This is crony capitalism on steroids.
Crony capitalism, simply defined, is when government officials favor friends (cronies) over others; or when the rich and powerful use their wealth and influence to gain access to governmental officials and opportunities that are not available to the average citizen. In 1832 President Andrew Jackson struck down a crony cabal that controlled the Second Bank of the United States. When he killed the American central bank, Jackson terminated a remarkably unethical arrangement, approved by Congress, that gave state-chartered banks rights superior to those of ordinary citizens and exempted the Bank’s foreign shareholders from taxes.
.. Past and current corporate and financial titans such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos provide leading examples of crony capitalism—men who used personal relationships with politicians to enrich themselves and their businesses. The decidedly liberal Buffett, for example, reared as the son of a decidedly conservative congressman from Omaha, grew up in Washington’s Fairfax Hotel, where he learned firsthand how to work the political world to gain advantages in business.
.. Many states sharply limited banks and actually required “double liability” for bank shareholders, meaning if the bank faced financial trouble its shareholders would have to match the par value of their investment with new cash. Owning a bank was a privilege and a grave responsibility to the community.
.. When banks began to convert to stock corporations, notes researcher and former Federal Reserve counsel Walker Todd, risk-taking behavior among bank officials changed dramatically; they took on more and more risk—and the public eventually was forced to bail them out in times of financial panic.
.. Prior to 1970, the Wall Street partnership structure ensured that bankers had plenty of skin in the game—essentially their full net worth was on the line every day. Requiring that Wall Street’s top executives, bankers, and traders again have a significant portion of their wealth at risk would provide much-needed accountability and reinforce the soundness and safety of the financial system. It would also unleash the power of the U.S. economy.
.. Many of these large banks have low or negative risk-adjusted returns on capital, compared with small banks—what might be called Main Street banks, lacking access to Washington pooh-bahs—that tend to be more cautious, more profitable, and more stable in terms of equity returns.
.. The most stable and consistently profitable U.S. banks are the super community banks that are important lenders to Main Street. They range between $1 and $10 billion in assets, and are the least benefited by crony capitalism.
Right-Wing Books, Wrong Answers
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Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left” is a jujitsu exercise that argues that only Donald Trump’s G.O.P. can “denazify” a U.S.A. in thrall to liberal totalitarianism.
.. But the two books are also sometimes weirdly similar, making them respectable and disreputable embodiments of the same crisis in the right-wing mind.
.. For Flake, as for many Republican critics of the current president, Goldwater-to-Reagan conservatism is the true faith that Trump has profaned, to which the right must return
.. His imagined G.O.P. would no longer need to “ascribe the absolute worst motives” to liberals, “traffic in outlandish conspiracy theories,” or otherwise engage in the kind of demagogy that informs, well, Dinesh D’Souza’s recent work.
.. But because D’Souza has become a hack, even his best material basically just rehashes Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” from 10 years ago, and because D’Souza has become a professional deceiver, what he adds are extraordinary elisions, sweeping calumnies and laughable leaps.
.. To pick just one example: It would be nonsense at any juncture to argue that because famed Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson was a Democrat and the Nazis admired the expulsion of the Indians, contemporary Democrats are basically Nazis. To make the argument during a Republican presidency that has explicitly laid claim to Andrew Jackson even as Democrats disavow Old Hickory is so bizarre that the term “big lie” might be usefully applied.
.. the senator and the demagogue both think that conservatives need to … cut social programs in order to cut taxes on the rich.
.. So long as they are not broken, the G.O.P. has two options. It can follow Flake’s lead and be a high-minded party of small-government principle, disavowing bigotry and paranoia — and it will lose elections
.. Or it can follow D’Souza’s lead (and Trump’s, now that his populist agenda seems all-but-dead) and wrap unpopular economic policies in wild attacks on liberalism. With this combination, the Republican Party can win elections, at least for now — not because most Americans can be persuaded that liberals are literally Nazis, but because liberalism’s intolerant and utopian tendencies make people fear the prospect of granting progressives political power to match their cultural hegemony.
Winning this way is a purely negative achievement for the right, a recipe for failed governance extending years ahead.
.. leaders and activists and donors to have an intellectual epiphany, and to realize that the way up from Trumpism requires rethinking the policieswhere Jeff Flake and Dinesh D’Souza find a strange sort of common ground.
Americans have always been nice. But is it just a sham?
The paradox of Trump’s insisting on his own niceness even while engaging in distinctly nasty conduct (political and otherwise) has a long history in the United States.
Trump epitomizes the conventional version of American niceness, which assumes that Americans are fundamentally decent and benevolent people with the best of intentions, whose acts of aggression are reluctant and defensive necessities designed to protect us.
.. This is the kind of amiability that obscures the shadowy side of American life.
.. Americans have also historically attempted to transform our niceness into a national attitude rooted in justice and mutual respect by acknowledging American cruelty and using it as an impetus to live up to an ideal of moral integrity based on the courage to tell the truth.
.. Since the 19th century, Americans’ belief in our own niceness has never wavered. Yet even then, American niceness obscured a tendency to refuse accountability for aggression and offense — and even unspeakable cruelty.
.. In 1814, Gen. Andrew Jackson supervised the mutilation of the corpses of more than 800 Creek Native Americans killed at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama during the Creek War. The desecration of the bodies involved cutting off the tip of each Indian’s nose to count the number of victims, and taking long strips of skin from the dead to use as bridle reins.
.. Thus the mistreatment of Indians wasn’t only a political problem but a profound failure on white Americans’ part to live up to their Christian reputation for courtesy, respect and kindness.
.. This same conflict could be seen in the issue of slavery.
.. If kindness were the rule in the master-slave relationship, Douglass argued, then Southern newspapers would not be filled with runaway-slave notices describing branding with irons and scarring from whips.
.. One is based on historical forgetting, on empty gestures and cliches, on refusing to own up to American errors; the other connects niceness with ethics and justice by recognizing Americans’ failures to be the kind people we imagine ourselves to be
Trump, Andrew Jackson and Ourselves
Trump believes in the “great man” theory of history. Specifically, he believes that a great man, a man like President Andrew Jackson, could have stopped the American Civil War.
.. “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ ”
Setting aside the fact that Jackson died on June 8, 1845, 16 years before the first shells were fired on Fort Sumter
.. Mr. Trump once boasted that he could have done a deal to avert the Civil War.
.. the Civil War was almost inevitable even before Jackson’s presidency.