More on Sumner Likening the Obama Administration to the 'Mafia.'

     I already wrote about this last night-Sumner is claiming that the Obama Administration is like the Mafia shaking down shopkeepers. 

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/11/sumner-tight-money-unemployment-and-bad.html#comment-form

     The only hitch is that the shopkeepers he has in mind are Wall Street banks like JP Morgan and even Wall Street hedge funds. I see in the comments section at Money Illusion that Geoff-who we've established beyond a shadow of the doubt to be Major Freedom-accuses me of lacking nuance in my comments. 

    "Mike don’t be a fool. He wasn’t “equating” banks with shopkeepers. He was likening the behavior of the Obama administration’s behavior against banks with the behavior of mafias against shopkeepers. You know, shakedowns."

   "And you’re lumping every bank into a “they deserve it” bin. That’s incredibly crude. What about the employees who end up in the cross fire? Collateral damage, huh? Yet they incur some of those costs. You think all 100% comes only from the fat cat executives who smoke cigars and carry money bags with dollar signs on them?"

    "Where’s the nuance in your analysis?"

   http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24694#comment-293321

   Well I like 'nuance' as much as the next guy, though, I suspect that in the way Geoff uses it here it probably means that the banks are always innocent and the government always guilty. Nuance is often a very helpful ploy in blaming the victim as well. 

    So in composing an answer to Geoff-MF I actually touched on something I initialy forgot to mention. 

   “Take the settlement agreed to by JPMorgan. The accompanying statements from both the bank and the regulator involved, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, provided no indication of what the firm did wrong and no admission of guilt.”

   "Speaking of nuance I think the wrong nuance is being given to this statement. The fact that JP isn’t copping to anything here doesn’t mean it’s innocent. Actually it’s a break for them. Often you see companies do that- where they know they’re guilty but agree to pay a fine with an agreement they don’t have to admit to anything."

   "The prosecutor takes the deal so they can avoid a lengthy court fight. As I read this both JP and the prosecutor probably realized that this could go on for a long time and so JP agreed to ‘no contest.’

     "It’s not a question of simply ‘they deserve it’-though it is a fact that they all took in much higher numbers in bailouts than any of them are paying now. This is the law-Dodd-Frank."

     "So for the Obama Administration there hasn’t been any breach of the rule of law-to the contrary as this quote makes clear it is actually enforcing Dodd-Frank. Now you may not like this law-I don’t see how anyone can prefer the previous status quo but that’s another matter-but there is nothing thuggish about them enforcing it-unless you think they simply should ignore every law based on whether someone out there disagrees with it."

I

   "I mean because you disagree with it Geoff, or Scott does doesn’t mean that it’s thuggish for a law that passed by the democratic process to be enforced."

    "And of course, while I eluded above to the fact of GOP gerrymandering, beyond that the fact is that there is nothing wrong much less illegal for the Administration to do this without GOP House approval even if their majority were legitimate-which it isn’t. This is, again, because Dodd-Frank was passed through the normal democratic legislative process."

   "The GOP had it’s chance to stop it then and they failed to do so. I can imagine the Darrell Issa investigation of ‘shakedowns of JP’ and testimony after testimony amounts to ‘Congressman it’s the law, maybe you should take some time and actually learn that before you waste more taxpayer money on one of your fishing expeditions.’

    So I guess I should be grateful to Major as this got me to thinking. Sumner is complaining that Obama is enforcing a law duly passed in the legislative process.