re: #108 Targetpractice

I think we’ve suffered a bit of our own voter amnesia here, because I can remember in early 2009, the biggest concern on the nightly news wasn’t “HANG THE BANKERS!,” it was “I’ve lost my job/my home/my savings/my credit!” Thousands of layoffs weekly, tens to hundreds of thousands monthly. The stock market cratering, credit disappearing, mortgages deeper underwater than the Titanic, and people eating into their savings just to make basic purchases. The White House faced opposition almost from Day One and part of getting through the Stimulus was making concessions like tax cuts that ultimately did nothing.

Dodd-Frank got through by the 3 votes in the House and 4 in the Senate, and that still was not as successful as it could have been because the GOP worked as hard as possible to block the implementation of it. So the idea of dragging bankers before Congress in early 2009 and reading them the Riot Act publicly might have appeal in hindsight, but at the time we were in a very precarious position politically. It’s the same reason why the administration made the politically necessary but publicly frustrating decision to let the Bush admin’s actions go without even cursory review.

I see this pretty much the opposite way around. By not prosecuting Bush administration torturers, we normalized war crimes. By not raking bank executives over the coals when we had the chance, we made the next bank crash that much more likely. Although they wouldn’t have been so easy to do (especially going after the torturers), these things needed to be done.

This business of the banks being above the law was a contributing factor to the weaknesses of mainstream Democrats on economic issues that Sanders et al. exploited, and that was a contributing factor to the Disaster of 2016.