Matt Taibbi: "Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment"

No one does a better job of dismantling Wall Street bull than Matt Taibbi.

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Anyway, I thought of all of this this morning, when I read about Bloomberg’s latest comments on Occupy Wall Street. I remembered how pleased Bloomberg looked with himself at the HuffPost ball last year when I read what he had to say about the anticorruption protesters now muddying his doorstep in Zuccotti Park:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but congress.

Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

"I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said. "Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that."

To me, this is Michael Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette moment, his own personal "Let Them Eat Cake" line. This one series of comments allows us to see under his would-be hip centrist Halloween mask and look closely at the corrupt, arrogant aristocrat underneath.

Occupy Wall Street has not yet inspired many true villains outside of fringe characters like Anthony Bologna. But Bloomberg, with this preposterous schlock about congress forcing banks to lend to poor people, may yet make himself the face of the 1%’s rank intellectual corruption...

...But did any of that have anything at all to do with the explosion of subprime home lending that caused the gigantic speculative bubble of the mid-2000s, or the crash that followed?

Not even slightly. The whole premise is preposterous. And Mike Bloomberg knows it.

In order for this vision of history to be true, one would have to imagine that all of these banks were dragged, kicking and screaming, to the altar of home lending, forced against their will to create huge volumes of home loans for unqualified borrowers.

In fact, just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could.

They lent to anyone with a pulse and they didn’t need Barney Frank to give them a push. This was not social policy. This was greed. They created those loans not because they had to, but because it was profitable. Enormously, gigantically profitable -- profitable enough to create huge fortunes out of thin air, with a speed never seen before in Wall Street's history.

Bloomberg's disdain and contempt for the Occupy movement has been obvious. That he is still schlepping for Wall St. some 3 years following the financial collapse shows just how in entrenched in the 1% he truly is. Dozens of books, studies and documentaries have detailed the abject greed of banks and yet he's still refuses to acknowledge their responsibility and mocks those who point the finger at corporate greed.

What's scary is that until he revealed his loyalties by his dismissive and condescending handling of the Occupy movement, I, like many other people, seriously considered him as a third party option for 2012 - he's smart, well-spoken and moderately progressive. Now, I just keep thinking of how he manipulated an historic third term as Mayor and he seems more like just another oligarch gate-keeping for the 1%

Great article, thanks for posting that.

I think Taibbi is a fantastic writer. He's played an important role hammering away on financial issues, especially related to the ongoing crisis, and his writing is both solid/no-nonsense and wonderfully entertaining. He explains complex issues more clearly than any other financial writer I've come across. I highly recommend his book "Griftopia" to anyone interested.

In this article, I guess I'd object a little to his reductionism, though. He criticizes Bloomberg for blaming the housing mess solely on government, which is a valid criticism. But then he goes on to blame the whole thing on the issuance of certain financial products, which is also a reductionist explanation. Make no mistake, the derivatives and those that fooled around with them deserve a heaping helping of the blame, and Taibbi is right to call them out in general. Its an issue more people need to be aware of. But in fact the government DOES also bear a great deal of blame and you know who else does? The AMERICAN PEOPLE who indulged in the housing boom or took on other debt irresponsibly. It's not politically wise for "either side" to point the finger at good old grassroots greed, but the fact is a lot of people bought too much house or took on too many credit cards, didn't bother to read the fine print, and acted stupidly. They shouldn't be let off the hook, either.

No doubt government played a role. From too little over-sight to straight up being too easily swayed by the Financial lobbies, most certainly it failed to represent the best interests of the people. And I agree too that there was greed enough to go around. But here's the thing - tax payers, the unemployed and the foreclosed are all left holding the bag while the banks got bailed out and their execs got bonuses.

Originally posted by kosmicjack
But here's the thing - tax payers, the unemployed and the foreclosed are all left holding the bag while the banks got bailed out and their execs got bonuses.

I agree with this. The bailout goodies have been distributed unfairly. And the fact that these people gorge themselves on taxpayer money and then continue to pay themselves huge salaries is obscene. They should be getting public-servant-level compensation the minute they start taking public money. Actually they should be happy not to be behind bars.

This guy is sounding more and more dangerous. I wonder if NYers at all regret giving him a third term?

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Mayor Bloomberg began his speech last night by discussing why City Hall is just fine by him. “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

At first, Mayor Bloomberg sounded he was outlining why three terms as mayor was enough experience in public office for him, but he quickly switched gears and began characterizing City Hall as the perfect preparation for the White House because it allowed him to buck the Beltway establishment get real on-the-ground knowledge. “I don’t listen to Washington very much, which is something they’re not thrillled about,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “We have every kind of people from every part of the world and every kind of problem.”