without regulators, discrimination against Conservatives is legal

October 6, 2022 12:25 PM

"This piece continues a theme I’m fascinated by, which is the internal conflict within the Republican Party over corporate power. In this case, it’s about a lawsuit by Wall Street and Big Tech to have the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is trying to stop banks from discriminating against customers, declared unconstitutional. But if Wall Street is successful, they will be empowering banks to deny banking services to conservatives. And therein lies the possible tension." Who Loves Woke Wall Street? By Matt Stoller

Matt Stiller previously

Selected paragraphs:

In a world without public regulators, which is what libertarians want, discrimination against conservatives is legal. Regulation doesn’t go away, it’s just that Mark Zuckerberg or Jamie Dimon become the regulators, and the administrative apparatus becomes the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or Environmental, Social, and Governance compliance program.

Now, I’m on the left, so I don’t necessarily have the same view of how to understand the problem of DEI and ESG programs that pervade Wall Street. From my perspective, banks and Big Tech firms who emphasize DEI/ESG are doing branding, not meaningful attempts to redress social injustices like racism or pollution. Instead, they are engaging in authoritarian practices to bureaucratize American commerce. But even though I’m not a conservative, I do think conservatives have an interest in preserving anti-discrimination rules, if they are suspicious of the arbitrary whims of concentrated power.

...

There is alignment between the populist left and the populist right in this area. If banks and Big Tech firms are going to profit by operating as common carriers, they should not be able to discriminate and wield social power in doing so. Right now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association are leveraging old arguments from the libertarian right about how the government is impinging upon our liberty by saying that banks can’t discriminate. But the reality is that this is no different than Google saying it has a right to censor us for our own good. If a bank closes down a conservative’s account because it violates some internal policy or annoys its employees, it’s discrimination, just as it’s discrimination when a bank manager refuses to offer services to a black man because he’s black.

posted by rebent (19 comments total)

If a bank closes down a conservative’s account because it violates some internal policy or annoys its employees, it’s discrimination, just as it’s discrimination when a bank manager refuses to offer services to a black man because he’s black.

This, of course, ignores why conservatives are facing such opprobrium these days - the blatant appeals to bigotry, the desire to strip rights away from anyone deemed unworthy, the attacks on representative democracy, among others. Turns out that people have A Problem with such behavior, and wish to use their freedom of association (a freedom that conservatives happily forget exists when it could wind up impacting them) to show their distaste. This is a far cry from someone being refused service solely because of their skin color, and to argue that they are the same is a revolting argument.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:44 PM on October 6, 2022 [29 favorites]

If a bank closes down a conservative’s account because it violates some internal policy or annoys its employees, it’s discrimination, just as it’s discrimination when a bank manager refuses to offer services to a black man because he’s black.

Am just I missing something here about this being a huge false equivalency, or is the author really equating a violation of bank policies with discriminating against a protected class?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:45 PM on October 6, 2022 [15 favorites]

Yes, you are. He covers that in the article
posted by rebent at 12:46 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was just about to post the same excerpt as the two commenters above who beat me to it. How are those two situations any way analogous?
posted by The Notorious SRD at 12:47 PM on October 6, 2022

(Also, "annoys its employees" is euphemistic weasel wording designed to engage in bad faith argumentation. If the author can't be honest about what's happening, then their argument is bullshit.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:47 PM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

Because they are both enforced by the cfpb, which the right is trying to get rid of.
posted by rebent at 12:48 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I will never rtfa
posted by ominous_paws at 12:53 PM on October 6, 2022 [13 favorites]

Because they are both enforced by the cfpb, which the right is trying to get rid of.

Which doesn't actually answer the question before you, which is very simple: is being denied service because of one's own conduct equivalent to being denied service because of one's immutable characteristics? The author is engaged in making a false equivalency using bad faith arguments because a) he wants readers to say yes and b) knows they won't if he's actually honest about why people are using one of their core freedoms to not deal with people who seek to harm others.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:54 PM on October 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

But the reality is that this is no different than Google saying it has a right to censor us for our own good.

But Google has been about that from the beginning:

"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches," [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] said. "We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about... We can look at bad behavior and modify it."

The root of the problem is that government has been ceding its regulatory responsibilities to companies like Google, which then turns around and acts on the freedoms it has been given. Google isn't acting in a vacuum.

Maybe management of Google or whichever ad company is faced with something like the January 6 terrorist attack, and it responds in a way that upsets a loud, rich, white supremacist, seditionist Republican somewhere who has a legislator's ear.

More often than not, though, it goes after someone already marginalized, someone who does not get to enjoy passive and active protections afforded by mostly right-wing governance to an extremist right-wing base, and those citizens can't fight back the same way (or at all).

The origin of the problem is laissez-faire government policy. Corporations are given a legal vacuum in which they act to protect and maximize shareholder value, not with any official regulatory mission in mind.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:06 PM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think the focus of the article is not what the author thinks should happen, but why the right wants to get rid of something that the right can use to protect itself. Rules and regulations aren't applied evenly, and tend to be used to disproportionately target minority groups and protect members of the in group. Conservatives may be more able to use rules and regulations to protect themselves, but they're working to do away with some of those rules.

The author problems with the cfpb seem to be more along the line that it doesn't fix problems, but provide the illusion of addressing racism:

My view is that DEI programs, though they are generally very annoying, also fail to deliver on what they portend to deliver on. For example,Bank of America has a “supplier code of conduct,” in which it mandates that all of their suppliers recruit a diverse set of employees and publicly disclose their workforce gender and racial breakdown, which is intended to promote tolerance. Only, Bank of America regularly engages in racist behavior, like calling the cops on a black man who was simply trying to cash an insurance settlement check, or having Black Panther director and multi-millionaire Ryan Coogler arrested for trying to withdraw money from his bank account.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:15 PM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

But Google has been about that from the beginning:

Google is an advertising company. So is Facebook. Putting information in front of people that changes their behaviour is what they do.
posted by mhoye at 1:20 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe they can next do something about all those single women discriminating against the new conservatives-only dating app
posted by acb at 2:50 PM on October 6, 2022 [11 favorites]

This is a strange article, and seems to me to be deliberately misrepresenting the reason banks and Wall Street want the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau closed down.

They want it closed down because of actions such as the way it just forced Region's Bank to repay $141 million in illegal overdraft fees it charged customers by telling them they had enough money to cover a draft, and then charging them the overdraft fee anyway. During the period this was going on, overdraft fees comprised 18% of bank revenues not including interest. Region's was also assessed a $50M penalty.

The bank knew the illegal fees were being charged, but explicitly declined to stop doing it until they came up with ways to replace the revenue which would be lost.

So why would the author deliberately misrepresent what's really happening here?

I think he's trying to get the left-leaning, social justice oriented, anti-capitalist left to laugh at banks and Wall Street trying to score an own goal like this, so we won’t rise up to protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is doing a hell of a lot more than simply protecting us from discrimination.

It’s amazing to see such blatant bad faith right out in the open like this, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when $100s of millions are at stake in single enforcement actions.
posted by jamjam at 3:58 PM on October 6, 2022 [21 favorites]

Sadly, I believe it's plausible that it's simply the fact that CFPB was Elizabeth Warren's creation. Same impulse that made Trump have hookers pee in Obama's bed.
posted by hypnogogue at 4:08 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think that was magick, hypnogogue.

Just like Trump laying his hands on the glowing orb with the Saudis and others during his first foreign trip was.

Trump's personality has all kinds of earmarks of belief in magical thinking and the occult — check out his apparently self generated and unfortunately thought better of scheme to come out Walter Reed in a Superman costume after being treated for Covid, his attempt to change the weather by drawing on a map with a sharpie, and his newly revealed discomfort at signing his name to the death certificates of US personnel who died in Afghanistan because it 'connected' him to the war — which is just one example of his fetishization of his signature in general.
posted by jamjam at 4:34 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

While I’m generally loathe to engage in ad hominems about columnists, and have subscribed to Stoller’s Substack in past years, from what I understand is that as much of an eloquent champion for antitrust action as he is, he has had contrarian brainworms get to the better of him as of late. So he might be trying to score some sort of anti-woke capital points at the expense of the liberal establishment, even by using tortured arguments.

It’s all very Greenwald-like, though funnily enough Stoller’s pro-economic interventionist position might be the opposite of Glenn’s left-libertarianism.

That said, while the above is added context about his worldview and shtick as a public discourser, I’m not actually sure if his interpretation is inaccurate or not here. Just an FYI.
posted by Apocryphon at 7:07 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Trump's personality has all kinds of earmarks of belief in magical thinking and the occult

He was literally raised in Norman Vincent Peale's church.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:46 PM on October 6, 2022

Seems like a lot of words when I have a much simpler explanation: people, especially conservatives, very much imagine that if the world were more unequal, that they'd be on the winning side of the transfer.

This is despite all evidence to the contrary, which is that most of then benefit greatly from government intervention and redistribution and social safety nets, etc., and they would very likely be harmed if some of their whims came to pass.

But it is not a position of reason. It is a position of faith—literally religious faith, in some cases, that they are and will always be among the fortunate and the chosen.

This is why they consistently vote for the Leopards Eating Faces party, despite having faces that look so tasty to leopards: their politics is built on faith that the leopards will know not to eat them.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:26 PM on October 6, 2022 [15 favorites]

This isn't about bank regulation, but on the subject of "Woke Capitalism", someone pointed out lately that if you read Adam Smith, one of the things he thinks is good about Capitalism is that if you're working to fulfil other peoples needs, that will give you sympathy for other people. To satisfy your customers you have to mentally put yourself in their shoes which (he thinks) makes you a better and more pro-social person.

So "Woke Capitalism" is the way Capitalism was originally supposed to work.

The idea that Capitalism means you should be ruthlessly self-interested is a later development.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:40 AM on October 7, 2022 [11 favorites]