Money Matters I: Pay Back’s a Bitch

Barak Obama is not going to limit his fundraising by taking Federal matching funds for the general election.

How dare he!

How unfair!

Poor little Johnny McCain with his stunted fundraising abilities will get just under 85 million dollars in Federal matching funds for his run at the presidency while Oprah can find that much by cleaning the change out of her couch.

Quel horreur!

Maybe Johnny will have to hit up his wife, Cindy, for some cash if he can get away from calling her names not usually used by husbands who expect to stay married very long. And it will mean that the neo-fascist and racist cash cows of the Republican Party and the up-and-coming Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters (including Karl Rove?) they have under contract will have their Willie Horton/Swift Boat ads answered within one news cycle.

That Obama sure plays dirty. He won’t even let the ultra-rich far right and the Natzionalistiche Republicanische Partei scuttle his candidacy. Damn! Not fair!

I actually believe that the public air waves are public in consequence of which broadcasters must provide free coverage of political events and free political advertising. I also believe that all elections must be totally, publicly financed. But I feel about Obama’s decision on public financing much the way I felt about the execution of John Wayne Gacey: I think that capital punishment is wrong but for him, I’ll make an exception. I’m willing to give Obama a pass on this one.

Ultimately, Obama is correct. The current public financing system is broken. The allegedly unconnected interest groups like the Swift Boat Veterans in 2004 can be set up quickly, financed anonymously by one or more rich neo-fascists and skew the results of an election. Obama has shown the ability to raise huge amounts of money, most of it in relatively small donations, and is not going to allow himself to be hamstrung by the party of wealth. In fact, one can argue that Obama’s fundraising has been more democratic, more populist than any Republican’s since, quite possibly, Ulysses Grant.

But I was struck by an interesting but of serendipity. On the same day, June 19, 2008, that Obama announced that he would forego public financing of his campaign two hedge fund managers from Bear-Stearns were arrested for bilking investors out of millions. The most important term in that sentence is hedge fund. The Investopedia defines a hedge fund as “a mutual fund for the super rich”.

And your point is?

That no one who’s bilked a family out of its savings and home with an unaffordable mortgage is going to jail. The big mortgage companies that were constructing mortgage applications out of whole cloth and pixie dust are still in business. But two guys who lied to millionaires and cost them a few percent of their trust funds are headed for jail.

Mathew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi probably each deserve a cell in Attica, preferably each will have a huge cellmate who hasn’t seen a woman in about 15 years and won’t be seeing one anytime soon. They have committed crimes for which they should pay but their arrests demonstrate that money matters. Those who bilk the rich are headed for court. Those who bilk the poor and middle class get a pass once they insinuate that the families they cheated should have been aware that they were being cheated. That’s the blame-the-victim argument just as surely as is “if she didn’t want to be raped she shouldn’t have worn a sexy outfit". But the mortgage companies’ attempts to blame the victim aren’t the only similarity between their actions and rape.

The case of the Bear-Stearns managers and Barak Obama’s refusal of Federal matching funds for the presidential election likewise are similar. They are flip sides of the same issue: money matters. Those who have money get what they want whether it’s the presidency of the United States or the arrest of the con men who cheated them. The rest of us can go suck wind. In the case of the Bear-Stearns hedge fund managers we have all the trappings of the sacrifice that will distract everyone from the real criminals amongst us. In the case of Barak Obama we have the first indicator that those of us who truly want change and a more just America will once again have our hearts broken. Unfortunately a broken heart is not anywhere near as lethal as the bloodsucking that we’d get from continuing the neo-fascists in power.