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Where DC Lobbyists Love to See and Be Seen

by ElveraLowe03281 Posted on July 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.

Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want—like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.

But whatever became of lobbying itself, which once seemed to exemplify everything wrong with Washington, DC? Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that lobbying remains one of the nation’s persistently prosperous industries, and that, since 2011, it has been the focus of Influence, one of the daily email newsletters published by Politico, that great chronicler of the Obama years. Influence was to be, as its very first edition declared, “the must-read crib sheet for Washington’s influence class,” with news of developments on K Street done up in tones of sycophantic smugness. For my money, it is one of the quintessential journalistic artifacts of our time: the constantly unfolding tale of power-for-hire, told always with a discreet sympathy for the man on top.

It is true that Americans are more cynical about Washington than ever. To gripe that “the system is rigged” is to utter the catchphrase of the year. But to read Influence every afternoon is to understand how little difference such attitudes make here in the nation’s capital. With each installment, the reader encounters a cast of contented and well-groomed knowledge workers, the sort of people for whom there are never enough suburban mansions or craft cocktails. One imagines them living together in a happy community of favors-for-hire where everyone knows everyone else, the restaurant greeters smile, the senators lie down with the contractors, and the sun shines brilliantly every day. This community’s labors in the influence trade have made the economy of the Washington metro area the envy of the world.

The newsletter describes every squeaking turn of the revolving door with a certain admiration. Influence is where you can read about all the smart former assistants to prominent members of Congress and the new K Street jobs they’ve landed. There are short but meaningful hiring notices—like the recent one announcing that the blue-ribbon lobby firm K&L Gates has snagged its fourth former congressional “member.” There are accounts of prizes that lobbyists give to one another and of rooftop parties for clients and ritual roll calls of Ivy League degrees to be acknowledged and respected. And wherever you look at Influence, it seems like people associated with this or that Podesta can be found registering new clients, holding fundraisers, and “bundling” cash for Hillary Clinton.

As with other entries in the Politico family of tip sheets, Influence is itself sponsored from time to time—for one exciting week last month by the Federation of American Hospitals, which announced to the newsletter’s readers that, for the last 50 years, the FAH “has had a seat at the table.” Appropriately enough for a publication whose beat is venality, Influence also took care to report on the FAH’s 50th-anniversary party, thrown in an important room in the Capitol building, and carefully listed the many similarly important people who attended: the important lobbyists, the important members of Congress, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the Obama administration’s important former health care czar and one of this city’s all-time revolving-door champions.

Describing parties like this is a standard theme in Influence, since the influence trade is by nature a happy one, a flattering one, a business eager to serve you up a bracing Negroni and encourage you to gorge yourself on fancy hors d’oeuvres. And so the newsletter tells us about the city’s many sponsored revelries—who gives them, who attends them, the establishment where the transaction takes place, and whose legislative agenda is advanced by the resulting exchange of booze and bonhomie.

The regular reader of Influence knows, for example, about the big reception scheduled to be hosted by Squire Patton Boggs, one of the most storied names in the influence-for-hire trade, at a certain office in Cleveland during the Republican Convention…about how current and former personnel of the Department of Homeland Security recently enjoyed a gathering thrown for them by a prestigious law firm…about a group called “PAC Pals” and the long list of staffers and lobbying types who attended their recent revelry…about how the Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the gang got together at a much-talked-about bar to sip artisanal cocktails.

There’s a poignant note to the story of former Congressional representative Melissa Bean—once the toast of New Democrats everywhere, now the “Midwest chair of JPMorgan”—who recently returned to DC to get together with her old staff. They had also moved on to boldface jobs in lobbying, television, and elsewhere. And there’s a note of the fabulous to the story of the Democratic member who has announced plans to throw a fundraiser at a Beyoncé concert. (“A pair of tickets go for $3,500 for PACs,” Influence notes.)

Bittersweet is the flavor of the recent story about the closing of Johnny’s Half Shell, a Capitol Hill restaurant renowned for the countless fundraisers it has hosted over the years. On hearing the news of the restaurant’s imminent demise, Influence gave over its pixels to tales from Johnny’s glory days. One reader fondly recounted a tale in which Occupy protesters supposedly interrupted a Johnny’s fundraiser being enjoyed by Sen. Lindsey Graham and a bunch of defense contractors. In classic DC-style, the story was meant to underscore the stouthearted stoicism of the men of power who reportedly did not flinch at the menacing antics of the lowly ones.

Influence is typically written in an abbreviated, matter-of-fact style, but its brief items speak volumes about the realities of American politics. There is, for example, little here about the high-profile battle over how transgender Americans are to be granted access to public restrooms. However, the adventures of dark money in our capital are breathlessly recounted, as the eternal drama of plutocracy plays itself out and mysterious moneymen try to pass their desires off as bona fide democratic demands.

“A group claiming to lobby on behalf of ordinary citizens against large insurance companies is in fact orchestrated by the hospital industry itself,” begins a typical item. The regular reader also knows about the many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by unknown parties to stop Puerto Rican debt relief and about the mysterious group that has blown vast sums to assail the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but whose protesters, when questioned outside a CFPB hearing, reportedly admitted that they were “day laborers paid to be there.”

You will have noticed, reader, the curiously bipartisan nature of the items mentioned here. But it really shouldn’t surprise you. After all, for this part of Washington, the only real ideology around is based on money—how much and how quickly you get paid.

Money is divine in this industry, and perhaps that is why Influence is fascinated with libertarianism, a fringe free-market faith that (thanks to its popularity among America’s hard-working billionaires) is massively overrepresented in Washington. Readers of Influence know about the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its “Night in Casablanca” party, about the R Street Institute’s “Alice in Wonderland” party, about how former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli came to sign up with FreedomWorks, and how certain libertarians have flown from their former perches in the vast, subsidized free-market coop to the fashionable new Niskanen Center.

There are also plenty of small-bore lobbying embarrassments to report on, as when a currently serving congressional representative sent a mean note to a former senator who is now an official at the American Motorcyclist Association. Or that time two expert witnesses gave “nearly identical written statements” when testifying on Capitol Hill. Oops!

But what most impresses the regular reader of Influence is the brazenness of it all. To say that the people described here appear to feel no shame in the contracting-out of the democratic process is to miss the point. Their doings are a matter of pride, with all the important names gathering at some overpriced eatery to toast one another and get their picture taken and advance some initiative that will always, of course, turn out to be good for money and terrible for everyone else.

This is not an industry, Influence‘s upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community—a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class.

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? To receive the latest from TomDispatch.com, sign up here.

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Where DC Lobbyists Love to See and Be Seen

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"Dear Susan, I Have Some Interesting News for You…"

by WilsonRobbins52 Posted on July 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2004, a decade or so before Transparent debuted and Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn, journalist Susan Faludi—author of the 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women—got an email from her 77-year-old Hungarian father. He’d moved back to Budapest after a long career as a photographer in the United States, and the two had “barely spoken” in 25 years. “Dear Susan,” the message read, “I have some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.”

Her father had gone to Thailand, undergone sex-reassignment surgery, and was no longer Steven Faludi, but Stefánie. His announcement marked the beginning of an extraordinary father-daughter reconciliation and a personal exploration of gender fluidity that culminated in Faludi’s latest book, In the Darkroom. I caught up with Faludi to talk about gender extremes, her own identity crises, and what post-Soviet Hungary has in common with Donald Trump’s America.

Mother Jones: Your book title works on several levels. The first refers to your father’s profession as a photographer. Let’s talk about the others.

Susan Faludi: I felt like my father was in a dark room of her own making—always in a state of hiding one way or another. And then there is the terrible darkness of the past, of my father’s childhood and Holocaust experience. And all the ways my father was trying to convert herself—or back then, himself—into something else, and trying to save his life to pass as something other than what he was. There was a lot of darkness.

MJ: Your dad was very violent when you were growing up, but through this journey, you discovered her vulnerability, warmth, and bravery. Was it difficult for you to reconcile these aspects of her personality with the father of your youth?

SP: I always knew something didn’t add up. Growing up, I saw my father trying on one role after another, whether it was Alpine mountaineer or all-American commuter dad with the workbench in the basement, wearing the fedora, and catching the 5:09 train home from the city. Then there was his fascination with manipulating photos, altering images.

It seemed a general confusion. But when I look back on his preoccupation with hyper-masculinity—all the rock climbing and marathon bicycling, ice climbing, and crossing glaciers in the Alps—I realize that I could have read that as compensatory behavior, a struggle to deny something much deeper. I wondered if perhaps my father as a woman felt that she had to go to the extreme—to exhibit hyperfemininity as the only way to release herself from the hypermasculinity she had encased herself in as a man. There were so many odd, idiosyncratic personality traits that I couldn’t put at the doorstep of anyone or any culture. On the other hand, there were qualities that my father had that I thought were strange until I got to Hungary and realized, “Oh, no, my father is Hungarian!”

MJ: Did you know from the moment your father told you about her operation that you would write this book?

SF: I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean? Who am I in relation to this person? It’s a familiar and comforting way of finding my bearings. My father immediately invited me to write her story. And we proceeded early on—me armed with reporters’ notebooks and tape recorders. But whether it would be for my bureau drawer or an actual book, I didn’t know. It was hard to grapple with how to turn it into a book—the whole personal story. Then I became consumed with the question of Hungarian history and the utterly tortured relationship between Hungarians and Jews, and the insistence that never the twain shall meet. And then the whole history of transgenderism. I often felt as if I were playing six-dimensional chess.

MJ: You reflect that your father is “exactly the kind of girl I’d always thought of as ‘false’.” Will you elaborate?

SF: In part, it applied to my father’s initial presentation of herself as this Doris Day, happy homemaker, just-couldn’t-wait-to-put-on-a-frilly-apron-and-go-into-a kitchen-and-be-taken-care-of woman. It’s kind of funny, because she never actually got taken care of after transition—that was more a fantasy than reality. There was a neighbor who fixed things around the house, but in fact my father was always very handy.

My father and I weren’t in contact during the five years or so—probably longer—before the operation, but she saved all the clothing and high heels, boas, and what-not. I was certainly privy to what then-he was wearing. Post-surgery, my father settled into a more, as she put it, “sedate” presentation of womanhood. But clichéd in other ways: “Here I am being this traditional frilly Magyar matron of a certain bourgeois class from 1925.” In the last several years of her life, she kind of settled into a more of an in-between state, one that wasn’t that far off from how I would dress. And a lot of that had to do with just being older, and having varicose veins—so much for the heels!

By the end, my father was wearing tennis sneakers and a hoodie and comfortable baggy pants. Also, in the very last years, my father began talking about herself as trans, instead of as a woman. Whereas early on he would say, “I am completely a woman.” The needle moved around a bit on the record. But the first few years, the piles of makeup and the insistence on frills and ribbons and bows was not at all attuned to my feminist views on what should be the defining attributes of womanhood. In fact, I don’t believe in any defining attributes. It’s fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.

MJ: It has been 25 years since Backlash came out. Looking around now, how would you say transgender issues fit in with feminist theory?

SF: I think there’s great overlap. I’ve never believed that women have some special, essentialist qualities, or were more nurturing, cooperative, and morally superior. My feminist view—that gender is on a continuum and we are all better off dropping a lot of those binary notions—is one that is shared by the more recent generation of trans activists and theorists. I know there’s this notion of a battle between the “turfs”—the trans-exclusionary radical feminists who are opposed to trans people. There are a handful of such separatist feminists, but they are really the exception. While it initially really challenged, or frustrated, my feminist notions to see my father running around in stilettos and push-up bras, ultimately the whole experience reaffirmed my feminist view that gender is really varied and complicated and sort of infinitely individualistic.

MJ: At one point, you steal a psychologist’s assessment of your father, and you begin to sort of question who you are at that moment. Girl reporter? Daughter? Was it difficult to toggle among these identities?

SF: I had these moments often, the question of which of my personas will kick in: Daughter? Journalist? Feminist? Having that journalistic guise to fall back on helped me get through the really difficult parts of sticking with my father. If I had just come over to talk, it would have been a lot harder for me to stay with it. I wouldn’t have had the security blanket of my reporter’s notebook and my list of questions, which allowed me to create a little distance so I could breathe and not just feel overwhelmed and suffocated—because my father could often be overwhelming and suffocating. My father was going through this transition from being behind the camera to being in front of it. And by writing about my father, I was going from behind the reporter’s notebook into looking at my own life and assumptions. We were both being pushed out of our comfort zones.

MJ: Beyond your father, this book tells the story of a nation in transition.

SF: The journalism goddess provided an obvious metaphor here. It struck me that Hungary’s transition from communism to capitalism—”the change”—was also what my father called her gender transition. I felt as if I was looking at these twin dramas, around identity in Hungary’s case, but also a cautionary tale. This is what happens when things go wrong. It has been just an endless stretch of identity crises in a country that feels so dominated and invaded and defeated, and so desirous of some fantastical mythological past to hang the culture on. There are so many debates. What is a Hungarian? Who is a Hungarian? But the debates often become a kind of substitute for a reckoning with really hard social and economic problems, and the failure to deal with the reality of a dark past; substituting that struggle for flag-waving, hyperpatriotic neo-fascism. Coming back home and watching the same thing with Trump has been really dispiriting—this grandiosity mixed with extreme self pity.

MJ: Your father is quite insistent about her feminine nature, which challenges a lot of your previous work. Did your sense of gender change while watching your father and writing this book?

SF: The tragedy of it was: If only my father—if only all of us—could be ourselves in our own messy in-between category-ness. My father was so much more interesting in an ambiguous state, which she didn’t reach until the last three or four years of her life. Also, she talked to me so much more, saying, “Now that I’m a woman I feel I can communicate more. As a man I felt I couldn’t communicate.” One of the things that gave her real relief was not feeling isolated at the end of her life. The other aspect of how my father found, I wouldn’t say peace, because no one fully changes—toward the end of her life, my father was willing to look into her own past. She was talking a lot more about being Jewish and her family and the history that she had spent so much time covering up. I think that was freeing for her. To stop trying to put on a mask and just begin to confront all the circumstances and historical conditions that shaped who she became.

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"Dear Susan, I Have Some Interesting News for You…"

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Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

by PorterGunson65 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a press release late Friday, the Dallas Police Department provided details about their investigation into the gunman in Thursday’s mass shooting, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a local resident and former soldier who served in Afghanistan. They said that a search of Johnson’s home revealed “bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.” Strangely, the Dallas PD included a couple of select details about Johnson’s Facebook account:

The suspect’s Facebook account included the following names and information: Fahed Hassen, Richard GRIFFIN aka Professor Griff, GRIFFIN embraces a radical form of Afrocentrism, and GRIFFIN wrote a book A Warriors Tapestry.

It is unclear why the Dallas PD chose to include this information regarding Griffin, who was a member of the seminal 1980s rap group Public Enemy. The press release contained no further context about it.

Johnson’s Facebook page (which is no longer available online) reportedly contained a photo of Johnson posing with Griffin, who quickly took to Twitter to say that he had no relationship with the attacker.

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Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

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Police Groups Blame Obama, Black Lives Matter for "War on Cops"

by NicholeClark8 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the wake of Thursday’s shootings in Dallas, which claimed the lives of five police officers, law enforcement organizations across the country have used social media to show their solidarity with the Dallas Police Department and the families of those who were killed or injured.

But some police groups are also joining high-profile right-wing figures in issuing sharp criticisms of those they see as facilitating a “war on cops,” often taking direct aim at President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page Friday, the National Association of Police Organizations stated, “While we mourn and grieve and commit ourselves to supporting the survivors, we must also stand up and speak out against the senseless agitators and gutless politicians who helped bring about these murders.” The post also criticized the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights for its supposed refusal “to prosecute cop killers”:

In a Friday morning interview with Fox News, William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said Obama has not done as much as his predecessors when it comes to “condemning violence against the police and urging support for the police.”

In St. Louis, KMOX radio is reporting that Jeff Roorda, a top official in the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, is standing by a controversial Facebook statement that he posted on his personal page hours after the shootings. The post includes a photo of a pair of hands covered in blood, with the caption “THIS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS, MR. PRESIDENT.” (The post has been deleted from Roorda’s page.)

Officials with other police organizations have been less heated in their reactions to the shooting but have still implied that some of the blame lies with Black Lives Matter. Patrick Lynch, the leader of New York’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said the Dallas shooting was the result of “national anger against police caused by erroneous information.” In 2015, Lynch faced public backlash after he said that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s support for Black Lives Matter-led protests contributed to the deaths of two NYPD officers.

On Thursday, while addressing the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week in encounters with law enforcement, Obama stressed that Black Lives Matter was not anti-police. “When people say black lives matter, it doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter,” he said. Prominent Black Lives Matter activists have condemned the shootings and offered their condolences to the officers and their families.

In a speech discussing the Dallas shootings earlier Friday, Obama was firm in his condemnation of the attacks on police officers, saying there was “no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement.”

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Police Groups Blame Obama, Black Lives Matter for "War on Cops"

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Watch Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Call Black Lives Matter Protesters "Hypocrites" After Dallas Shooting

by Polly Browder Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick directly blamed Black Lives Matter protesters for putting the lives of police officers in danger—actions he said contributed to Thursday night’s attack in Dallas that killed five officers.

“Too many in the general public who aren’t criminals but have a big mouth are creating situations like we saw last night,” an emotional Patrick said during an interview with Fox News on Friday. He later added, “All those protesters last night, they ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to turn around and protect them—what hypocrites!”

“I do blame people on social media with their hatred toward police,” he said. While pointing out that last night’s Dallas protest was peaceful, Patrick said, “I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests.”

Patrick’s comments follow a starkly different public statement calling for unity that he issued overnight:

Patrick’s comments come at a time of heated rhetoric in the wake of the Dallas attack. Prominent critics of the Black Lives Matter movement have gone so far as to declare the country is at “war.”

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Watch Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Call Black Lives Matter Protesters "Hypocrites" After Dallas Shooting

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch Urges Americans to Reject Violence After Dallas Police Ambush

by MarjoriDiq Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Friday called on Americans to come together and reject violence in the wake of the “unfathomable tragedy” that occurred overnight in Dallas, where five police officers were killed and six wounded in a police ambush.

“Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness and uncertainly and fear,” Lynch said in a press conference. “These feelings are understandable and they are justified, but the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.”

She encouraged Americans to take “peaceful and collaborative” steps towards building trust between law enforcement officials and communities. Echoing President Obama’s remarks on the tragedy just hours earlier, Lynch said the attack should spark a serious consideration about the easy access with which individuals seeking to inflict harm are able to obtain weapons.

Throughout her address, she urged Americans not to allow the events of this week, which included the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, to become the “new normal in America.”

“May we turn toward each other, not against another.”

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch Urges Americans to Reject Violence After Dallas Police Ambush

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Today’s Big Campaign News

by Deloris0856 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Is it really big news that Donald Trump released a non-idiotic statement responding to the shootings in Dallas? Judging from the headlines today, I guess it is. What a world. We sure do set the bar low for reporting on Trump’s every move.

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Today’s Big Campaign News

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

by ChantePuig9156 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Thursday night, at least one sniper in Dallas opened fire near a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, killing five police officers and injuring seven others. The shooting marks the deadliest attack on law enforcement in the United States since 9/11. While there has been an outpouring of grief and anger on social media, some high-profile individuals—including a former congressman and a veteran policy adviser to Republican leaders—stirred threats of violence and impending “war” against the Black Lives Matter movement.

From former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, in a post that has since been deleted:

Twitter

More from Walsh:

From Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and radio show host:

From Frank Gaffney, president of the right-leaning Center for Security Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Ted Cruz:

The New York Post‘s front page declared “Civil War”—which quickly drew a fierce backlash.

On his radio show today, right-wing host Rush Limbaugh called Black Lives Matter “a terrorist group committing hate crimes”:

The full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks: “I found a story from March, I think, of 2015, in which President Obama welcomed two founders of Black Lives Matter to the White House and commemorated them and their efforts and praised them as being better organizers than he is. And… Black Lives Matter was just exactly who they are then as who they are today. They’re a terrorist group. They’re quickly becoming a terrorist group committing hate crimes.”

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High-Profile Right Wingers Declare "War" in Wake of Dallas Police Shootings

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John Cena Released a Video About "What Patriotism Should Mean"—And It’s Amazing

by CaryHayden Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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John Cena does a lot of things. He delivers a mean body slam, raps, and now has some pretty awesome things to say about what patriotism should mean in America.

“Patriotism is love for a country—not just pride in it. But what really makes up this country of ours? What is it we love?” he asks. “It’s the people.” In this video, released on July 4 as part of an Ad Council campaign, Cena challenges our biases about who we think the average American is and reminds us that “almost half the country belongs to minority groups.”

The main message? Throw out the labels. Love everybody. And stop imagining that the average American is a white man. Watch below:

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John Cena Released a Video About "What Patriotism Should Mean"—And It’s Amazing

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Italy Is Next In Line For a Banking Crisis

by ArmandoMcAllist Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Italy could be ground zero for the next European economic crisis:

In Italy, 17% of banks’ loans are sour. That is nearly 10 times the level in the U.S., where, even at the worst of the 2008-09 financial crisis, it was only 5%. Among publicly traded banks in the eurozone, Italian lenders account for nearly half of total bad loans.

….The U.K. vote to exit the European Union has compounded the strains on Europe’s banks in general and Italy’s in particular…. Brexit has many executives concerned that central banks will keep interest rates lower for longer than they might otherwise, in an attempt to counteract the slower growth—in the eurozone as well as Britain. European banks’ stocks slid after the vote, with those in Italy especially hurt.

….“Brexit could lead to a full-blown banking crisis in Italy,” said Lorenzo Codogno, former director general at the Italian Treasury. “The risk of a eurozone meltdown is clearly there if Brexit concerns are not immediately addressed.”

It’s not clear to me just how bad things really are in Italy, since the Journal compares their level of nonperforming loans to the US, not to peer countries like Portugal or Spain. Even better would be to tell us how Italy’s current NPL level compares to past levels. It it really way out of whack historically? Or just mildly worse than usual during this phase of an economic cycle?

That said, it’s apparent that Europe’s banking sector continues to have problems thanks to the endless can kicking done between 2010 and 2014. The hope that everything would just spontaneously get better if structural problems were ignored long enough was never a great plan, and it still isn’t. However, a standard bank bailout isn’t possible, thanks to new rules adopted by the EU two years ago. Philipp Hildebrand suggests instead something simpler:

As Angela Merkel, German chancellor, has pointed out, the rules as they stand…permit the temporary shoring-up of banks with public money to make up for a capital shortfall revealed by a regulatory stress test, if raising private capital is not feasible. It is a fortunate coincidence that the 2016 European Banking Authority’s stress test campaign is under way. And it is clear, with most European banks trading far below book value, that raising private capital at this juncture is not a practical option. At the same time, most European banks are perfectly viable, and so resolution is not the way to go.

The European Commission should therefore allow those governments that wish to do so to take temporary equity stakes in banks that need a capital boost. Importantly, state aid rules apply, so this should not be a free handout. Rather, it should be conditional on banks committing to significant steps to address the structural difficulties they face and diversifying income sources. This would be similar to the US Tarp process in 2008 that ended up returning money to taxpayers.

Perhaps so. “Temporary,” of course, has a tendency to last a long time in some countries. Still, this might be the best and easiest solution. If Italy thinks it best to rescue its own banks with an equity infusion, they should probably be allowed to do so. Ditto for Portugal, Spain, and other countries with continuing bank sector weakness. I don’t know if it would work as well as TARP did—and TARP did work, despite the bad rap it’s gotten—since Italy’s economy is fundamentally weaker than the US economy ever was. But it’s worth a try.

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Italy Is Next In Line For a Banking Crisis

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