Banks: Our Private Profit Trumps Your Public Interest

It isn’t often that I read an article about the political battles being fought over financial regulation and get reminded of an old girlfriend, but that is exactly what happened yesterday when I read James Suroweicki’s piece in The New Yorker about how banks are flexing their political muscle to derail the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The CFPB is charged with bringing more transparency to consumer financial markets so that people looking to borrow money -- whether by accepting a credit card, taking out a home loan or otherwise -- have a very clear understanding of what the real cost of that new debt will be.

In his article, Suroweicki points out that the creation of the CFPB actually will benefit the banking industry, and argues that the banks are therefore acting counter to their own interests by opposing the creation of this agency.  

Unfortunately, I think Suroweicki is missing something important here.  I am sure that the banks fighting so ferociously against the CFPB understand quite well that its creation really will benefit the banking industry, but they also are profoundly aware that it will do so at the expense of the banks themselves.  These two interests are not identical, and Suroweicki misses part of the story by assuming that they are.

Deconstructing David Brooks

Now that the Republican Plan to Destroy Medicare^™ has proven to be so incredibly unpopular with the American public, the GOP and their enablers in the Village Media are trying to shift voters’ focus away from that plan to the Democrats.  Increasingly we hear the right-wing claim that Obama, Democrats and the Left don’t have any plan to “save” Medicare, which means that it will soon be driven into bankruptcy and go away on its own.  Republicans, they argue, have to destroy Medicare in order to save it.

David Brooks may not be the worst such offender, but given his prime real estate over at The New York Times he could be the most influential.  His latest column is classic Brooks, filled with false equivalencies, rhetorical straw men, and dubious comparisons all deployed in an effort to persuade his readers that the Republican Plan to Destroy Medicare^™ will result in a consumer-driven, “continual, bottom-up process of [health care] innovation.”  His “argument” such as it is, is a muddled mess, an exercise in rhetoric but not logic.