by William Skink
Why do people believe anything politicians say? Take Jon Tester for example. Yesterday our pretend populist with the flattop haircut used his weasel words to grandstand against the audacious corruption of Wells Fargo. Partisan hack Don Pogreba was quick to put up a post with the title Tester Takes Wells Fargo to Task. Here is one of the quoted excerpts from the theatrical tongue-lashing yesterday:
It was Tester who told the single biggest truths of the morning’s proceedings. First, he told Stumpf that a CEO of a major bank who cannot stop 5,300 people from committing two million acts of fraud is “giving a lot of ammunition to the people who want to break up the big banks.” Then, he pointed out that the fraud at Wells Fargo had managed to produce something rare in these politically polarized times.
“I’ve been on this committee for 10 years,” said Tester, “and you’ve done something I haven’t seen in a long while. You have managed to unite this committee, and not in a good way.”
What a fucking joke. There was an opportunity for Democrats to actually do something about the fraud and corruption that brought the global economy to its knees 8 years ago, when Obama was elected and Democrats had a congressional majority, but we know how that turned out.
And when there were other opportunities to reign in the banks, what did Tester do? He once again sided with the banks by killing the Brown-Kaufman amendment 6 years ago. Here is what that amendment would have done:
“The amendment, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), would have required megabanks to be broken down in size and capped so that their individual failure would not bring down the entire system.
Under Brown-Kaufman, no bank could hold more than 10 percent of the total amount of insured deposits, and a limit would have been placed on liabilities of a single bank to two percent of GDP.
In practice, the amendment required the six biggest banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to significantly scale down their size. It was touted as a way to end Too Big To Fail.”
Tester voted against this amendment because he’s a tool of the banks and other corporate interests. Jon Tester isn’t going to do anything that would compromise the corporate loot from flowing to the DSCC he chairs. His job is to be a tool, and that’s what he’s going to be. Weasel words mean nothing. It’s how politicians like Tester act that exposes who they really work for.
And it’s not you, Montana. Remember that in 2018.