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Can we dare to "look away" (from the financial destruction wrought on the lower classes)? It's nice to have friends in the right places. Don't you agree? And to have your whining (to them) pay off so richly. (It's really unfair that outsiders think they have a stake in this country's financial sector.) Driftglass: Chicago Operatives Alert!
I've said this before (all right, not exactly this, but I'm not the writer that David Michael Green is), and DMG says it much, much more definitively here. (And you didn't think President Obama had a favorite banker!) I'm running this essay in its entirety because no one wants to read an article from the Business section of the NYT anymore. Okay, I do, but no one else will admit to it. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
If the Democrats are given four years to govern and they adopt half-measure after Milquetoast point-four-three-rounded-up-to-half-measure – all to little or no effect – then there will be a little surprise in November of 2012. If they fail to produce a robust economy, or if they end the recession but produce a jobless recovery, it’s not gonna go the way it looked after last November. If they fail to use the bully pulpit to sell good ideas and aggressively discredit the disastrously failed ones, there’s gonna be a different script three years from now, no matter how good a speech Obama gives.
Normally, I’d put Sarah Palin down as an easy shot for the nomination but a long shot for winning the general election. But if the Democrats do all the stupid things listed above, then the battle for the Republican nomination will wind up being be the actual contest, with the victor in that race easily beating the incumbent president who failed to produce a recovery or vanquish the bankrupt ideas of those who made the mess in the first place.
But who could be stupid enough to allow them to do that?
Can you say “Barack Obama”?
Jamie Di(a)mon(d)! The name almost sings with promise, doesn't it? It did anyway. And somehow, still does - seductively serpentine (over and over). Jamie Dimon is the name. JPMorganChaseGovernmentSex is the game. And I think it's hilarious that Tim Geithner says he's worried about how his past associations will be perceived. (Please excuse the emphasis marks, which I've added; somehow they seem necessary - Ed.)
Read the rest here. Hope you do. Suzan ___________________WASHINGTON — Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, will hold a meeting of his board here in the nation’s capital for the first time on Monday, with a special guest expected: the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel’s appearance would underscore the pull of Mr. Dimon, who amid the disgrace of his industry has emerged as President Obama’s favorite banker, and in turn, the envy of his Wall Street rivals. It also reflects a good return on what Mr. Dimon has labeled his company’s “seventh line of business” — government relations.
The business of better influencing Washington, begun in late 2007, was jump-started just as the financial crisis hit and the capital displaced New York as the nation’s money center. Then Mr. Obama’s election brought to power Chicago Democrats well-known to Mr. Dimon from his recent years running a bank there. One of them is Mr. Emanuel, who has accepted the invitation to speak to the board pending a review by the White House counsel. The Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, declined out of concern that he would be seen as too cozy with a company that has numerous business issues before the department, an administration official said. “It’s a very nice thing for the board to have happen,” said the chief of a major financial company. “But you’d have to have a lot of influence to pull it off.”Mr. Dimon and his company enjoy a prominence in the city’s K Street lobbying world that parallels their recent rise on Wall Street; JPMorgan went into the crisis stronger than most rivals and reported robust quarterly gains last week that confirmed its place at the top of the heap. With the crisis, Mr. Dimon, a longtime Democratic donor, has become even more politically engaged, in the process becoming perhaps the most credible voice of a discredited industry. Other onetime giants like Citigroup and Bank of America find themselves muted as wards of the state. JPMorgan gave back its bailout money quickly, though like all the country’s big banks it still benefits from government loan guarantees and lending facilities. He is “one of the few Democratic C.E.O.’s in that line of work,” said Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House banking committee. “And look, he’s been less impaired by failure than some of the others, so that’s given him a kind of lead role.”
Mr. Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, comes to Washington about twice a month, compared with maybe twice a year in the past. He requires senior managers to commute as well. In recent months, he has met with officials including Mr. Geithner; the White House economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers; and lawmakers of both parties. He phones or e-mails Mr. Emanuel at whim. Each week, his staff gives him the names of a half-dozen public officials to call.
“It’s got to be a regular thing. You’ve got to have a few relations where people know and trust you; you can be an honest broker,” Mr. Dimon said in an interview. “You can’t just fight everything.” While he has been quick to criticize the administration, JPMorgan has chosen its fights carefully, viewing his activism as a good investment, particularly as the government considers a historic rewrite of financial rules. Mr. Obama has singled out Mr. Dimon for praise more than once. Yet some Democrats say Mr. Dimon can be too outspoken, and deaf to the anti-bank sentiment of the country. When he complained in a March speech about Washington’s vilification of Wall Street, more than 40 House Democrats shot off a protest letter. “That was nonsense,” Mr. Frank said. Yet Mr. Dimon helped persuade Mr. Frank and Congress to ease the terms for banks, allowing JPMorgan to repay $25 billion in bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP. He did so by complaining publicly and privately that JPMorgan only reluctantly took the money last year from the Bush administration to avoid stigmatizing more needy banks, and now was being hit with new limits — on hiring skilled foreigners, executive pay and more. JPMorgan and the industry lost when a pro-consumer credit card bill became law. But it beat back a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to lower the amount homeowners owe on mortgages. That victory came with a cost: JPMorgan angered Republicans by negotiating with Democrats and then enraged some Democrats when those talks collapsed. But Mr. Dimon and JPMorgan are willing to bear such defeats if it translates into victory on the broader financial regulation fight that is just beginning. A centerpiece of that effort involves regulating the market for derivatives, which Mr. Dimon’s firm dominates. While JPMorgan favors new reporting requirements for the complex financial instruments, it opposes the administration proposal to force trades onto public exchanges; doing so would likely cut into the firm’s lucrative business of selling clients custom-made instruments. Like other banks, it also opposes a new consumer agency for financial products.
Meanwhile, the company’s reputation could be tarnished by investigations into the crisis. Among them, JPMorgan is under scrutiny from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible antitrust and securities law violations, including derivatives deals with local governments.
As he comes into these battles, Mr. Dimon, 53, must relish his and his company’s hard-won status in both Washington and New York: For years, such pre-eminence was widely accorded to Citigroup, the financial supermarket that he helped build, and to Citigroup’s former chief, Sanford I. Weill, who was Mr. Dimon’s mentor and famously fired his protégé in 1998.
Mr. Dimon’s midcareer exile took him from his native New York to Chicago. There he rebuilt his career, reviving BankOne and merging it with JPMorgan in 2004 before returning to New York full time in 2007. In Chicago, he got to know the fast-rising Mr. Obama and his friends.
Mr. Dimon and Mr. Geithner know each other well from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Mr. Geithner was president and, as such, a JPMorgan regulator. Mr. Dimon sits on the New York Fed’s board. The two men spent untold hours negotiating in 2008 when the government enlisted JPMorgan to buy some of Bear Stearns’s assets and Washington Mutual to prevent their collapse. Mr. Dimon said the two had spoken by phone perhaps 10 times this year.
A recent conversation involved their impasse over the warrants the government received from JPMorgan last fall in return for the bailout money. When the bank insisted on a lower price, the two sides agreed to let the Treasury auction the warrants. Even then, Mr. Dimon called Mr. Geithner to argue that the government’s valuation was wrong, according to administration and company officials.
But Mr. Geithner reiterated that the auction would protect the Treasury from any criticism that it had cut a backroom deal.
Mr. Emanuel was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton when he met Mr. Dimon, and briefly entertained a job overture from him at Citigroup.
When Mr. Dimon was fired, he got a supportive call from Mr. Emanuel, who recalled his own firing early in the Clinton years and how he worked his way back into the inner circle.
“The bond here is both of us lost at some place in our career and both rebuilt,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. Now, he added, “He’s not afraid to express his opinions and I’m not afraid to express mine.”
He recalled that Mr. Dimon once phoned to protest the anti-business populism taking hold as voters tired of bailouts, and snapped, “Washington doesn’t get it!”
“You guys don’t get the anger out there,” Mr. Emanuel replied. “Jamie, you’re asking the American people to bail out the industry. And if they’re going to bail out the industry, it’s got to change its habits.”
Another Obama associate is on JPMorgan’s payroll. Mr. Dimon hired William M. Daley, a former commerce secretary and Chicago powerbroker, in 2004 as vice chairman and head of Midwest operations. Since 2007, Mr. Daley has overseen global government relations.
It was at that time that Mr. Dimon assessed his own performance for his board and gave himself a “D” for effort in Washington. He subsequently revamped the firm’s government affairs office, mindful of Democrats’ ascendance: They had won control of Congress and were favored to seize the White House in 2008.
Rick Lazio, a Republican former congressman, was replaced as head of government relations, reporting to Mr. Daley, with a wired Democrat: Peter L. Scher, a former official in the Senate, the Commerce Department and the trade representative’s office.
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