Congress Should Change The Name Of The House Financial Services Committee To The Neoliberalism Committee

This is propaganda

Members of Congress mostly sign up for the Financial Services Committee because it's the easiest committee in Congress to sell your vote for big bucks. There are a lot of really corrupt committees, but Financial Services is numero uno. Every now and then a Democrat or two will manage to get on the committee with the express purpose of reforming it. They rarely last long. The out-going chair, Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) is leaving Congress just in time to see control of the committee which from Republicans to Democrats. His legacy is having taken immense amounts of money from the banksters in return for destroying as many regulations on their behavior as he could. These are the bribes he earned-- and how the amount stacked up to other members of the House who were busy taking bribes last year:

• Financial Sector as a whole- $7,905,748 (2nd most)
• Stock brokers and the Investment Industry- $1,536,111 (12th most)
• Finance/Credit companies- $738,104 (#1)
• Hedge Funds- $107,350
• Mortgage Banking- $251,555 (2nd most)
• Payday Lenders- $202,000 (2nd most)
• Commercial Banking- $1,459,388 (the most)
• Savings and Loans- $85,903 (2nd most)

Well now he's gone and the new chair, Maxine Waters (D-CA), doesn't spend her life gobbling up bribes on a level Hensarling did. Hensarling isn't the only Republican who is leaving Congress from the committee. No more payoffs will be flowing to these criminals, in order of seniority and including how much they've taken from the Finance Sector:

• Ed Royce (R-CA)- $7,593,842
• Stevan Pearce (R-NM)- $2,015,512
• Randy Hultgren (R-IL)- $2,368,537
• Dennis Ross (R-FL)- $1,983,567

• Robert Pittenger (R-NC)- $1,367,745
• Keith Rothfus (R-PA)- $2,252,763
• Luke Messer (R-IN)- $1,828,341
• Bruce Poliquin (R-ME)- $2,357,049
• Mia Love (R-UT)- $1,812,806
• Dave Trott (R-MI)- $577,765
• Tom MacArthur (R-NJ)- $1,308,469
• Claudia Tenney (R-NY)- $984,180

• Mike Capuano (D-MA)- $2,686,760
• Keith Ellison (D-MN)- $914,294
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)- $2,537,077
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- $4,208,505

I don't know who McCarthy has decided to anoint as the GOP ranking member this year but the three with the most seniority on the committee are Peter King (R-NY- $3,092,721) Frank Lucas (R-OK- $2,483,427) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC- $5,586,542) and it will presumably one of them. McHenry is the most corrupt and I'd bet hell get the job.

OK, while I was researching this I noticed something else. If you want to power-goose the bribes, the subcommittee to be on is Capital Markets, Securities and Investment. OMG! Do these crooks just roll in the cash-- more than anyone else, short of leadership positions. I can't wait to watch which crooked freshmen gravitate towards this one, The chairman was Bill Huizenga (R-MI) and he managed to grab $2,801,450 and the new chair is an incredibly corrupt NYC Democrat, Carolyn Maloney who has taken a startling $6,327,421 from the Finance sector. The Democrats should be ashamed to appoint this crook to chair the subcommittee. But they're not.

These are the Capital Markets, Securities and Investment subcommittee members, the ones who aren't leaving the House (so I won't mention that Kyrsten Sinema, who's going to the Senate accepted $4,208,505 in bribes while serving on this subcommittee) who have taken over a million bucks each from the Finance Sector:

• Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)- $6,327,421

• Jim Himes (New Dem-CT)- $6,279,357
• Steve Stivers (R-OH)- $5,598,776
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- $5,586,542
• Brad Sherman (New Dem- CA)- $3,823,403
• Sean Duffy (R-WI)- $3,679,647
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)- $3,661,288
• David Scott (New Dem-GA)- $3,260,344
• Peter King (R-NY)- $3,092,721
• Ann Wagner (R-MO)- $3,041,599
• Josh Gottheimer (New Dem-NJ)- $2,967,427
• Bill Huizenga (R-MI)- $2,801,450
• Bill Foster (New Dem-IL)- $2,780,919
• French Hill (R-AR)- $2,386,049
• Stephen Lynch (D-MA)- $2,084,356
• Juan Vargas (New Dem-TX)- $1,706,965
• Tom Emmer (R-MN)- $1,333,623

So that leaves us with the freshmen who took the most money from the banksters-- over $700,000-- while they were running. I've never seen a freshman class entering Congress with this kind of a debt to the banksters. And notice-- not one of them is a Republican! These are the ones the banksters are counting on to allow them to go on cheating their customers and ripping off the country:

• Mikie Sherrill (New Dem-NJ)- $1,356,124
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)- $1,079,022
• Antonio Delgado (D-NY)- $1,077,633
• Dan McCready (New Dem-NC)- $1,006,825
• Tom Malinowski (New Dem-NJ)- $949,192
• Josh Harder (New Dem-CA)- $946,554
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)- $907,303
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- $894,376
• Abigail Spanberger (New Dem-VA)- $793,472
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- $775,938
• Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (New Dem-FL)- $756,569
• Max Rose (New Dem)- $746,093
• Kim Schrier (New Dem-WA)- $732,502
• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)- $729,600
• Angie Craig (New Dem-MN)- $710,436
• Mike Levin (D-CA)- $710,273
• Katie Hill (New Dem-CA)- $710,109

17 freshmen who have already taken over $700K from the Finance Sector-- unheard of! And notice that 15 out of the 17 are New Dems, the caucus invented to sell their votes to Wall Street. Lookin' pretty miserable already. And that brings us to an interesting essay that Rainer Shea published on Sunday at the Ghion Journal-- Neoliberalism Is The Rationalization For Corporate Tyranny. It helps to explain the ideology behind the New Dems that even many of them don't fully grok themselves. "To understand the pathologies behind our paradigm of militarism, institutional racism, and extreme inequality," he began, "we should focus not so much on the attitudes of the elites but on the ideology that they use to advance their agendas."

When was the last time we had someone in Congress willing to say anything like this?

He makes the point that neoliberalism-- the extreme version of capitalism-- is the ideology "that the ruling class has made into conventional political thought. And neoliberalism is an exceptionally useful worldview for a power elite to propagate because it gives those who share their ideology the same mindset that the elites themselves have."

Like every dominant class throughout history, the plutocrats see those in the lower rungs of society as inferior. But neoliberalism causes this hostility towards the poor to spread among the broader population. Following in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and propagated by right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, an attitude has developed among many people that one’s economic position is always their own fault. Resentment towards perceived freeloaders is widespread, with even lower-class people often being suspicious that their economic peers are siphoning off society’s resources through welfare.

When this impulse to blame the country’s decay on laziness and “degeneracy” is fed by the dominant political forces, the ruling elite’s belief in the supreme moral value of wealth and the need for a corporate capitalist “free market” becomes the worldview of much of the rest of society. The super-rich believe that “freedom” means the ability to gain unlimited amounts of wealth without accountability, and this is essentially how most conventional political thinkers also view freedom. The domination of the neoliberal consensus applies to both the mainstream “conservative” and “liberal” sides since the Democratic Party reliably helps Wall Street and large corporations while marginalizing potential progressive reformers.

In reality, our political system is controlled by neither conservatives nor liberals. Electoral politics, government agencies, the courts, the universities, and the media have been bought out by corporations and billionaires. America’s economy is tied in with permanent wars, which are waged to sustain the demands of a global corporate-controlled empire. Our politics and our culture have been subverted by a tiny ruling circle, whose agenda isn’t to advance the traditional definitions of conservatism or liberalism but to protect their own wealth and power. And these elites have gotten many people to rationalize their tyrannical rule-or to even be unaware that a dominating class exists-by branding the accumulation of wealth as a personal freedom that shouldn’t be limited.

This economically centered concept of “freedom” is popularized by giving Americans-- especially white Americans-- the sense that they have the opportunity to succeed in the game of capitalism. Of course, the vast majority of white working class people never become part of the capitalist class. But the promise that they can theoretically become the commanders of the capitalist apparatus is rooted in the Western mentality of individualism, which is psychologically compelling for someone who’s told that the masters of business are society’s deserving “winners.” And the fact that becoming part of the capitalist class would entail domination over society’s “losers” is justified by the darker part of Western culture that glorifies conquest. This aspect of our culture derives from the mentalities behind colonialism and slavery, and it’s now being used to justify our current period of exploitation.

The shallow culture of consumerism enforces this lack of concern for the common good, as well as the regimentation and lack of community that our modern suburban paradigm has created. America’s culture is in a crisis of empathy, where people are encouraged to only think of their own interests while ignoring the circumstances of those who are different from them. Anthropologically, it makes sense for a population in these circumstances to largely be cynical, suspicious of outsiders, and loyal to authority.

...As the clinical psychologist John F. Schumaker recently wrote about the empathy deficit that modern consumerist capitalism has created:

Only the odd diehard biophile or flower child still preaches love as the revolutionary force that could awaken a higher humanity and reverse our death march. People have become less loveable, both in terms of their loveableness and, more crucially, their ability to love.

The lesson is that if we want to make things better, we need to spread compassion and generosity throughout our daily lives. Even more important is the creation of a mass movement that seeks to overthrow corporate capitalism, and then creates a society which protects the planet while ensuring that every person has a safe and comfortable life.