Yesterday, I pointed out in "The Morning News" that the way Jenny Durkan handled the biggest bank failure in US history was consistent with what the journalist Jesse Eisinger described as the Chickenshit Club, in reference specifically to "the rise of corporate impunity" in the US. Like almost all Justice Department prosecutors, Durkan happened to find no criminal activity (or crime that met her exacting standards) after a 3-year investigation of WaMu—a bank that packaged and sold exotic mortgage-backed securities around the world. Billions were made on these securities, which proved to be toxic. Big, but not big enough to not fail, WaMu was sold to JP Morgan for a song, and thousands in Seattle lost their jobs.
Durkan investigated WaMu and, like other members of the Chickenshit Club investigating the dodgy banking practices that led to the biggest market crash since 1929, found no wrong done anywhere (up and down and all around).
Durkan's campaign staff felt that it was unfair for me to bring up her chickenshitting without asking her first for a response. This was unprofessional on my part. A staffer also informed Stranger news editor Steven Hsieh that I neglected to mention that I donated money to Cary Moon, her opponent in the mayoral race. She wanted that fact stated in my post (the post has been updated). She also got into some semantics about the word "news." Was I writing news? Could it be called news? What is news? Clearly, she wanted to distract the fact that she chickenshitted on WaMu by discrediting my work.
During all of this, Durkan did not mention that she pretty much called me a racist in a press release emailed to all local news outlets on September 12. She wrote that Moon and I posted something "xenophobic" and opened "the door to discrimination" on the "Slog." Those were her very words, and she never bothered to ask me for a response before emailing that press release. She just sent it out because she can do that—but I can't do the same. Clearly, Durkan has different standards for different people. Keep that in mind when you vote in November.
To make matters worse, Durkan's press release linked to a post by Seattle PI's Joel Connelly that, line-by-line, deconstructed sections of my "Slog" post on Vancouver's housing market with the view of exposing its xenophobia. But Connelly, like Durkan, never asked me for a response before posting the article. He just went right on ahead and did the thing. But yesterday, guess who I found up and down in the comments of my Facebook account? None other than Joel Connelly. He described me as a journalist of the worst sort for not giving Durkan a chance to explain the chickenshitting business with WaMu. He said I was to Moon what Fox News is to Trump. He even dropped the names of a bunch geezers who represented journalism at its ethical best.
Connelly also patted himself on the back: "When a hyper-critical Senate committee report examined WaMu's collapse, I took it to Durkan, asked why she didn't prosecute." So, he is ethically higher than me, yet I heard nothing from him before be posted this claim: "Charles Mudede of The Stranger... explicitly singled out Chinese buyers for the real estate tsunami that has hit Vancouver, B.C.." His story also connected my name and writing with racially charged terms like "Hongcouver" ("such language evokes... "Hongcouver"')
Connelly did not even bother to do any research of my work on global economics, which focuses on the problems of global surplus capital. He didn't mention that I also discussed global surplus capital as a global dynamic. Or about how I compared the flow of surplus capital from China to Vancouver with the flow of surplus capital from South and Central America to Miami's real estate market. No. He had nothing to ask me, and he did not bother to research my work on the matter.
Is this a white thing? Is this because I'm black? Different standards for different colors? There is a history of this sort of thinking in the US. It's not something that comes out of the blue. It's also no accident that the only bank to get prosecuted for 2008 crash was not white-owned. It was small and owned by a Chinese family. That was systemic. The fact no major banks got prosecuted was systemic. And maybe Jenny Durkan's effort to impose on a black writer standards that she does not follow is systemic.
