Guest MINDSETTER™ David Segal - Who Really Destroyed Rhode Island’s Economy?
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Raimondo's donors.
Angel’s not a bad guy. He’s not exactly an angel, either. (I’m not actively supporting him or any other candidate in the race for governor, at least at this stage.)
But when stood up in contrast to Gina Raimondo, with a cynicism whose black depths seem yet to be fully charted — (I doubt we’ve hit bottom yet!) — you’d be forgiven if you didn’t discern the faint glow of a halo starting to envelope the Providence mayor.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLet’s put it bluntly: Raimondo’s newest attacks on Taveras presume that Rhode Island’s electorate is a befuddled lot whose minds can’t conjure up memories from any earlier than 2011.
Raimondo now blames Taveras for the poor state of Rhode Island’s economy. Taveras’s team responded, appropriately, by asserting that
“Attempting to blame Angel Taveras for Providence’s or Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is only slightly less ridiculous than blaming him for the 2008 stock market collapse…”
But do you know what is substantially less ridiculous than blaming Angel for Providence’s economic woes and the 2008 stock market collapse?
Blaming Gina Raimondo’s Wall Street underwriters and friends for precisely those same things.
In case Raimondo’s messaging gurus are right, and her attacks really do reach the ears of an audience lacking in any concept of historical context — if events of just five or six years ago can be consigned to “history”:
Raimondo’s support from the finance industry gets much seedier as one deconstructs it — this is not a question of some nebulous “Wall Street” vs “Main Street”. She’s not just taking money from some old pals from college or law school who’ve made a few bucks in banking. Rather, she is an increasingly intimate associate of the very people who help lead many of the mega-banks that:
1) Lobbied for financial deregulation that created massive systemic risk, so as to make it easier for them to make money.
2) Inflated the housing market bubble until it crashed and destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people and tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders.
3) Got bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars — taking money that should have gone to stabilize home-owners and local businesses. (Raimondo could actually have helped countervail some of the bailout's disregard for Main Street by investing more of Rhode Island’s pension fund locally — but instead shifted it into investments that meant higher fees for cash managers in lower Manhattan.)
4) Saw their leaders made filthy rich along the way. (The better to donate with to Raimondo and others politicians who’ve signaled their sympathy to the plight of the financial elites.)
As I’ve noted elsewhere, these donors include the closest relatives of the likes of Robert Rubin — named America’s number one “corrupt capitalist”; Pete Peterson, who funds multiple organizations devoted to slashing Medicare and Social Security and was the mentor of former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who orchestrated so much of the largess that’s benefited the mega-banks. She’s taken thousands of dollars from the leadership of JP Morgan Chase, which last year paid a record $13 billion settlement for, as Attorney General Eric Holder put it, “knowingly bundl[ing] toxic loans and sell[ing] them to unsuspecting investors”. And, perhaps most disturbingly, many of these people have titles like “director of state and local government relations” — i.e., the very lobbyists in charge of persuading government officials to do the banks’ bidding.
Raimondo’s has gained the confidence of many of the very individuals whose boundless greed has wrought more human economic suffering upon our society than any other clique in the last 80 years. How can Rhode Island’s voters seriously consider electing such a person to the highest office in a state so disproportionately harmed by the economic collapse?
And doubly so, as she demonstrates the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness by blaming the misdeeds of her friends and supporters on somebody who was, at the time of the collapse, a local lawyer?
As Raimondo hobnobs in the office towers and private homes of the lords of finance at Manhattan fetes hosted in her honor, I sure hope she calls them out with at least the same fervor with which she now so publicly attacks Taveras.
David Segal is a former member of the Providence City Council and Rhode Island State Representative for Providence and East Providence. He is a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project and executive director of Demand Progress.
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