At least I think it will, assuming I can tie some disparate strands together.
Now that Obama has won his victory over the contumacious tea partiers, we can safely go back to criticizing him for his many failings, chief among which is his coddling of Wall Street. Pam Martens, the normally sensible blogger at Wall Street on Parade does just that today, but I'm sorry to say that she's totally off the mark. She takes offense at the Administration's implicit claim that it effectively pursues Wall Street criminals by nailing a few lower downs and fining the banks. Some might say this is a little like jailing Mafia thugs and letting the Godfather off with a fine, which he, by the way, doesn't pay personally, but extracts from the folks who have to pay protection, or, in the case of the banks, people we call “shareholders” or “depositors”. She writes:
Jeffrey St. Clair, Editor at CounterPunch, sums up the situation perfectly in his column on the web site today:
“Obama is the executive manager of what the British punk band the Mekons called the ‘Empire of the Senseless.’ By this, I don’t mean an empire that is inchoate, but a government that doesn’t sense, that doesn’t feel, that is immune to the conditions and desires of the governed.”
As the market now anticipates JPMorgan moving from a $1 billion settlement to an $11 billion settlement, the Obama administration seems incapable of understanding that these escalating sums simply means that crime is out of control; that money does not equal justice.
As I said, she's normally sensible, but she's got this all wrong. In this country, in this time, money, not man, is the measure of all things. It is only right and just, that our modern day crime bosses can cleanse themselves of sin by payment of money. It's sort of like buying an indulgence, and we all know how fair that was. Besides, Martens must have a skewed idea of the concept of justice. Those of us who have read Plato's Republic carefully are well aware that poor Socrates tried manfully, but never really did rebut Thrasymachus's claim that justice was “the will of the stronger”. Rather than complain, we should be thankful that the banks deign to throw some money our way to atone for their sins.
And that brings us to the music, which illustrates the point. There's only one thing that matters, and it's not justice:
By the way, in addition to the inestimable Randy, this video features Mark Knopfler and David Sanborn. Great musicians and great big dollops of truth, all in one place!
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