JPMorgan
honcho Jamie Dimon should count his millions and be grateful he's not in jail.
Jamie Dimon is annoyed. He’s fed up with the populist attitude
that’s sweeping the country. He’s not going to take it anymore.
That’s why he recently bleated to
reporters that “banks are under assault.”
Well, not every bank. He was talking about JPMorgan Chase —
America’s largest Wall Street empire, which Dimon heads.
Government regulators, he snarls, are pandering to grassroots
anger at Wall Street excesses by squeezing the life out of
the JPMorgan casino.
But wait — didn’t JPMorgan score a record $22-billion
profit last year?
And didn’t those Big Bad Government Regulators provide a $25-billion
taxpayer bailout in 2008 to save Dimon’s conglomerate from its
own recklessness?
And isn’t this Wall Street popinjay raking in over $20 million in
personal pay to suffer the indignity of this so-called “assault” on his bank?
“In the old days,” he whined, “you dealt with one regulator when
you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about
how American that is,” he lectured reporters, and “how fair that is.”
Golly. One reason JPMorgan has half-a-dozen regulators on
its case is because it doesn’t have just “one issue” with regulators.
It has beaucoup issues —
including deceiving its own investors, cheating more than 2 million of its
credit card customers, gaming the rules to overcharge electricity users in
California and the Midwest, overcharging active-duty military families on their
mortgages, illegally foreclosing on troubled homeowners, and…well, so much
more.
Dimon should ask himself “how fair” all that is. Then he should
shut up, count his millions, and be grateful he’s not in jail.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the
populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org.