Like everything else that is good for the environment, cycling has morphed from being a mode of transport into a weird annoying cult full of pious missionaries spreading the good word. As a driver, I have lost count of the amount of times I’ve been held up by a cyclist (usually with no helmet) taking up the center of the road and holding up traffic. Honk your horn and they’ll erupt in a fury of indignation. “I’m a cyclist dammit! I’m special!”. And there’s not much you can do about it, other than wait patiently until they turn off. Or run them off the road and face jail time…

Like vegans, cyclists want everyone to know that they’re cyclists. The wear cycling t-shirts, post pictures of themselves cycling on facebook, visit cycling website, and even start their own annoying blogs about cycling and how great it is. Cyclists also hate motorists, and make a point of giving drivers dirty looks if they get too close or try to engage them in debate. Motorists are dirty, evil environment killers and are not worthy of talking to. Drive a car to work? Screw you, baby seal killer.

A couple of days ago, a cyclist was killed outside my office in DC. Why? Because he ran through a red light, wasn’t wearing a helmet, and got hit by an oncoming car. He spent a few hours in hospital in critical condition, then died from his injuries. It was a terrible tragedy, but if you’re going to cycle with no helmet and break laws designed to stop people from getting killed, there is a limit to how much sympathy you are entitled to.

In DC, it’s pretty common to see cyclists speeding through the streets without helmets (around 25%, according to the data). The capital’s bike sharing program is increasingly popular, and as a result, increasingly dangerous. Many incidents go unreported, and when they happen, the results are more often than not, pretty horrific.

Hyperbole aside, cyclists do have the right to use their bikes on public roads. In America, most funding for roads comes from general tax, and if anything, cyclists subsidize drivers, and not the other way round. Cycling is good for many reasons: It reduces congestion, is good for the environment, and it keeps riders healthy, lowering health care costs. Which is great.

But let’s be honest here – roads, at least in their current incarnation, are designed for cars and not bikes. And when they share, it can be pretty dangerous, and mostly for the cyclist. The average US car weighs 4,000lbs, while the average American weighs 177.9lbs. If they hit each other at speed, well, you do the math…

Safety issues aside, it isn’t actually all that clear whether cyclists provide much benefit to the environment when sharing roads with motorists. From EnvironmentalResearchWeb.org:

Encouraging people onto their bikes can reduce costs for all users by reducing congestion. But perversely, increasing bike use can actually add to pollution and greenhouse emissions if roads are not updated to accommodate these bikes. “Cities cannot hope to significantly increase cycle ridership without negatively impacting traffic unless they build bike facilities,” said Clarens. In particular, the researchers show that bikes can significantly slow traffic down on steeper sections of road and where roads narrow. The findings are published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).

Clearly cycling is a good thing, but not when using roads that weren’t designed for it.

I’m all for ripping up current roads and making them bike friendly. In fact, I’d even get behind banning cars in all urban city centers to make them more livable places. Bring back rickshaws, bike taxis and trams, and limit car use to suburban areas and cross country travel.

But until then, cyclists need to accept the roads as they are. If you’re going to use the same space as motorists, don’t act like you own it, because physics dictates you clearly don’t.

An ardent supporter of fiscal austerity, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn is demanding budget cuts are made elsewhere before funding disaster relief for the tornado victims in his state. Coburn spokesman Jon Hart wrote to Politico telling them that “He’ll [Coburn] ask his colleagues to help Oklahoma by setting priorities and sacrificing less vital areas of the budget”.

This is clearly political suicide for the Senator, who along with Sen. Jim Inhofe have voted repeatedly against funding disaster relief around America. Reports the Huff Post:

They [Coburn and Inhofe] also have opposed increased funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers federal disaster relief.

Late last year, Inhofe and Coburn both backed a plan to slash disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. In a December press release, Coburn complained that the Sandy Relief bill contained “wasteful spending,” and identified a series of items he objected to, including “$12.9 billion for future disaster mitigation activities and studies.”

If they remain steadfast and demand the cuts, they should be given credit for consistency. But certainly not compassion.

By Robert Parry

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has popped up on TV recently affirming a key Republican talking point, likening the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s Benghazi talking points to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which Woodward helped make famous.

But, as he joins in hyping the GOP’s Benghazi scandal-mongering, Woodward doesn’t appear to know that new documentary evidence has transformed our understanding of Watergate and especially its tie-in to the Vietnam War – and how those documents make comparisons between Watergate and Benghazi both ludicrous and obscene.

Journalist and author Bob Woodward.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on May 17, Woodward compared the administration’s development of talking points for TV appearances by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in 2012 to Nixon’s mendacious editing of his Oval Office tapes to conceal the role of his reelection campaign in the break-in at the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters in 1972.

“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” Woodward said. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al-Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’”

Then, noting that four U.S. diplomatic personnel died in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, Woodward added, “I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed.”

But Woodward appears to have been relying on Republican talking points in his understanding of why Obama administration officials decided to leave out some details from Rice’s talking points, specifically a concern that divulging certain specifics would compromise the ongoing investigation to catch the Islamic terrorist believed responsible.

At the time, there also remained genuine confusion over the connection between the Benghazi attack and angry demonstrations sweeping the Middle East over an American video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the recently released e-mails buttress then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s testimony about concerns over the possibility of harming the investigation.

By contrast, Nixon systematically reviewed tape transcripts of his Oval Office conversations to remove sections that incriminated him and his top aides in a felonious cover-up. We also now know what Nixon’s most dangerous secret was, i.e., why he hired ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to organize an espionage team in the first place.

Nixon was terrified that a missing file might surface revealing FBI wiretaps of his 1968 campaign’s sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a politically motivated case of obstruction that Johnson privately called “treason.”

In other words, the ultimate secret of Watergate – one that apparently still remains a mystery to Woodward – was that Nixon was terrified that the American people might learn that he had extended the Vietnam War for an additional four years to get an edge in a political campaign.

As a result of LBJ’s failed peace initiative, some 20,000 more U.S. soldiers died along with an estimated one million Vietnamese and countless more dead in Cambodia. The war also tore apart America’s political and social fabric.

So, to put the flap over the Benghazi talking points in the same sentence with Nixon’s Watergate crimes suggests either a complete lack of proportionality or some self-serving agenda. It’s possible that Woodward doesn’t want to acknowledge the new evidence because it would show that he missed the most important element of a scandal that made his career.

Recognition of the fuller Watergate scandal also would shatter a favorite saying of Official Washington, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” That surely wouldn’t be true if the Watergate scandal were understood to encompass Nixon’s treacherous scheme to block Johnson’s Vietnam peace deal.

Memoirs and Documents

We now know based on memoirs of principals and documents available at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, that in 1969, Johnson ordered his national security aide, Walt Rostow, to remove the wiretap file on Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage from the White House and that Nixon later learned of the file’s existence from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

However, Nixon’s senior advisers, Henry Kissinger and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, were unable to locate the missing file, not realizing that it was in Rostow’s personal possession. Nixon’s concern about the incriminating wiretaps grew into a panic after June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which detailed the mostly Democratic lies that had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967.

As those stories dominated the front pages of newspapers across the nation and the world, Nixon realized something that few others knew, that there was a sequel that was arguably even more scandalous, a file containing evidence of his campaign’s successful sabotage of Johnson’s peace talks, which could have negotiated an end to the war in 1968.

As the Pentagon Papers dominated the news, Nixon summoned Kissinger and Haldeman into the Oval Office again on June 17, 1971, and ordered them to redouble their efforts to locate the missing file. Nixon’s panic is captured on an Oval Office tape that was made public decades ago but not fully understood.

“Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman about Johnson’s file. “I’ve asked for it. You said you didn’t have it.”

Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”

Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”

Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”

Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”

Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it.”

Nixon: “Where?”

Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a file on it and it’s at Brookings.”

Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”

Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”

Nixon: “I want it implemented. … Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to –“

Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”

Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them around.”

But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.

On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.

“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. … Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”

Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”

Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”

For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place. Also unclear to historians was the full significance of the missing file. They knew that it had a connection to Johnson’s peace initiative in October 1968 but they assumed, mistakenly, that it was a file containing policy papers, not wiretap evidence.

The ‘X’ Envelope

The missing link to the story was filed away at the LBJ Library, where Rostow eventually deposited what he labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope.” Rostow transferred the file to the library after Johnson’s death in 1973 but with instructions that it not be opened for 50 years. Library officials eventually overrode Rostow’s mandate but not until 1994 when the envelope was opened and declassification of its contents began.

But the two-decade delay caused serious damage to the historical record because, in the interim, a distorted narrative of the Watergate scandal had taken shape and solidified. Not knowing the contents of the missing file – the one that Nixon thought might be at Brookings – led Woodward and other Watergate reporters to concentrate on the cover-up, not the underlying crime.

Because of that mistaken focus, an entire generation of journalists cut their teeth saying, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” There also grew an animosity toward evidence suggesting that Republicans would go behind the back of a Democratic president to undermine an important foreign policy initiative like, say, trying to end the Vietnam War. Somehow disclosing such facts was deemed not “good for the country.”

So, my discovery of the missing piece of the Watergate mosaic in 2012 was unwelcome news in many quarters, easier to ignore than to explain. However, the false narrative of Watergate is not old news; it has become a current reference point for Republican efforts to undermine another Democratic president on a foreign policy incident.

Because of the lack of proportionality – made possible by the distorted Watergate narrative – Sen. John McCain and other leading Republicans can breezily call the Benghazi story “worse” than Watergate. Then, by recycling some bad history, Bob Woodward contributes to the problem. [For details on Rostow’s “X Envelope,” see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

(AP)

UPDATE: Via Brad Blog, Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research defined specifically how the climate crisis magnified the Oklahoma tornado:

The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place.
Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage.

–
As we observe the aftermath of the horrifying tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, I can’t help but to feel simultaneously crushed by the loss and brutally angry by the disease that likely produced it. For so many reasons, including personal experiences with similar tragedy, my heart goes out to the people of Oklahoma City as they struggle with the catastrophic, practically atomic destruction in their community.

Although it’s times like these when Americans invariably rise to the occasion and affirm our commitment to our national community. We always do. Americans, more often than not, stick together and help those who can’t help themselves, whether by the collective participation in government or by personal and immediate assistance. We’re good at it.

However, this is where I can’t help but to feel a powerful anger. I’m not supposed to write this yet but as I connect the scenes of horror in Oklahoma with so many other worsening weather-related disasters, I wonder if our American community will actually band together to cast aside ignorance and political intransigence to actually mitigate the disease, the climate crisis, instead of simply reacting to the aftermath of its symptoms.

Yes, dammit, when it comes to the increased frequency and severity of these kinds of storms we ought to be immediately asking serious questions of the people who, for decades, have not only resisted action on the climate crisis, but who’ve deliberately injected misinformation and conspiracy-mongering into the debate in order to finance their re-election campaigns, while pacifying our human self-indulgence and hubris. Americans are hesitant to sacrifice convenience, and so we elect too many leaders who tell us we don’t have to because it’s all a hoax. Don’t worry, be happy, and vote accordingly. For these leaders, mostly Republicans, it’s a win-win. They always win the ignorance vote, and, with it, they always win the financial backing of corporations that are actively engaged in worsening the crisis.

The political misinformation campaign is as strong as ever. Just last week, it was reported that 97 percent of all climate scientists agree that the crisis is real, man-made and happening now. Not surprisingly, the remaining three percent reportedly had less experience and knowledge in the field. Concurrently, according to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans think the climate crisis is exaggerrated. Why? Here’s an example.

Over the weekend, Sarah Palin posted on her Facebook page a photo of her daughter playing in the snow with the following caption: “One last blast of Alaska winter today, hopefully? This is what “Grad Blast” means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace. (Global warming my gluteus maximus.)”

As of this writing, 53,372 Likes and 1,995 Shares.

Yes, because there was a dusting of snow in Alaska on Saturday, global warming isn’t real. In fact, the snow in Palin’s back yard might’ve actually been a symptom of climate change. It turns out Anchorage set a new record for the longest snow season ever: 232 days. (A slew of other records were broken as well.) Palin and similarly idiotic deniers don’t understand that a symptom of global warming happens to be the increased severity of all varieties of weather: snow, rain, hurricanes, tornados, heat, cold and so forth. They also don’t understand the notion of climate and global temperature averages versus local weather. Just because it’s cold in New York City in February doesn’t mean global warming isn’t occurring — large sections of the planet might simultaneously be experiencing record high temperatures. Science: complicated stuff for mouth-breathing yokels like Palin.

By the way, I’m only singling out Palin because she was the most recent doofus in the conga-line of ignoramuses to hop in front of the radar. Clearly the numbers show that there continues to be an American pandemic of casual nescience in the face of arguably the most threatening crisis to face humanity since the potential for nuclear war. My ongoing fear is that we’ll simply resign ourselves to the roundelay of worsening natural disasters, and, instead of doing what’s necessary to maintain a hospitable climate for our species, we’ll focus exclusively on thwarting the impact of the climate crisis with more levees, sturdier houses and comprehensive insurance policies. For instance, Chris Christie has done nothing for the environment in New Jersey, but he’s announced the construction of a series of sand dunes to protect against another Hurricane Sandy scenario when, in fact, he and other politicians ought to be focusing on both the disease and the symptoms.

Again, maybe it’s too soon to segue from Oklahoma City to the climate crisis, but as with the gun debate it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the catastrophes from the politics because the severity of future catastrophes depends entirely upon what we do today, just as the politics and inaction from years ago have contributed to the extreme weather events of 2013 and beyond. We have no choice but to dose a layer of anger with our sympathies in times like these. Through vocal accountability, we might actually make some progress. And make no mistake: there are people — human beings — who are accountable for the climate crisis and its accompanying natural disasters.

How many more monster storms will it take for us to become fed up with it all — to band together and demand a preventative approach rather than merely banding together for triage? If we’re going to break through and solve the climate crisis, we have to defeat our crisis of ignorance. I’m not exactly sure which is more daunting, but we have no choice. We have to achieve this or acquiesce to more of the same — indeed, cataclysms of ever increasing severity. We can take it seriously now before the body counts are incurred, or we can simply weep and pray after the fact as the body counts rise. Even in my most pessimistic hour, I honestly believe we can still do it.

The Tornado that destroyed an entire suburb in Oklahoma and killed hundreds of people might well have not happened if humans hadn’t been pumping insane amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Or it still might have. We really don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that thousands of people have just experienced unimaginable horror and have been left with an apocalyptic wasteland that used to be their home town. Right now, the country should be focused on the victims in the suburb of Moore, and how they can be helped.

While there is an opportunity to bolster the argument for a strong federal government to help respond to the disaster, and an even better opportunity to promote action on global warming, liberals need to hold off and wait until the panic has calmed before making a point.

It’s not that the arguments are wrong; Disasters often highlight the need for a well functioning, well funded government, and extreme weather events help make the case that rising global temperatures really do have catastrophic effects on all of us.

It is the timing of it that matters.

Republicans will be itching to point fingers at reactionary Democrats (they are already busy smearing Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for speaking out about it) in order to turn the public off of issues like global warming and funding the federal government. And it works. Republicans, in collusion with oil funded ‘research’, have managed to convince 30% of Americans that man made global warming is a hoax, and even more that government needs to shrink in size. They literally salivate over liberals doing what they do on a daily basis, as they get to look like grownups and swing public opinion in their favor.

So wait, liberals. You’re right about the federal government, and most likely right about the link between the tornado and global warming. Just keep it to yourselves for now if you want your message to actually affect anything.

To donate to the victims of the Oklahoma tornado, go to the Red Cross website here.

This afternoon in Oklahoma:

A massive tornado with winds of up to 200 miles per hour devastated the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on Monday, killing at least 37 people as it tore up entire tracts of homes, two schools and a hospital, leaving a wake of tangled wreckage.

The death toll of 37 was expected to rise, said Amy Elliott, chief administrative officer of the Oklahoma chief medical examiner’s office. Some 20 to 30 school children were missing and feared dead beneath the rubble, KFOR television reported, citing unnamed officials from the scene.

Rescue workers raced against the setting sun to find survivors in Oklahoma as the dangerous storm system threatened as many as 10 U.S. states with more twisters.

Police and fire crews pulled third-graders from the devastated Plaza Towers Elementary school in Moore, a KFOR television reporter said from the scene, and aerial video showed teams sifting through the rubble left behind.

Here’s a tip for all you wannabe media moguls: If you want to get ahead in the business, make sure you have a very successful parent.

22 year old Gus Wenner, son of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner has been promoted to head up operations at RollingStone.com after a long career in….college. Via JimRomenesko.com:

Here’s Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s memo about his son‘s promotion.

From: Jann Wenner <jann.wenner@rollingstone.com>
Date: Monday, May 20, 2013 2:52 PM
Subject: Gus Wenner

Gus Wenner (from his Facebook page)

Dear all:

[Wenner Media chief digital officer] David Kang and I are very pleased — and I am very proud — to announce that Gus Wenner, after leading the re-launch re-design effort for our website, will now continue by heading up the overall operations of RollingStone.com.

Jann

Hamilton Nolan’s take:

Gus Wenner, 22, is an amazing media success story. Just a few years ago, he was a Brown University student playing in a band with fellow celebukid Brown student Scout Willis. Today, he’s still playing in a band with Scout Willis— and also running the website of a major national magazine!…..Gus followed the traditional route to a perch atop the media hierarchy: playing in an alt-country band in college.

[Full disclosure: My father was a big figure in the entertainment industry. He did once get me a job in the video tape library of his company as a runner, but after almost getting fired for incompetence on several occasions, I left after 4 months.]

Only in the South…

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a man selling shrimp on the side of the road had his sign stolen by a man in passing truck. Taking matters into his own hands, the shrimp seller jumped on the hood of the truck and the driver took off down the freeway with him on it.

A car passing by captured the incident on camera and had the following relatively relaxed conversation with the shrimp seller, going and God knows how many miles per hour:

Man on hood of speeding car: Call the police for me!

Woman holding camera: What’s going on?

Man on hood of speeding car:He ran me over and I jumped on the hood! Call the police for me.

Woman holding camera: Ok.

While the man on the hood of the car was not apparently telling the truth (he didn’t get run over according to the police) he did seem fairly annoyed at the driver:

Apparently, no charges have been filed by any parties involved.

Jamie Dimon: Wall St Titan and major dick

Macho man and JP Morgan Chase Chairman, President and CEO Jamie Dimon is regarded as a titan on Wall St, and a dick by pretty much everyone else. Dimon is a balls-to-the-wall capitalist and unapologetic advocate of the system that makes people like him rich, and brought the global economy to its knees in 2008.

In April 2o12, JP Morgan reported a loss in a London-based division, first calculated to be $2 billion. The estimates then kept going up, finally reaching over $6 billion. Dimon dismissed the incident initially, calling it a “tempest in a teapot”, then embarrassingly had to walk back his statement and accept his bank screwed up big time.

Thankfully, Dimon might get dealt a small dose of humility tomorrow as shareholder groups are calling for the bank to strip him of his chairman job. At the bank’s annual meeting in Florida, several groups including the union AFSCME, the NYCCO (New York City Comptroller’s Office) will ask bank shareholders to approve a proposal that splits the roles of chairman and CEO, giving the chairman job to someone outside the bank. This would essentially strip Dimon of much of his power and ensure he faced far more scrutiny in his job.

But of course Dimon wants none of this, claiming the event is a “sideshow” orchestrated by unions. Dimon wants everyone to understand just how how vital rich bankers are to the survival of America.  ”I am not embarrassed to be a banker” Dimon once told a roomful of corporate clients in response to attacks on his industry.

Quite the claim given the public had to put up $12.8 trillion to keep his industry from collapsing.

Dimon, described by the New Yorker “as an overgrown frat boy” has a long history of making dick statements, making his impending comeuppance all the more gratifying.

Here’s 9 quotes from the Wall St mogul that definitively prove that he is in fact, a giant dick:

1. “That’s why I’m richer than you.”

- Jamie Dimon Speaking to Mike Mayo CLSA analyst when asked whether he agrees that customers should feel safer with banks that have higher capital ratios (like JP Morgan).

2. “I have gotten disturbed at… some of the Democrats’ anti-business behavior, the sentiment, the attacks on work ethic and successful people. I think it’s very counter-productive.”

- Jamie Dimon on Meet the Press in 2012 forgetting that his industry almost wrecked the entire global economy.

3. “You read constantly that banks are lobbying regulators and elected officials as if this is inappropriate. We don’t look at it that way.”

-Jamie Dimon in his annual shareholder letter arguing that banks have the right to corrupt the political system with money (JP Morgan spent $7.5 million on lobbying in 2011).

4. “I am not embarrassed to be a banker. I am not embarrassed to be in business.”

Jamie Dimon defending the business of taking tax payers money and lending it back to them at extortionate rates.

5. “The term ‘too big to fail’ must be excised from our vocabulary.”

- Jamie Dimon forgetting that the public bailed out the banks because the were indeed, too big to fail (and still are).

6. “Giving debt relief to people that really need it, that’s what foreclosure is.”

-Jamie Dimon arguing that banks taking people’s houses and kicking them onto the streets was in fact, a good thing for people ruined by debt.

7. ”JPMorgan would be fine if we stopped talking about the damn nationalization of banks. We’ve got plenty of capital. To policymakers, I say where were they? … They approved all these banks. Now they’re beating up on everyone, saying look at all these mistakes, and we’re going to come and fix it.”

— Jamie Dimon in 2009 at Davos speaking about the financial crisis, forgetting that his own bank required nearly $100 billion in taxpayer help to fill its own lack of capital during the meltdown.

8. “Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.”

— Jamie Dimon on the losses incurred by JP Morgan in 2012, rejecting the notion that more regulation is needed to prevent them happening again.

9. “We don’t think there are cases where people were evicted out of homes when they shouldn’t have been.”

— Jamie Dimon in 2010 responding to the investigation led by 49 state attorney generals into bank foreclosure practices. Along with several other banks, JP Morgan settled with regulators after widespread mortgage abuse was found and paid out a combined $9.2 billion to those it foreclosed on illegally.