Are you guys sitting down? Good.
Try not to freak out, but it seems that the chairman and CEO of America’s largest bank and the Fabianist U.S. Senator from Vermont do not agree on what socialism is or what it does.
We apologize for the shock. We’ll give you a moment to breathe before you read this tweet:
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I didn't hear Jamie Dimon criticizing socialism when Wall Street begged for the largest federal bailout in American history—some $700 billion from the Treasury and even more from the Fed. https://t.co/mnXyKqrjq1
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 12, 2019
First of all, this is adorable.
Jamie Dimon’s purposefully simplistic rendering of what socialism looks like was designed to piss off the socialists who are looking to take charge of the Democratic party. By painting socialism in the same broad gray strokes that one would use to convey brutalist state communism (Jamie’s been watching “Chernobyl”), Dimon is pushing forward the argument that he has been making for months now: Something is broken in our contemporary capitalist structure, but socialism is an overcorrection.
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As hamfisted as Jamie’s provocation was though, Bernie Sanders’s tweet is even dumber.
Sure, Bernie Bros and Warrenistas will adore this #slam on Jamie Dimon, but that’s utterly meaningless. Those people hate banks and bankers already, so this tweet is whining at the choir. It moves no one’s thinking in any direction while also managing to create friction between two parties who should really be looking to foster some kind of alliance before the second Tuesday of November of next year.
But first, let’s address the fallacy at the heart of Sanders’s tweet.
Jamie Dimon didn’t criticize socialism during the bailout because socialism had nothing to do with the bailout. 2008 was about keeping money flowing through the economy and that required injecting government loans into it so that businesses throughout the American ecosystem could do things like make payroll and pay their rent. Treasury and the Fed threw money at Wall Street to save Main Street. In fact, many bank CEOs resisted the Treasury Department’s insistence that the banks take bailout funding. One of those CEOs was Jamie Dimon.
The crisis was such an incontrovertibly epic fuck-up by the American financial sector that it seems like political malpractice to watch Sanders poke at something so banal and incorrect as Dimon’s “failure” to decry socialism while he was also being forced to acquire the smoldering ruins of Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns.
We’re clearly not saying that Dimon and his fellow bankers were the heroes of the story, but we are saying that the government pushing liquidity into an almost dead financial system isn’t exactly the kind of “socialism” that Bernie is talking about. And in the eyes of Wall Street, it was basically state-sponsored capitalism. If anything, the forced mergers arranged by the Fed and the Treasury Department in the throes of the crisis were seen by many on Wall Street as a bit socialist, and the CEOs did bitch rather loudly about them. If you don’t believe us, just Google “John Mack and Wachovia.” If we’re going to re-litigate the not-so-distant past, let’s at least do it with some nuance.
Everyone knows that Bernie Sanders and Jamie Dimon disagree on the existential notion of “socialism,” so this feud is not only redundant but self-defeating. Despite their placement on the ideological spectrum of who should control the means of production, Sanders and Dimon actually agree on some very broad ideas, namely the corrosive effects of the growing wealth gap on American society. For Sanders, it goes to the heart of his entire political life, and for Jamie… well, it’s bad for business. At the most simplistic level, less money in American households means less money in American bank accounts means less money to roll for fees which means less money for JPMorgan Chase. (We said “simplistic.”)
Pop Quiz: Who said this in January while discussing the economic crisis in American inner cities?
“I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, a Republican, a teacher, a union member or a parent…We’re relegating generations of kids to poverty.”
Sounds like Bernie, right? That was Jamie Dimon… at Davos.
The current administration is both a product of income disparity and a potent weapon in its perpetuation. In order to unseat Trump and create the narrow Venn diagram of policies that Sanders and Dimon both favor (increased public funding of education, job training, more health care reform, infrastructure spending, etc.), guys like Sanders and Dimon are going to have to find common ground at some point, and this tweet makes that seem even less likely.
What this tweet does make likely, however, is a second-term Trump administration.
Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat, tweeting about far-left progressivism at Jamie Dimon, who is also not a Democrat (anymore), is a perfect example of how bad things look for Democrats. For a party that is about to kick the most important primary ever into high gear, it should be a bit concerning that a standard bearer for young progressive voters is sending salty, bad tweets at a standard bearer of a Wall Street power bloc that has been overtly inclined to back the nominee of the party looking to dethrone Trump.
Sanders and Dimon aren’t at odds over socialism, they’re at odds over what it means to be a Democrat in 2019, and that’s something the party needs to rectify before it sends a 77-year-old centrist Democrat into battle against a sitting president who has proven no one knows what a centrist Democrat is anymore.