The Gentleman from Massachusetts

I am beginning to worry I may be biased. The pundits seem unanimous in their agreement that Mitt Romney cleaned Barack Obama’s clock in last night’s debate. The challenger looked presidential and talked forcefully, while the president let pass the distortions and untruths of his opponent. Perhaps. But I had a hard time warming to the supercilious half-smile/half-sneer with which Romney ended each of his lectures.

As for the non-body language, Obama missed a huge opportunity to remind people of the 47% Romney had dismissed, especially as the latter waxed prosaic about his sympathy for the middle class. Nor did the president adequately respond to Romney’s false charge that he would restore the $716 billion the administration had cut from Medicare.

For me, though, the debate was defined by the absence of two critical domestic issues: the assault on the environment and the abandonment of the poor.

It is one thing to canonize the middle class. It is another not to even mention the country’s most vulnerable and marginalized people.

And the closest we came to an environmental discussion was Romney’s statement, “I like coal . . .  and oil and gas” and his mockery of Obama’s green energy subsidies. Obama failed to counter that any national policy that dismisses all alternatives to extraction, destruction and pollution is derelict.

And Romney, the vigorous defender of Medicare, the populist opponent of big banks, and the representative of bipartisan politics in Massachusetts . . . well, that is a Romney we had not seen in the Republican debates.

Legislating from the Bench

Robert Simpson is yet one more example of why electing judges is a horrible idea. Simpson, elected as a Republican to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, initially upheld the legislation requiring voters to produce photo identification at the polls. The law, which passed without a single Democratic vote, had one aim: It's “gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania,” said Mike Turzai, the Republican floor leader.

When Simpson’s decision was challenged in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, lawyers could not produce a single instance of in-person voter fraud in the state. But they did show that the law disproportionately affected – indeed, appeared to be aimed at – four groups: the elderly, the poor, minorities and students. They have two things in common: they are less likely than others to have the required document and they are more likely to vote for Barack Obama.

The Supreme Court returned the case to Simpson, instructing him to account for its practical impact at the polls. Yesterday Simpson delayed implementation of the law in a decision in which he, unlike King Solomon, actually tried to cut the baby in half.

Poll workers, said the judge, have every right to ask for the identification, but if you don’t have it, you can still vote. Out with fraud, in with intimidation, which has a far uglier history in American politics. How can someone demand to see something that has no bearing on my right to vote? What’s next – a poll tax that is refundable when I produce the required papers?

Either the law is valid or it is wrong. This law is wrong.

Of Human Life

It’s astonishing how far America’s social and cultural conversation has shifted to the right, almost without notice, because partisans have manipulated the language without changing the subject. Take contraception, which I believe most people think is a good thing, and one long settled in the public arena. It has been 44 years since Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical against birth control, Humanae Vitae, which even then seemed a last gasp to hold back the secular world. In 1968 both the women’s and environmental movements were stressing the perils of unwanted births, and soaring birth rates threatened the economies, environments and the liberation of women in the developing world.

Realizing that contraception was a settled matter, Republicans redefined the issue as “religious freedom” – just as they redefined the removal of the economic safety net as an issue of personal freedom. And so in 2012, when Barack Obama sought to require hospitals to provide patients the option of birth control, the backlash was so ferocious that even Democrats jumped ship in droves. Senator Mario Rubio introduced a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Rush Limbaugh, who only looks pregnant, called the law student who testified for birth control a slut; and Rick Santorum called contraception “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

This is about freedom: freedom from them and their efforts to restrain the human spirit. On this issue, at least, Mullah Omar, the pope and the Republican Party have more in common with each other than they do with me.

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Rich States, Poor States

Nine of the 10 states with the highest median household incomes in America voted for Barack Obama in 2008. (The exception was Alaska, whose governor was the Republican candidate for vice president.) That trend holds this year (except Virginia and New Hampshire are currently toss-ups). Nine of the 10 poorest states are solidly Republican – both in 2008 and today. New Mexico is the sole blue exception. The other nine are rural, southern states. All 10 states receive far more in federal payments than they pay in federal taxes.

But why do poor states overwhelmingly support candidates whose policies favor economic inequality, while rich states vote for higher taxes and more government?

False consciousness? Karl Marx wrote that, because the powerful control the public conversation, they can induce the working class to vote against its own interests. But that doesn’t explain the behavior of the rich states.

The help? Are servants outvoting their employers in Greenwich and Palm Springs? But the domestic vote isn’t what it used to be.

I think the explanation is historical: With the break-up of the New Deal coalition came the rise of third-party movements (Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968) that led white southerners out of the Democratic party. Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and “Reagan Democrats” realigned the parties around social and cultural issues: abortion, guns, evolution, environmentalism – and, let’s be candid, race.

Far from the distractions people try to make them, these are the issues over which this election is being contested.

Richest States         1968 Vote                           Poorest States         1968 Vote

10. California                 DEM                                    10. Oklahoma               GOP

9. Delaware                    DEM                                    9. South Carolina          GOP

8. Hawaii                        DEM                                    8. New Mexico              DEM

7. Virginia                       DEM                                    7. Louisiana                  GOP

6. New Hampshire        DEM                                    6. Tennessee                 GOP

5. Massachusetts           DEM                                    5. Alabama                    GOP

4. Connecticut                DEM                                    4. Kentucky                    GOP

3. New Jersey                 DEM                                    3. Arkansas                   GOP

2. Alaska                          GOP                                    2. West Virginia           GOP

1. Maryland                    DEM                                    1. Mississippi                GOP

Consensus and Vision

OneMaine is one of several groups that have arisen to combat America’s toxic political conversation. Its purpose is to support candidates across a broad spectrum who reject hyperpartisanship, represent their constituents not special interests, and seek principled compromise on behalf of the whole community. Clearly we are at the limit of strident discourse and unbending gridlock. We need more civility, more thoughtfulness, more effort to understand, rather than react to, each other. But is compromise the way out of this mess?

Compromise has worked best during times of prosperity, as the 1950s, or national consensus, as the “era of good feelings”, or one-party dominance, as the New Deal.

It has not worked when there has been a crisis of vision. In 1776 the colonies issued a declaration, not a joint agreement. All the compromises that tried to resolve the slavery issue only put off the day of reckoning – and ensured it would be horrendous when it came. Those who rejected compromise – William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Barnwell Rhett – were condemned as fanatics. But they knew what Lincoln learned, that a house divided cannot stand.

Perhaps the one exception is the much-maligned 1960s, when the nation seemed bent on tearing itself apart. There was much ugliness: 50,000 dead in Vietnam; federal troops in our city’s streets; the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames; vigilante violence in the South. But out of those times came a new vision and some of the most important civil rights and environmental legislation in history.

Once again, two visions are competing for America’s soul. We do need more civil conversation, but I believe that one vision must triumph before consensus is possible.

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In His Own Words

“My dad . . . was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico, and, uh, had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this.” Mitt Romney’s rather lame effort to make rich donors laugh comes from the same talk he gave in which he asserts that 47 percent of Americans “will vote for the president no matter what” because they are dependent upon government, believe they are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. . . .And the government should give it to them. . . .These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Acknowledging his remarks were “not elegantly stated,” Romney is standing behind their substance. And well he should, as the image he paints of a nation in which almost half the people are freeloaders being carried by the half who produce the wealth is a dominant, if sotto voce, theme in his campaign.

As David Brooks points out in this morning’s column, the comments betray Romney’s ignorance of America. Most government beneficiaries are the elderly poor, disabled veterans, the unemployed, and the working poor – who do pay payroll taxes. Romney’s campaign increasingly reveals a party for whom a united nation has become as much of a pariah as the United Nations.

Whether Mr. Romney is himself part of the 47 percent, we do not yet know.

Beyond Benghazi

Mitt Romney’s responses to the fatal attacks in Benghazi were predictably appalling in both their timing and their content. In his desperation to be president he has become a two-dimensional man: one dimension toadies to the Republican Party’s major donors and immoderate base; the other attacks President Obama with unfiltered ferocity. After being pummeled by the neo-conservatives for not mentioning Afghanistan, Iraq or our troops in his convention speech, Romney was quick to get his saber out yesterday, and his first target was the president:

“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

The accusation is untrue, its timing disgraceful, coming before the facts were clear and on the heels of the deaths of four American diplomats. That was a time to come together.

In his effort to extricate himself, Romney dug deeper: "It's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values. It’s never too early for the U.S. government to condemn attacks on Americans and defend our values.” Which is what the administration did.

And what are those values? This is a question few address lest they be accused of disloyalty. But for me this election is about values, about what kind of a country we want America to be. I believe our values of compassion and community, of standing up to bullies and for human rights, of protecting the earth and looking out for each other, are in greater danger of being derailed by what is happening here than what is happening elsewhere.

Conscience of a Conservative

The four columns that David Brooks wrote during the two conventions continue to fascinate me. The New York Times columnist is a conservative in the old sense of the word: a believer in small government and free markets, one who values the continuity of institutions and the traditions of a community. The Republican Party is Brooks’ natural political home. But he does not seem at home in this one. He praised the GOP convention for its celebration of “the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked within and became wealthy.” But in the end, he wrote, today’s Republican party cannot govern because “its commercial soul is too narrow.”

He was disappointed with Obama’s speech because he believes that a country that has lost its way needs a leader with big ideas and the audacity to push for big change. Romney cannot do that. Obama has yet to show he will.

I agree. This election is about two men playing it safe, appealing to a narrow wedge of voters without offending their base. The way to do that apparently is to go negative . . . to show why the other guy is a worse choice than you.

If this election turns on who can be meaner, more partisan, more negative, we will all lose. And that is the direction in which the campaign is headed. Barack Obama is the only candidate who can rise above that and offer the communal vision this country needs. I hope he does.

Obama’s America

In an interview on NPR, noted conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza discussed his documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which is playing in over 1,500 theaters around the country. D’Souza argues that Obama is intentionally implementing policies that will weaken America as he pursues the anti-colonialist dream of his Kenyan father. In the interview, D’Souza said that, in his autobiography Obama explicitly laid out his view that the key to a more equitable post-colonial world lies in diminishing the domination of the West and expanding the opportunities of the developing nations. D’Souza seems bent on recasting “birtherism” in intellectual dress – unlike the less subtle bumper sticker I recently saw: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for the American.” But inadvertently or not, he raises important questions: How will we integrate a planet of 7+ billion people who are in constant and deadly conflict over limited resources? How will we close the global gap between rich and poor?

The current model is based on continual economic growth and resource extraction in the belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” It is also based on fear, symbolized by our obsession with fences, walls and gates – with us on the inside trying desperately to keep them on the outside. Those two components contradict each other. Yet as the doctrine of unending growth appears to have run its course, those who have benefited most from it build higher fences, thicker walls and more heavily guarded gates.

We need to make more universal Ronald Reagan’s demand that we “tear down that wall.”

David Brooks

Several of you mentioned David Brooks’ column in Monday’s New York Times, and one even suggested I write about it. My initial response, of course, was that I will write about David Brooks’ column when he writes about mine. But on deeper reflection, it occurred to me that David has better things to do. I, on the other hand, do not. For those not familiar with him, Brooks is the Times’ conservative columnist and the right-of-center counterpoint to E.J. Dionne on NPR and Mark Shields on PBS. Hired by William F. Buckley at The National Review, he later wrote for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard. Brooks, like his intellectual hero Edmund Burke, is a sober, thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful spokesman for moderate conservativism – a movement so diminished in today’s GOP that the Times later hired Ross Douthat to speak for the hard right.

Brooks has written admiringly of Obama, and while he speaks out against his policies often and forcefully, his criticisms seem born more of disappointment than dislike.

In Monday’s column, Brooks, writing in an unusual satiric tone, sought to parody the media’s depiction of Romney as rich, aloof and shallow. The piece was so out of character for Brooks and so edgy about Romney, however, that in lampooning the pundits, he also roasted the candidate.

David Brooks’ ideal candidate is one who is pragmatic, thoughtful and represents a conservatism that builds on the best traditions of the past – one like the old Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts. But, whether in jest or not, that is not the Romney he presented on Monday.

Conventional Wisdom

The big question for many this week was whether the wrath of Mother Nature would pound down on the Convention of the Angry God. For now, at least, it appears that Hurricane Isaac is content to stay to the west and probe the levees built in the wake of Katrina – a reminder of the most expensive and one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Meanwhile, nature is sending another message from the north, as the volume of sea ice in the arctic has hit a record low. These reminders of the need to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, the desperate plight of the urban poor and the clear evidence of climate change have so far gone unnoted in Tampa. But after all, the reason people go to Florida is to get away from the ice and snow of winter. What disruptions there have been to the carefully orchestrated Republican convention have come from the mouths of Ron Paul’s delegates, who yelled loudly each time his votes were ignored in the official tally. With the big networks limiting coverage to both conventions, the wonderfully ribald process of political horse-trading, rousing speeches and brokered conventions is a thing of the past.

Maybe the process wasn’t any better back then, but it did have more surprises. The results were not so clearly pre-ordained nor were the candidates so programmed to stay on message. Politics perhaps has never been pretty, but it used to be more fun.

Radio Talk

I was driving back on Sunday afternoon from a wedding between one man and one woman, channel surfing on my car radio, when I landed on a talk show station that had just broadcast a long interview with Mitt Romney. The station had asked Laura Ingraham to do a post-interview analysis of the speech and preview this week’s Republican convention in Tampa. Ingraham, the host informs me, is the most ”listened to” woman on the radio. She got right to the point. The interview, she said, had shown a man of strong principles and deep faith who is comfortable with himself. This humanized Romney could now focus on the state of the economy, a subject his opponent desperately wanted to change. All the Democrats have to offer, she said, is “higher taxes, more aborted babies and gay marriage.” That, she concluded, was not a winning agenda.

Now, I don’t often find myself in agreement with a Fox commentator, but I think she’s onto something. If that’s all Obama’s got, he is in trouble.

As I thought about Ingraham’s trifecta, it occurred to me it was actually the mirror image of the GOP platform, which calls for constitutional amendments on taxes, abortion and marriage. That’s a lot of fundamental changes to a document we are told has been sacrosanct since 1789.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to create a fair tax system that recognizes our obligations to each other and to allow each of us to make personal decisions based on our needs rather than the dictates of the state?

Rape

Todd Akin is no quitter. In the face of calls for his resignation from Republican leaders across the country, Akin announced yesterday that he would stay in the race for Missouri’s Senate seat. Who can blame him? Polls show him winning, and he is in lock step with his party, which yesterday approved a constitutional amendment to ban abortions with no exceptions and to apply 14^th-Amendment protections to a fetus. Meanwhile, Akin told Mike Huckabee that he was being pummeled for “one word and one sentence on one day.”

The word that seems to stick in everybody’s craw is “legitimate.” The word that should is “rape.”

These guys talk about rape like it was like falling off a bicycle or getting a bloody nose. You know, stuff happens. And, occasionally a little miracle is the result. The great fear is that women will feign rape to get access to abortion services, but the gatekeepers are too vigilant for that.

Rape is an instrument of violence, of torture, of war. During the war in Bosnia, the UN Commission concluded, rape served “a political purpose – to intimidate, humiliate, and degrade [a woman] and others affected by her suffering.” It was also a tool for “ethnic cleansing,” and Bosnian Muslim women raped by Serbs were often forced to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth to “little Chetniks.”

Todd Akin is not some distraction from the real issues of this election. Wrapped in the false rhetoric of the sanctity of life, he represents a worldview that is as dangerous as it is repugnant.

Soul of America

While today’s hot question is whether Congressman Todd Akin will give up his bid to be Missouri’s next senator, the more significant questions are: (1) after his disquisition on “the female body,” why is he still leading Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill? And (2) how did he get the nomination anyway? Akin is no one-blunder wonder.

On Energy: “Energy regulations from the EPA and other agencies have stifled our industry.”

On Guns: “Certainly, some people commit crimes with weapons and I support the prosecution and conviction of these lawbreakers – this includes everyone from the street criminal to our Attorney General, Eric Holder.”

On Health Care (other than pregnancy, of course): “Health care decisions are intensely personal and touch every American.”

On Taxes (other than the very rich): “We need a system where more people would pay some taxes and, thus, have ‘skin in the game.’"

On National Defense: “Defending our country is a proud part of the Missouri tradition. . . . Missouri is ranked 5th in the nation in total defense contracts, with over $12 billion, . . . almost 160,000 jobs in Missouri are connected to defense, and over 16,000 active duty military personnel are garrisoned in our state.”

On Climate Change: “In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change, you know. Who in the world wants to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways?”

Despite Akin’s complete unfitness for office, McCaskill ran ads supporting him in the Republican primary – which he won with 36% of the vote – because she considered him the easiest challenger to beat. That is to say, she spent $2 million people had donated to her campaign to put this man in position to be a U. S. Senator. That is unconscionable.

Sticks and Stones

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) via Annie Blaine. This, I think, helps explain the poisoned atmosphere of our political discourse. It has become personal in the worst kind of way.

It has happened before. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U. S. Senate, Preston Brooks, Democratic Congressman from South Carolina, beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts so viciously with his cane that Sumner never recovered. The attack came in response to a speech two days earlier in which Sumner had heatedly attacked both the institution of slavery and the character of those who practiced it. Brooks intended to “punish” Sumner, not for his attack on slavery but to avenge the honor of his relative, Senator Andrew Butler (D, S.C.).

Many Southerners thought Sumner had it coming. As the leader of the radical Republicans in the Senate, he was an uncompromising abolitionist whose speeches were filled with invective and incendiary allusions. (His counterpart in the House was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, he of the club foot, who held the seat I ran for in 1996, a seat now occupied by one of the most reactionary men in the United States Congress. Such is the sad trajectory of the Grand Old Party.)

Four years later, the country was at war, in part because some had taken forceful speech against an unconscionable institution as attacks on their personal honor.

Big Fracking Deal

Think of natural gas as the methadone of our fossil-fuel addiction. It’s cheaper than oil and therefore more addictive. It’s cleaner than coal so we can feel good about using it. And there is lots of it so we can take it until we drop dead. In Pennsylvania, dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas” because of its massive Marcellus shale deposits, 60,000 new wells are forecast by 2030. They will require clearing thousands of acres of woodlands, threaten the forest habitat of countless species, and have a multi-dimensional impact on fresh water: drilling a well requires hundreds of thousands of gallons; gas companies contend the chemicals they inject are a proprietary secret; and hundreds of wells will be drilled near the state’s cleanest streams. A chemical engineer friend told me that, while the technology exists or soon will for safe fracking, he doubts many oil and gas companies will use best practices. Meanwhile, stories of both human and environmental contamination pile up.

In the face of risks that are both huge and still largely unknown, the gas rush intensifies because the money is mind-boggling and the oil companies have enormous economic and political power. They spew the usual mantras: jobs, growth, dependence on foreign oil – although, as my son Jake pointed out, the U. S. is a net exporter of oil products.

As Bill McKibben wrote in a recent article that will wake you up, as long as the big energy companies control the public debate, little will change, and our addiction will end like all other addictions . . . badly.

Bleeding Kansas

It didn’t rival the border wars in Kansas territory that culminated in John Brown’s deadly attack on the pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, but Tuesday’s Republican primaries for the Kansas state senate were bitter enough. When the votes were counted, the Tea Party candidates had shellacked the moderates, reducing the latter to a rump group with little clout. Such state and local elections are where the political map of America is being redrawn, largely out of sight because the national media aren’t paying much attention – another consequence of the collapse of the traditional press. And it takes a tiny fraction of eligible voters to make a big difference in these races. In March Rick Santorum’s 15,290 votes gave him 51% of the Kansas vote – crushing Mitt Romney by over 2-1.

This vitriolic infighting is happening across the country. It’s not clear what it will mean for this election, but the Republican right’s distrust of Romney has deep roots. Although it began in 1854 as the party of abolition, the GOP was from the beginning the party of big government and big business – and also of midwestern farmers who were deeply conservative on social issues. Nixon’s “southern strategy” enticed southern whites to the GOP over civil rights, and Reagan attracted working-class Democrats in big numbers. Those constituencies have long distrusted Wall Street and the eastern capitalists who run the national party. They now have the votes to remake the party in their own image. They also have the money. The Koch brothers are from Kansas, too.

Unspoken Words

A friend sent me the following in response to yesterday’s post. Words never mentioned on the campaign trail:

• "the poor"
• "climate change"
• "gun control"
• "reforming financial markets"

I was stunned. These are four of the most critical issues we face. They all have enduring consequences, and the first two go a long way to defining what kind of a country we will be – for how we treat each other, particularly the poor, and how we treat the earth are two sides of a single coin of humanity and survival.

It is not especially surprising that Mitt Romney isn’t talking about these things. Concern for the poor is not a striking trait of the modern GOP. Climate change is a hoax. The Second Amendment is sacrosanct. And the financial markets need liberation not reform.

But Barack Obama could build a campaign around these issues. The poor are a constituency that needs empowerment. Climate change already affects all we do. With Jared Loughner pleading guilty to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting spree and recent bloodbaths in Wisconsin and Colorado, it seems a good time to discuss America’s obsession with guns. And the accusation that Standard Chartered laundered billions for the Iranians is but the latest in a never-ending story of arrogance, corruption and greed in the marketplace.

There are other words that aren’t mentioned much either: entitlement reform, Palestine, community.

In what many call “the most important election in our lifetime,” the candidates seem determined to talk about nothing important at all.

Beyond the 99 Percent

Today’s post is an almost-inadvertent addendum to yesterday’s. In the interim I read a review of The Price of Inequality, in which Joseph Stiglitz describes the consequences of the vast inequalities of wealth that now define America, perhaps more than any other nation on Earth. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, argues that our two-tiered society has arisen, not primarily because of either the survival of the fittest or the impact of globalization, but because the rich have become increasingly able to control the political system: “While there may be underlying economic forces at play, politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” The result, he says, goes beyond unfairness; it undercuts the virtues of a free market system by promoting inefficiencies, reducing the educated labor pool and not investing in the infrastructure capitalism requires. (Yes, Barack Obama was absolutely right to point out that we don’t do it alone.) My concern is that the focus on a two-tiered society obscures what is happening. This entire political campaign cycle now involves rebuking or vindicating the one percent and toadying up to the mythical middle class, which is everybody else – the 99 percent. Once again, the poor, whose lives are as removed from the middle class as they are from the rich, have become invisible – none more so than the urban poor, who are locked in ghettos from which there is little escape. This is a moral calamity. It is also a tinderbox . . . and every time we reduce essential public services, we add fuel for the flames.

Following the Herd

Americans have long had an antipathy toward “government” . . . except, of course, when we need it for things like growing old, regulating child labor, rescuing the economy from plundering plutocrats, protecting clean air and water, enforcing civil rights . . . things like that. Otherwise we like to picture America being built by rugged individualists clearing the frontier and small businessmen creating jobs, while the scalawags in Washington plot to tax away their life savings.

This election is giving us that image in spades. We have a socialist president pursuing big-government policies that will enshrine inefficiency, class warfare and the herd mentality, opposed by a businessman fighting to unleash the power of the private sector and the creativity of visionary individuals.

So, I was surprised by the bank employee who told the Fed official that Barclay’s reported false interest rates because it wanted to “fit in with the rest of the crowd.”

You might think that, after wrecking the world’s economy four years ago, the big banks might at least pretend to care about the public’s trust or their clients’ welfare. But it’s hard to see a scintilla of shame, as reports in the last three days show:

• Analysts giving advance information on corporate earnings to large hedge funds.
• JP Morgan losing $2 billion in rogue trades. Oh, sorry, $3.5 billion. Well, actually, it’s closer to $6 billion. Um, would you believe $7.5?
• HSBC apologizing for money-laundering.
• Peregrine Financial unable to account for $215 million in customers’ money, going bankrupt and being charged with fraud

The brazenness of the crimes, the baldness of the lies and the pettiness of the excuses reveal a financial system out of control.

Mitt Romney, we are told, should be president because he knows how to run a business. Suddenly, that’s not particularly reassuring.