Congress, which had been so tied up in a partisan knot by right-wing extremists that it became unable to move, suddenly sprang loose at the end of the year. Before heading home for the holidays, it put on a phenomenal show of acrobatic lawmaking.
In one big, bipartisan spending bill, our legislative gymnasts pulled off a breathtaking, flat-footed backflip for Wall Street. They then set a dizzying new height record for the amount of money deep-pocketed donors can give to the two major political parties.
It was the best scratch-my-back performance you never saw. You and I didn’t see it, because it happened in secret — with no public hearings, debate, or even a vote.
Tucked into the year-end spending bill known as a “cromnibus” was a provision allowing Wall Street’s most reckless speculators to have their losses on risky derivative deals insured by us taxpayers. Such losses were a central cause of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent unholy bank bailout.
That crash led to the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to spare taxpayers from future Wall Street bailouts.
But with one, compact, 85-line section inserted deep inside the 1,600-page, trillion-dollar spending bill, Congress did a dazzling flip-flop, putting taxpayers back on the hook for the banksters’ high-risk speculation.
In this same spending bill, Congress also freed rich donors — such as the Wall Street bankers it just did a huge favor for — from the $100,000 limit on the donations that individuals can give to national party committees. In a gravity-defying stunt, lawmakers flung the limit on these donations to a record-setting 15 times higher.
So now, bankers who are grateful to either party for letting them make a killing on taxpayer-backed deals can give a combined total of over $1.5 million to each.
It’s always an amazing sight when Wall Street and Congress get together — especially when they do it behind closed doors.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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