At times of crisis, our deeply flawed bipedal species casts its alarmed, doe-eyed glance to the alpha male who best performs the virile leader act, issues orders, and browbeats dissidents into silence. While some of my friends shake their heads in amazement at Trump’s rising approval ratings as he drives the ship of state over a waterfall, they fail to notice their own hero worship for the other team. Clan loyalty, another humanoid weakness, poisons the critical faculties.
Unable to rally around bumbling Joe, who appears to be hiding in a cave under the Delaware River, members of the educated and erstwhile prosperous Democrat base have developed a crush on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appears nightly on TV positioned strategically positioned in front of a tower of medical supplies. This has the same psychological effect as the flower display that greets you upon walking into any upscale supermarket: you associate flowers with freshness and unconsciously assume the edibles around the next aisle have just now popped out of the ground. Similarly, Cuomo’s boxes of hospital gowns and respirators, his stand-ups in front of hastily thrown-together field hospital units, reassure those desperate for normalcy that Daddy is taking care of us.
ABC News called Cuomo’s speeches “a source of comfort, calm and inspiration,” perhaps hinting indirectly that the other guy’s nightly comments aren’t. ABC doesn’t know—or doesn’t bother to find out—that Cuomo simultaneously is attempting to slash Medicaid spending in the state rather than pass wildly popular levies on the 0.1%, including taxes on yachts and stock buybacks. Cuomo’s stubborn determination to further undermine healthcare for the poorest New Yorkers in the midst of an epidemic merits no real scrutiny from the same reporters who cast themselves as lonely victims of meanie Trump’s fake-news baiting comments.
Meanwhile, “serial corporate predators,” in Marshall Auerback’s term, are once again welcomed to feed at the public trough to an even more grotesque degree than they did 11 years ago when Obama stood between the bank goons and the pitchfork-wielding masses—in his own words. The Orwellian-termed CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) does not direct the vast resources suddenly made available to the productive economy. Rather, it liberates the plutocrats from any responsibility for their mismanagement of the economy over the last decade and rewards their criminal fecklessness with a gigantic wave of free cash while tossing a meaningless crumb to the 99%. A more apt title for the legislation would be CROCODILES, the Coronavirus Raiding Opportunity for Corporate Oligarchs and Delinquents.
It is instructive to retrace the role of the Democrat “opposition” in this historically shameful episode. To do so is a required corrective for the “Vote blue no matter who” fantasists. I insist on this point because of my recent experience issuing a very mild and eminently deserved criticism of Cuomo on Facebook and watching the red-faced outrage among people who think that Trump is the disease facing our society rather than merely a superficial symptom and that any criticism of the blue team is an act of treasonous self-indulgence.
To take a tiny and almost laughably minor aspect of the $2 trillion corporate boondoggle, we were somberly assured by Pelosi’s troops that the Democrats had valiantly charged into battle against the GOP, Inc., and won “oversight” of the staggering slush fund hastily arranged to bail out the executives who have proved so incompetent at capitalism. This is familiar. The 2009 salvage operation created an office known as SIGTARP, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, “an independent audit watchdog” set up to root out the usual trifecta of “fraud, waste, and abuse” in the portion of the federal aid package explicitly created to “preserve home ownership.”
Recall that the suffering induced by Wall Street included millions of victimized homeowners deeply underwater in their shiny new homes and unable to pay for them. Eight million people lost them while the bankers were being made hole and enjoying a new round of bonuses. Now, let’s hear from the guy who actually took on the IG job, Neil Barofsky, as he details what happened as the original $700 billion face value of congressional aid ballooned into a secretive $23.7 trillion of largesse, almost none of which reached homeowners. Here is Barofsky in his 2012 book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street describing a conversation with Herb Allison, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (under Geithner), as the SIGTARP work started to uncover evidence of criminal misbehavior:
Allison: “Neil, you’re obviously very talented, with a bright future, but you’re hurting yourself. This job isn’t going to last forever. Have you thought at all about what you’ll be doing next? Out there in the
market, there are consequences for some of the things that you’re saying and the way that you’re saying them.”
[Barofsky] Having failed to achieve the desired response by holding up the spectre of homelessness for my wife, my soon-to-be-born daughter, and me, Allison shifted course.
“Well, is it an appointment you might be looking for? Something else in government? A judgeship?”
Barofsky hilariously and depressingly outlines in the book how the Obama White House and Geithner specifically did everything under the sun to undermine any attempt to hold the guilty responsible for stealing poor people’s equity. This happened under the Democrats. And we’re supposed to believe that some lame-ass oversight auditor is going to have better luck with the Trump people? Conveniently, Trump promptly told Nancy Pelosi to cram it, just in case anyone was harboring a lingering doubt about their plans to amass ever greater mountains of cash on the public dime.
The bill also suspends the Freedom of Information Act for the Federal Reserve so that no one can ever dig around in the emails to find out where all the loot went. And Bloomberg reports that the slush fund will be outsourced to BlackRock, a wealth fund that already manages half a trillion in assets. Steve Mnuchin, who should be in prison for his role in the housing collapse (but isn’t, thanks to Kamala Harris’s negligence) is the cabinet officer in charge. And on and on.
So no, Austerity Andrew is not the knight errant du jour riding in to save us from the insatiable maw of the Trumpian dragon. Read his treacly rhetoric at the daily photo op news conferences: it’s as vapid and meaningless as anything trotted out by Trump, only delivered with a smidgen more credibility since, in contrast to the chaos in Washington, someone actually seems to be running the state. He’s a convenient foil to distract you from the main action, the good cop who offers you a soda after the beating you’ve just sustained in the back room from the real enforcers. But after you’ve swallowed the blue pill and agreed to take the plea, they’ll all gather at the pub to celebrate how they played you.
You can always file an appeal.
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