I expect Obama to do whatever he is told to do by Wall Street. \u2026\u00a0He has turned over management of the economy to his campaign contributors from Goldman Sachs and Chase Manhattan. He does not have views of his own, other than self-promotion. He wants his presidential library. He wants to have a big foundation like the Clintons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Never mind who<\/em> said that, because the point here it that it is, demonstrably, all my balls. It is mendacious, masturbatory nonsense. That paragraph was written, and quoted adoringly, during the same week that Republican members of Congress were attaching amendments to everything in sight attempting to overturn the fiduciary rule. What\u2019s that? Well, if that quote makes you feel all warm and tingly, then you probably are too virtuous to care, but the fiduciary rule says that\u00a0financial advisors have to look after the best interests of their clients, not their firms. Basically it means they\u2019re not allowed to rip people off, then charge them for the service, by steering them toward retirement savings plans that benefit the analysts more than the clients.<\/p>\nThe salient point here is that Wall Street hates<\/em> the fiduciary rule and they\u2019re fighting, hard<\/em>, to overturn it, just as they\u2019re still fighting hard to overturn the new overtime rules \u2014 another Obama initiative that stands to benefit millions of people even though it is precisely the opposite of what \u201cWall Street\u201d or \u201cGoldman Sachs and Chase Manhattan\u201d want and even though the banksters are\u00a0using all of their political clout to fight against these things.<\/p>\nBoth of these are clear and important examples of Obama vs. \u201cWall Street.\u201d They\u2019re also examples of Obama vs. Wall Street + Congress.<\/em> For now, Obama seems to be winning those contests, but the outcome remains uncertain due, in part, to his lack of public support from the sort of people who prefer to indulge in feeling all warm and tingly by saying things like \u201cI expect Obama to do whatever he is told to do by Wall Street\u201d and the sort of people who refuse to taint their holiness\u00a0with the ugly business of politics as they sit out the midterms and await\u00a0the great leap forward.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s quite likely that, like me, you won\u2019t be directly affected by the fiduciary rule. Retirement savings? Investments?<\/em> You might as well be talking about Narnian castles as far as I\u2019m concerned. So the battle in this specific moment doesn\u2019t affect me directly in the way that some of the other Obama vs. Wall Street battles have \u2014 like the long fight to create and fortify the CFPB. One of the things that agency has been doing is beating back at the \u201coverdraft protection\u201d racket, which annually transfers more than $30 billion out of the accounts of people living paycheck-to-paycheck and into the pockets of the banksters.<\/p>\nTo a clean-handed purist bystander, I suppose, that\u2019s just nibbling around the edges or rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. To me, that\u2019s a series of $35 fees hitting at precisely those moments when I haven\u2019t got $35. And to tens of millions of others like me, that\u2019s $30 billion a year that we\u2019d kind of like to keep.\u00a0Fighting against the reverse-Robin-Hood overdraft wealth transfer may not be a magic bullet solution that will usher in economic utopia, but it\u2019s a Good Thing and a necessary thing. Of course it\u2019s not the only fight, but dismiss it as a meaningless sideshow and it becomes a fight we lose by forfeit.<\/p>\n
I still don\u2019t know what \u201cneoliberalism\u201d means any more than the people who keep saying that word do. But to the extent that \u201cneoliberal\u201d means anything, this is why the neoliberals will always win against their critics. Because those \u201cneoliberals\u201d are out\u00a0on the playing field, running up the score, while their critics sit on the sidelines, refusing to get their uniforms dirty with anything as impure as politics.<\/p>\n
Politics ain\u2019t beanbag, but it ain\u2019t Tic-Tac-Toe, either, Professor Falken. Not to play is not a winning move. Refusing to play just guarantees you\u2019ll always lose.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The surest way to lose at politics is to refuse to participate in it because you’re above it all. Refusing to sully yourself with the ugly business of compromise and get-what-you-can incremental change doesn’t mean you’ll have pure, clean hands when the revolution comes. It means the other guy wins, big time, because nobody is playing against him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[58,26],"class_list":["post-32538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-greed","tag-money"],"yoast_head":"\n
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It means the other guy wins, big time, because nobody is playing against him.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2016\/07\/01\/as-politically-pure-as-a-bystanders-clean-hands\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"As politically pure as a bystander's clean hands\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The surest way to lose at politics is to refuse to participate in it because you're above it all. Refusing to sully yourself with the ugly business of compromise and get-what-you-can incremental change doesn't mean you'll have pure, clean hands when the revolution comes. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. 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