Entrepreneurs entrepreneurin’
by Tom Sullivan
The JPMorgan Chase & Co. headquarters at 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan,
via Wikimedia Commons
Like Jesus the carpenter, I am a tradesman. Just without the sandals and his deep compassion and charity. My sin is, I don’t aspire to be an entrepreneur. Unlike the sitting president, many of us just don’t have the genes for entrepreneurship. Judging by policies that get the most traction in Washington, that makes us second-class citizens.
See, to be an entrepreneur is to be ennobled. A saint among citizens. A star in the capitalist firmament. Someone to make your mother proud. A job creator.
This is the gospel according to the ruling class, Ayn Rand, Horatio Alger, the Heritage Foundation and a heavenly host of other conservative think tanks. And quite a lot of politicians on either side of the aisle.
As venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said so memorably, “It’s a small jump from job creator to The Creator. This language was not chosen by accident.” It is, he said, a claim on status and privileges.
The business community let out a mighty, “We are not amused.”
One of the stepping stones on the path to the Crash of 2008 was the Bush effort to create an “ownership society.” Everybody should own a home. It is the American Dream and everyone should have one. Can’t afford one? Not a problem. Financial wizards on Wall Street and their mortgage-backed securities could put you in a new home with no money down and no net cash flow. And then put your family out in the street when it all came crashing down.
Bankers did, by the millions, as David Dayen again details in a post this week for The Nation. Wall Street even paid its fines through fraud, according to a lawsuit now being heard in US District Court in New York City:
JPMorgan, it appears, was running an elaborate shell game. In the depths of the financial collapse, the bank had unloaded tens of thousands of toxic loans when they were worth next to nothing. Then, when it needed to provide customer relief under the settlements, the bank had paperwork created asserting that it still owned the loans. In the process, homeowners were exploited, investors were defrauded, and communities were left to battle the blight caused by abandoned properties. JPMorgan, however, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, thanks to using other people’s money.
Federal appointees at the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight signed off on the JPMorgan. Former North Carolina congressman Brad Miller, a longtime advocate for financial reform, told Dayen:
“No one in Washington seems to understand why Americans think that different rules apply to Wall Street, and why they’re so mad about that,” said former congressman Miller. “This is why.”
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?
Douglas Schoen, a former Clinton White House senior political adviser, however, is not amused that many Democrats are insufficiently appreciative of the money Wall Street wizards have to offer its candidates, nor of all of the wonderful things they do. In his New York Times op-ed, he argues that Hillary Clinton’s “lurch to the left” cost her the election in this “center-right, pro-capitalist nation.”
Therefore, “Democratic leaders must prioritize entrepreneurship, small-business growth and the expansion of job-training and retraining programs.” Democrats need to partner more closely with a financial sector. “The financial industry brings to market the world’s most innovate products and platforms that expand the economy and create jobs.”
You can never enough entrepreneurs entrepreneurin’. And people complain Democrats don’t represent working people anymore. Where do they get such ideas?
The notion that policy should tilt towards entrepreneurs aspiring to be “job creators” devalues real people who work for a weekly paycheck. They take pride in what they do whether or not they are business owners. As Hanauer pointed out, it is consumption that drives the economy. You can’t have entrepreneurs entrepreneurin’ without consumers consumin’. And working people are the ones getting short-changed in Washington, not the entrepreneurs and the financial industry. As Miller suggested, people outside Washington know it too well.
Part of the impetus behind the ownership society was to create more Republican voters. The theory was that paycheck workers tend to think like and vote for Democrats. Mold them into property owners and you create conservative voters resentful of government programs that helped get them there and of safety net programs that still serve neighbors now beneath them on the social ladder. Not to be all “class warfare” or anything.
What Democrats like Schoen argue for is another version of the ownership society. If only everyone was an entrepreneur, they would think and vote like entrepreneurs. Uh, wait….
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