As If We Needed Another Reason to Hate Bankers

Just when you thought they couldn't sink any lower, the rentier capitalist class has burrowed down into the deepest slimy depths of shameless greed.

These ideological progeny of the slave trade are complaining that if the Black farmers trapped in debt peonage are freed by the federal government to the tune of $4 billion, with the predatory loans paid off early and in full, it wouldn't be fair to the investors in the "secondary market" who were counting on earning interest on compound interest on compound interest until either the death of the debtors and all their heirs. or until hell freezes over.

And if the federal government still insists, despite all the ravenous ongoing lobbying by banking groups, on paying back the Black farmers' loans early, the bankers proceed to demand that they and the investors in these loans should also be handsomely compensated for future paper losses. 

I suppose you can't really blame the rentiers of finance capital, given that heretofore the feds had so reliably bailed out Wall Street while shafting Main Street. It was just a little more than decade ago, for instance, that the Obama administration had rewarded the miscreants of the subprime mortgage industry and house-stealing private equity firms while allowing millions of ordinary people to lose the roofs over their heads. The Trump administration later sweetened the pot even more by lowering corporate tax rates and using the pandemic to open up the spigots of the Federal Reserve to the already-rich to the tune of trillions of dollars.

The predatory financial class simply doesn't understand why the Biden administration is allowing mere mortals, like Black farmers, to partake of even the crumbs left over from the feast.  Not that the debt peons have yet received one single crumb, mind you, because the funds approved in March as part of the $1.9 trillion rescue package are still stuck in bureaucratic limbo, along with the billions approved by Congress for rent relief.

As the New York Times reports:

Bank lobbyists, in letters and virtual meetings, have been asking the Agriculture Department to make changes to the repayment program, a U.S.D.A. official said. They are pressing the U.S.D.A. to simply make the loan payments, rather than wipe out the debt all at once. And they are warning of other repercussions, including long-term damage to the U.S.D.A.’s minority lending program.

In a letter sent last month to Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, the banks suggested that they might be more reluctant to extend credit if the loans were quickly repaid, leaving minority farmers worse off in the long run. The intimation was viewed as a threat by some organizations that represent Black farmers.

“If U.S.D.A. does not compensate lenders for such disruptions or avoid sudden loan payoffs, the likely result will be less access to credit for those seeking U.S.D.A. guaranteed loans in the future, including U.S.D.A. farmers/ranchers,” they (the bankers) wrote to Mr. Vilsack in April.

If this sounds like attempted extortion, it's because it is attempted extortion.

But because the de facto oligarchy that rules these United States could never survive in our putative representative democracy without also engaging in some good old co-optation and Divide and Conquer mayhem, a different group purporting to represent white ranchers and farmers is also suing the USDA, on grounds that the federal bailout is racially discriminatory. It's called America First Legal, and it's led by Stephen Miller, late of the Trump administration.

As for USDA Secretary Vilsack, his reappointment to the post in the Biden administration elicited a flurry of complaints from civil rights leaders and Black farmers themselves for the backlog of discrimination complaints he'd allowed to accumulate during his eight years under Obama, as well as his misrepresentation of data to cover up the numbers of Black farmers who'd been losing their land for decades because of discrimination by banks.

Whether he now bows to pressure from the banking lobby and delays disbursement of funds just as planting season begins remains to be seen. But he already has a history of crumbling to right wing pressure.

In 2017, he became the only Obama cabinet member to support the confirmation of Trump's own agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue - who among his other claims to fame, moved to kick hundreds of thousands of people off their SNAP (food stamp) benefits unless they got jobs.

In 2010, a doctored video produced by the late notorious right wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart led to Vilsack firing Black USDA regional official Shirley Sherrod without getting her side of the story or demanding to see her full recorded remarks. Once Sherrod was vindicated, Vilsack merely offered her a different post, one which she refused. She was among the chorus of critics who expressed dismay at Vilsack's reappointment as ag secretary by Biden. 

That's the history that gives the predatory banking industry so much hope for a lot more federal change in their own pockets as their reward for continuing to profit off the pain and deprivation of others.