Courtesy of Pam Martens.
George Melloan has done a deep disservice to the ever-shrinking pool of ethical investigative writers covering Wall Street, civic-minded prosecutors, and to the underpaid but dedicated career regulators overseeing the financial markets. (No, the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington hasn’t quite killed off all that is good.)
Yesterday, Melloan penned an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that was so Koch-esque, so preposterously skewed, and so utterly lacking in factual basis that it must be called out. Melloan makes the claim that the big banks aren’t doing anything more egregious than they have done in the past and the growing charges of fraud are the product of overly zealous regulators, “encouraged by the Obama administration” to blame the nation’s economic ills “on the rich, Wall Street, moneybags bankers, deal makers like Mitt Romney or almost anyone else who still wears a suit to work.”
One might forgive a young, naïve Tea Party recruit for publishing a rant such as this in a small town newspaper. But Melloan worked for the Wall Street Journal as both a writer and editor for 54 years, retiring in 2006. Surely, after more than half a century working for the Wall Street Journal, he is actually reading the investigative reporting in the paper and not just the right-wing editorials.
Melloan’s evidentiary support for the premise that Wall Street simply can’t be any more corrupt than it was in the past is built around the Alan Greenspan theory (now debunked by everyone including Alan Greenspan) that bankers have a vested interest to self-regulate. (Wall Street bankers, both today and throughout history, have had an overriding interest to make as much money as they personally can.)
Melloan writes: “Have bankers all gone rogue? Populists would have you think so, and apparently a sizable majority of Americans hold that view as well, judging from opinion polls. But this is not plausible. Bankers are more likely to exercise extreme discretion in an era when they are being constantly reviled by leftist politicians, writers and placard-carriers in the streets.”
For Melloan’s first witness, he calls up Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the poor mistreated figure who is “paying dearly” at the hands of those populist regulators for no greater crime than simply calling parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation “idiotic.”
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