We may someday look back at Jamie Dimon's increasingly shrill cries of persecution as a cry for help or a plea to be caught. He has not only fought the regulation of Wall Street banks. He's used extreme language to characterize criticisms of bank activities as a) mean, b) an attack on all forms of business, and c) bigotry that is no different from racism.
Dimon has used his visibility -- and his lavish public relations budget -- to obtain highly flattering profiles of himself in major U.S. publications. And he's used that public platform for, among other things, arguing for unwise ideas in public policy areas where he has no expertise. Most of those ideas involve forcing the American people to suffer additional financial hardship in order to pay for the damage caused by Dimon and his colleagues.
Just last week Dimon was arguing for the "Simpson/Bowles plan" authored by two private individuals, which would impose the same kind of austerity on the United States as that which is currently wreaking economic and political havoc on Europe.
If nothing else, Dimon is consistent: He can't respond to reality any more effectively in the policy arena than he can in the banking sector.
Dimon argues against regulation by saying that bankers are moral and sophisticated enough to manage their businesses without oversight. But he's been making those arguments to a nation that's standing in the wreckage his colleagues left behind the last time they were allowed to play with trillions without adult supervision.
And he has somehow managed to argue simultaneously that no other bankers are as smart as he is, and that nevertheless they should be unregulated because guys like him are so smart. That doesn't make sense.
The Flacks
Despite Dimon's illogic and the criminal track record of his organization, he has been flattered, quoted, and profiled in major news publications at roughly the same frequency as Lindsay Lohan has been in entertainment mags, and for the same reason: He makes good copy if you don't dig too deeply.
The day before the scandal broke, in fact, Dimon punked CBS host David Gregory on Meet the Press by pontificating on political and other matters in a pre-taped interview, knowing that this story was about to break tomorrow. We won't knock Dimon for not breaking the story (there are rules about handling information at a publicly traded company, although Dimon never seems to have cared much about them before.)
But it was an embarrassment to Gregory just the same.
The flackery didn't start after this story broke. The supposedly 'hardball' coverage of this '"error" typically amounted to little more than the kind of damage control Dimon and his PR team were no doubt hoping they'd get. The incident was described as an "embarrassment," a "mistake," an "error."
Few news outlets discussed the size of JPMorgan Chase and other too-big-to-fail banks, which continued to grow even after the passage of a financial reform law. They failed to discuss what would happen if the bank got into serious trouble.
And they glided lightly over the fact that crimes may have been committed. When they did, they were quick to characterize this scandal as the work of overzealous or crooked underlings.
That's what they said in Alabama, too.
The Influence Peddlers
Banks have paid Washington lobbyists $50-60 million per year for the last few years -- and they've gotten their money's worth.
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