Wanderthread

This “protection” involved misleading the public to make it look like Democrats, especially vulnerable freshmen, are engaged in populist policymaking when they are not. In one case, in response to the financial giant AIG offering bonuses to its executives after having taken a massive government bailout, leadership had freshmen Democrats sponsor a bill that would have barred unreasonable bonuses by financial institutionsthat had taken public money. The bill was designed to easily pass the House floor. But the Obama administration wanted to ensure that these banks could pay bonuses, so the bill wasn’t meant to be signed into law. Putting the name of freshmen on it let those freshmen take credit for being tough on bankers, but without actually doing anything to threaten banker interests.

Everyone was proud of their very clever little scheme that they imagined fooled voters. Of course, no actual voter cared about any of it; they were too battered by the financial crisis to notice. And the practice was far from unusual. The Obama administration routinely pledged to help homeowners in foreclosures, but as then-Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) observed, when given the chance, President Barack Obama wouldn’t actually do it. Instead, Timothy Geithner was seeking to, as he put it, “foam the runway” for the banks, meaning space out foreclosures instead of stopping them, so banks wouldn’t have to take hits to their balance sheets. There were similar rancid deals around pharmaceutical pricing and trade deals.

A related comment from last year:

Wanderfound · January 26, 2019, 11:55pm