Oh, Those Demonizing Dems

I don't know what's funnier: that Beltway insiders are professing shock that Democrats are boldly demonizing the Supreme Court, or that the corporate Democrats in mid-term election mode actually think they'll be taken seriously as raging born-again populists.

Because when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) rails against predatory plutocrats, hilarity not only ensues -- it explodes:

“They wish to dismantle all limits on giving, piece by piece, until we are back to the days of the robber barons, when anyone or anything could give unlimited money, undisclosed, and make our political system seem so rigged that everyone will lose interest in our democracy,” Schumer said of the court.

Um, Chuck. The political system doesn't seem rigged, it is rigged, thanks in large part to your own complicity. Maybe people have lost interest in our democracy because in actuality, the system is on the fast track to an oligarchy. This did not start with the McCutcheon vs. FEC Supreme Court decision or with the Koch Bros, Chuckie.

Schumer is said not to be interested in the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee, purely because too-incessant public posturing against the very predators who finance him might dry up the dollars, even though it's simply posturing. Plus, he is in line to replace Harry Reid.  And being forced to go soft on Wall Street as banking leader could hurt his chances for the leadership. Those dreaded lefty bloggers might give him a hard time.

But still, it's explosively hilarious that Schumer is now publicly demonizing the robber barons, given that his last target was "lefty bloggers" who demonized... the robber barons!

From the December New Republic interview with Isaac Chotiner:

IC: It seems like one difference would be the approach to Wall Street. I assume you’re not supporting a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,³ which she (Elizabeth Warren) is sponsoring?

CS: No.

IC: You and Mayor Bloomberg, in 2007, said that reregulating Wall Street would cause people to flee overseas to London. That is very different than Warren.

CS: It has got to be, to me, a careful balance, OK? Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. And to sit there and do nothing, or do what the Republicans want—repeal Dodd-Frank—makes no sense. But on the other hand, I think that you just don’t attack Wall Street because they’re successful or rich.

I just unsuccessfully, with Bloomberg, supported raising the building height in midtown Manhattan, so we could build more office buildings. Office buildings are our factories—imagine the people of Michigan saying, “We don’t want to build a new auto factory, because the Ford family will get richer, or the person who builds the factory will make money.” You’ve got to look at the effect on average folks. The vast majority of the people employed by Wall Street are the secretary who goes in to work on the Long Island Rail Road, who makes fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year. I’m not saying Elizabeth does this, but there are some on the far left who just have a visceral hatred of Wall Street. It’s counterproductive.

Um, Chuck. Comparing Wall Street to Detroit is disingenuous. Your office buildings are not factories that manufacture things. They are the corrupt centers of the vampiric financialization of the entire global economy, the direct cause of the most soul-crushingly extreme wealth disparity in the history of the United States.

CS: You don’t want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti–Wall Street. It’s not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck! There goes your falsely equivalent centrism again.The "left" goes after things based on reality -- like the widespread documented unprosecuted mortgage fraud by the robber-bankers. The right goes after things based upon their own lies, such as their chronic climate change denialism.

CS: It’s sort of funny. People on Wall Street think I haven’t done enough for them, and people on the left think I’ve done too much for Wall Street. On this one, I go by my internal gyroscope, and I’m pretty happy about where I’ve come down.

I had one of those gyroscopes when I was a kid. They spin and they spin and they spin. And when they come down, they come down with an annoying little clatter. Until the controlling player re-attaches the string and spins it a little more. They tilt at crazy angles, but with enough practice you can even get one to walk on a tightrope. It's sort of funny.

This time around, the spin is that it's safe to demonize the Supremes as long as you pretend that they're not every bit as controlled by the Wall Street's oligarchic strings as you are. As if the robber barons aren't the continuing source of your own continuing grasp on raw political power.As if you think you can pound the table for Wall Street deregulation with your right hand and pound the table for the victims of Wall Street with your left.

It would be sort of funny if it weren't so mind-numbingly corrupt.