Ah, progress! In the 2012 elections, Republicans cast themselves as budget balancers by promising to whack welfare programs for the poor, snarling that such people are “takers” and “moochers.”Such vindictive sourness didn’t play too well with voters, and Republicans now seem to have learned their lesson. Oh, they’re still going after food stamps, school lunches, etc. with a vengeance – but this time, with a gentle, even loving tone.The GOP’s official message massagers now have their members saying that they want to “help the poor” by eliminating those programs, referring to them as soulless giveaways that sap their initiative and tether them to the cold, uncaring hand of government. The message is: We’re doing this for the poor people’s own good. Their chief budgeteer, Rep. Paul Ryan, trotted this theme out at a recent right-wing rally, condemning school lunches as unloving “Obamafare” plopped on plates by unsmiling cafeteria personnel: “What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul,” he oozed.If that doesn’t make you gag, try another subsidized lunch program that tender-hearted GOP budget whackers never mention, much less demand that it be eliminated. It’s the tax subsidy for corporate meals, drinks, and entertainment. Multimillionaire CEOs can go wining and dining on your and my dime, writing off their high-dollar lunches, cocktails, dinners, and club hopping as a business expense. And expensive it is for us taxpayers – this subsidy adds up to more than $12 billion a year. And that doesn’t count the human cost of executive initiative that is sapped by this giveaway and the lack of love a CEO feels from being dependent on unsmiling taxpayers. We ought to be subsidizing healthy meals for poor people, but not a dime for fat cat CEOs dining out at Chez Gourmand.

“A Nation Of Takers?” The New York Times, March 27, 2014.
“Schools’ healthy lunch goal lacking bipartisan support,” Austin American Statesman, March 21, 2014.

Sniffing the ethical rot in Wall Street’s culture

Let’s review the rap sheet of Wall Street banks: Defrauding investors, cheating homeowners, money laundering, rigging markets, tax evasion, credit card ripoffs… and so sickeningly-much more.
At last, though, some of the cops on the bank beat seem to be having regulatory epiphanies. The New York Times reports that some financial overseers are questioning “whether such misdeeds are not the work of a few bad actors, but rather a flaw that runs through the fabric of the banking industry… Regulators are starting to ask: Is there something rotten in bank culture?
Really. Where’ve they been?
Millions of everyday Americans sniffed out that rot back in 2007 at the start of the Wall Street collapse and nauseating bailout. Imagine how pleased they are that it took only seven years for the stench of bank rot to reach the tender nostrils of authorities. Still, even sloooww progress is progress.
Both the head of the New York Fed and the Comptroller of the Currency are at least grasping one basic reality, namely that the tightened regulations enacted to deal with the “too big to fail” issue do nothing about the fundamental ethical collapse among America’s big bankers. The problem is that, again and again, Wall Street’s culture of greed is rewarded – bank bosses preside over gross illegalities, are not punished, pocket multimillion-dollar bonuses despite their shoddy ethics, and blithely proceed to the next scandal.
More restraint on bank processes miss a core fact: Banks don’t engage in wrongdoing, bankers do. As Comptroller Tom Curry says, the approach to this problem is not to call in more lawyers, “It is more like a priest-penitent relationship.”
Public shaming can be useful, but it should include actual punishment of the top bosses – take away their bonuses, fire them, and prosecute them!

“Questions Are Asked of Rot in Banking Culture,” The New York Times, March 13, 2014.