Why Iowa Isn't Occupied: Wall Street 'Scapes Whipping Again

Always idiosyncratic, the Iowa caucuses may not be an early sign of very much to come in the 2012 campaign--especially not when Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, two men who have NO chance whatever to be president, are vying to win along with Romney. (Adding to Iowa's growing irrelevance: the new GOP primary rules, which award candidates delegates in proportional rather than winner-takes-all fashion until April 1).

But the utter ABSENCE of blame being directed at Wall Street, the chief culprit of America's economic disaster, in Iowa may well be a harbinger of what's to come. It has been the most deafening of silences. OK, this is just the Republicans, who from Mitt Romney on are mainly interested in pushing the Big Lie that Washington policy-makers, especially Fannie and Freddie, were mainly to blame, as I posted on Dec. 23. But even the Obama camp is looking to spread blame around beyond Wall Street, having hired a former financial services lobbyist as a key advisor for its 2012 campaign. The industry is lying low, even as it continues to quietly gut the meager Dodd-Frank reforms.


On a personal note, it was nice today to see Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, still the preeminent book critic in America, favorably mention my book, Capital Offense, since the book does mainly blame Wall Street, blasting Washington only for its negligence in containing Wall Street. The plug came in Kakutani's tough review of Thomas Frank’s latest, "Pity the Billionaire." (Pity Tom too!), when she concluded that Frank’s “critical analysis of the causes and consequences of the crash of 2008 … lacks the intellectual rigor of the arguments that the economist Joseph Stiglitz laid out in his 2010 book, 'Freefall,' just as they lack the journalistic insights into Wall Street’s relationship with Washington that Michael Hirsh offered in his 2010 book, 'Capital Offense.'”

I doubt I'll ever make a living selling books, but it's awfully nice to be modestly praised by the reviewer who had the guts to deliver a proper comeuppance to the likes of Norman Mailer and Jonathan Franzen.