the only culprits. Or JP Morgan. Or Goldman Sachs. Or AIG. Or the NYSE. Or the SEC. It was everyone. It was the whole damned thing and nearly everyone in it.
And especially, how do we protest that system when so many us aren’t part of that game? I don’t have any investments. I’m one of those Americans that have the opposite of investments – I have debts. (People invest in me, is how I like to call my debt burden. Sounds so much more impressive, doesn’t it?) I suppose I could pull my money out of my Chase bank since it used to be Washington Mutual but got bought out by JP Morgan after it failed; but I doubt they’d miss my several hundred dollars that I keep in there on a regular basis. Not when they’re making money off borrowing from the Fed at a miniscule amount of interest and then turning around and lending it out at much higher rates — or, rather, in this case, buying bonds from the government; essentially, lending that very money back to the federal government at a higher interest rate than they borrowed it initially. And when I say “federal government,” of course that means “taxpayers.” Incredible, right? This is actually happening.
The anger gets superseded by frustration because there just doesn’t seem to be any recourse that we can do on an individual basis to make any sort of difference or dent. Certainly it’s not electing “the other guy” every two or four years; that’s shown it doesn’t work when it comes to this problem since everyone is beholden to the big banks.
Perhaps the best thing we can do is to continue to keep this conversation going. To not become complacent to the point of just accepting this as the status quo. But again, I just don’t know how much that will change. So far that’s all we’ve been doing and the banks are turning profits already while we still have 9 percent unemployment and over 13 million Americans out of work. I just wish I knew what to do.
