Who would have thought such a thing?
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) has decided to use her committee to go after the hated banking industry. Congresswoman and Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has announced
We’re going to hold oversight hearings to make these banks accountable for investing in and making money off of the detention of immigrants[.]
Dangerously, and sadly, the overt intimidation seems to be working.
On February 5 JPMorgan Chase announced it will no longer do business with private prisons. In January Wells Fargo said it would no longer market to private prison companies, aiming to achieve the same objective by attrition.
Never mind that the Progressive-Democratic Party—then just the Democratic Party, with 61 Senators and 292 Representatives in that 95th Congress—politicized, and racialized, banking ‘way back in 1977 with their Community Reinvestment Act.
Today’s bankers are bowing and scraping and showing the same abject cowardice that bankers in the late ’70s and ’80s displayed when those Democrats attacked the banks for being banks—and for concerning themselves with their fiduciary duty to their owners and investors regarding loan risk.
It’s going to be a long two years for the American financial industry and so for our economy.