Today, the massive too-big-to-fail banks are hardly doing George Bailey-style loans at all. They are not interested in community lending. They are doing their own proprietary trading—trading for their own accounts—which generally means speculating against local interests. They engage in high-frequency program trading that creams profits off the top-of-stock market trades; speculation in commodities that drives up commodity prices; leveraged buyouts with borrowed money that can result in mass layoffs and factory closures; and investment in foreign companies that compete against our local companies.

We can’t do much to stop them. They’ve got the power, especially at the federal level. But we can quietly set up an alternative model, and that’s what is happening on various local fronts.

Most visible are the Move Your Money and Occupy Wall Street movements. According to the Web site of the Move Your Money campaign, an estimated 10 million accounts have left the largest banks since 2010. Credit unions have enjoyed a surge in business as a result. The Credit Union National Association reported that in 2012, for the first time ever, credit union assets rose above $1 trillion. Credit unions are non-profit, community-minded organizations with fewer fees and less fine print than the big risk-taking banks, and their patrons are not just customers but owners, sharing partnership in a cooperative business.

Move “Our” Money: The Public Bank Movement

The Move Your Money campaign has been wildly successful in mobilizing people and raising awareness of the issues, but it has not made much of a dent in the reserves of Wall Street banks, which already had $1.6 trillion sitting in reserve accounts as a result of the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing in 2010. What might make a louder statement would be for local governments to divest their funds from Wall Street, and some local governments are now doing this. Local governments collectively have well over a trillion dollars deposited in Wall Street banks.

A major problem with the divestment process is finding local banks large enough to take the deposits. One proposed solution is for states, counties and cities to establish their own banks, capitalized with their own rainy day funds and funded with their own revenues as a deposit base.

Today only one state actually does this: North Dakota. North Dakota is also the only state to have escaped the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a sizeable budget surplus every year since. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, the lowest default rate on credit card debt, and no state government debt at all. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) has an excellent credit rating and returns a hefty dividend to the state every year.

The BND model hasn’t yet been duplicated in other states, but a movement is afoot. Since 2010, 18 states have introduced legislation of one sort or another for a state-owned bank.

Values-based Banking: Too Sustainable to Fail

Meanwhile, there is a strong movement at the local level for sustainable, “values-based” banking—conventional banks committed to responsible lending and service to the local community. These are George Bailey-style banks, which base their decisions first and foremost on the needs of people and the environment.

One of the leaders internationally is Triodos Bank, which has local offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany. Its Web site says that it makes socially responsible investments that are selected according to strict sustainability criteria and overseen by an international panel of “stakeholder” representatives representing various community, environmental, and worker interest groups. Investments include the financing of more than 1,000 organic and sustainable food production projects, more than 300 renewable energy projects, 33 fair trade agricultural exporters in 22 different countries, 85 microfinance institutions in 43 countries, and 398 cultural and arts projects.

Two U.S. banks exemplifying the model are One PacificCoast Bank and New Resource Bank. Operating in California, Oregon and Washington, One PacificCoast is comprised of a sustainable community development bank with around $300 million in assets and a non-profit foundation (One PacificCoast Foundation). Its commercial lending business focuses on such sectors as specialty agriculture, renewable energy, green building, and low-income housing. Foundation activities include programs to “help eliminate discrimination, encourage affordable housing, alleviate economic distress, stimulate community development and increase financial literacy.”

New Resource Bank is a California based B-corporation (“Benefit”) with $171 million in assets, which focuses its lending and banking services on local green and sustainable businesses. New Resource was recognized in 2012 as one of the “Best for the World” businesses, being in the top 10 percent of all certified B-Corporations and scoring more than 50 percent higher than 2,000 other sustainable businesses in overall positive social and environmental impact.

All this might be good for the world, but isn’t investing locally in a values-based bank riskier and less profitable than putting your money on Wall Street? Not according to a study commissioned by the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV). The 2012 study compared the financial profiles between 2007 and 2010 of 17 values-based banks with 27 Globally Systemically Important Financial Institutions (GSIFIs)—basically the too-big-to-fail banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan, Barclays, Citicorp and Deutsche Bank. According to the GABV report, values-based banks delivered higher financial returns than some of the world’s largest financial institutions, with a return on assets averaging above 0.50 percent, compared to just 0.33 percent for the GSIFIs; and returns on equity averaging 7.1 percent, compared to 6.6 percent for the GSIFIs. They appeared to be stronger financially, with both higher levels of and better quality capital; and they were twice as likely to invest their assets in loans.

CDFIs

Along with the values-based banks, community investment is undertaken in the United States by Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), including community development banks, community development credit unions, community development loan funds, community development venture capital funds, and microenterprise loan funds. According to the CDFI Coalition, there are over 800 CDFIs certified by the CDFI Fund, operating in every state in the nation and the District of Columbia. In 2008 (the last year for which a report is available), CDFIs invested $5.53 billion “to create economic opportunity in the form of new jobs, affordable housing units, community facilities, and financial services for low-income citizens.”

Two of many interesting examples are the Alternatives Federal Credit Union and Boston Community Capital. Alternatives FCU, located in Ithaca, New York, is committed to community development and social change and is part of the Alternatives Group, which includes a non-profit corporation (Alternatives Community Ventures); a 40-year old trade association of community groups, cooperatives, worker-owned businesses and individuals (Alternatives Fund); and a not-for-profit organization that facilitates secondary capital investment in the credit union (Tomkins County Friends of Alternatives, Inc.). The credit union has over $70 million in assets and offers many innovative financial products, including individual development accounts—special savings accounts for low-income residents that offer matching deposits of two to one up to a certain amount—in addition to more traditional services such as loans for minority and women-owned businesses, and affordable mortgages. The credit union also offers small business development (classes, seminars, consultation, and networking programs), free tax preparation, and a student credit union.

Although its lending programs focus on lower-income borrowers, Alternatives FCU has had lower delinquency and charge-off rates than many major banks that avoid these types of customers. Boston Community Capital (BCC) is a CDFI that is not actually a bank but invests in projects that provide affordable housing and jobs in lower-income neighborhoods. BCC includes a loan fund, a venture fund, a mortgage lender, a real estate consultation organization, a solar energy fund, and a federal New Markets Tax Credit investment vehicle. Since 1985, it has invested over $700 million in local organizations and businesses. These funds have helped build or preserve more than 12,800 affordable housing units, as well as child care facilities for almost 9,000 children and healthcare facilities that reach 56,000 people. Their investments have helped renovate 850,000 square feet of commercial real estate, generate 5.9 million KW hours of solar energy capacity, and create more than 1,500 jobs.

Less Money for Banks and More for Workers: The Models of Germany and Japan

Values-based banks and CDFIs are a move in the right direction, but their market share in the U.S. remains small. To see the possibilities of a banking system with a mandate to serve the public, we need to look abroad.

Germany and Japan are export powerhouses, in second and third place globally for net exports. (The U.S. trails at 192nd.) One competitive advantage for both of these countries is that their companies have ready access to low-cost funding from cooperatively owned banks.

In Germany, about half the total assets of the banking system are in the public sector, while another substantial chunk is in cooperative savings banks. Germany’s strong public banking system includes 11 regional public banks (Landesbanken) and thousands of municipally owned savings banks (Sparkassen). After the Second World War, it was the publicly owned Landesbanks that helped family-run provincial companies get a foothold in world markets. The Landesbanks are key tools of German industrial policy, specializing in loans to the Mittelstand, the small-to-medium size businesses that drive the country’s export engine.

Because of the Landesbanks, small firms in Germany have as much access to capital as large firms. Workers in the small business sector earn the same wages as those in big corporations, have the same skills and training, and are just as productive. In January 2011, the net value of Germany’s exports over its imports was 7 percent of GDP, the highest of any nation. But it hasn’t had to outsource its labor force to get that result. The average hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) of German manufacturing workers is $48—a full 50 percent more than the $32 hourly average for their American counterparts.

In Japan, the banks are principally owned not by shareholders but by other companies in the same keiretsu or industrial group, in a circular arrangement in which the companies basically own each other. Even when there are nominal outside owners, corporations are managed so that the bulk of the wealth generated by the corporation flows either to the workers as income or to investment in the company, making the workers and the company the beneficial owners.

Since the 1980s, U.S. companies have focused on maximizing short-term profits at the expense of workers and longer-term goals. This trend stems in part from the fact that they are now funded largely by capital from shareholders who own the company and want simply to grow their returns. According to a 2005 report from the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, equity financing is more than twice as important in the U.S. as in Europe, accounting for 116 percent of GDP compared with 62 percent in Japan and 54 percent in the eurozone countries. In both Europe and Japan, the majority of corporate funding comes not from investors but from borrowing, either from banks or from the bond market.

Funding with low-interest loans from cooperatively owned banks leaves greater control of the company in the hands of employees who either own it or have much more say in its operation. Access to low-interest loans can also slash production costs. According to German researcher Margrit Kennedy, when interest charges are added up at every level of production, 40 percent of the cost of goods, on average, comes from interest.

Globally, the burgeoning movement for local, cooperatively owned and community-oriented banks is blazing the trail toward a new, sustainable form of banking. The results may not yet qualify as the Golden Age prophesied by Hindu cosmology, but they are a major step in that direction.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, author, and president of the Public Banking Institute. Her latest book is Web of Debt.

A big bet gone wrong is hardly unusual on Wall Street. It’s the nature of the beast, the kind of thing one expects from over-testosteroned speculators surfing the waves of their own monster egos. It happens all the time.

But not to JPMorgan. And not to Jamie Dimon. Until now JPMorgan was renowned for the excellence of its risk management strategies. It was one of the few big banks to come out of the financial crisis stronger than before the meltdown. While other banks collapsed or sought shotgun mergers, JPMorgan was the killer whale gobbling up the weakened predators around it. Dimon even complained mightily about being forced to take a government bailout. His bank didn’t need it, he said, and he returned the money as fast as he possibly could.

But it was his behavior after the meltdown that has really stoked the fires of pundit schadenfreude. An early supporter of Barack Obama — once even considered a possibility for Treasury secretary — Dimon’s feelings were hurt by the president’s mild anti-Wall Street “fat cat” rhetoric. He took great exception to the notion that Wall Street needed better regulation, and he fought long and hard to gut Dodd-Frank. All the while, he could point to his own bank’s relative fiscal strength as support for his superior attitude.

But not anymore. Now, one of his own employees has reminded the entire world that Wall Street needs to be protected from itself, both for its own good and for the rest of the global economy.

Finally to top it all off, there’s the nature of the trade itself — a huge bet on credit default swaps. Cue the credit crunch flashbacks! Details are sketchy, but what we know so far indicates that a London-based JPMorgan trader made a complicated bet on an index of corporate bonds that assumed that the individual corporations were likely to do well in the near future. The trader was essentially selling insurance protection on that index of bonds. If the companies did badly JPMorgan would have to pay off the buyers of that protection.

For weeks, there was scuttlebutt in the financial markets that a group of hedge fund sharks had figured out the strategy and were executing their own bets in a fashion designed to put pressure on Morgan. At the time Dimon and his chief financial officer casually dismissed the rumors. On April 13, Dimon called it “a complete tempest in the teapot.” Ooops!

We don’t know exactly what happened, yet, but in this case, it looks like the sharks savaged the killer whale.

So there you have it: the most arrogant of Wall Street’s investment bankers, a virulent critic of the notion that Wall Street’s sorry record of speculation in complex financial derivatives needed any kind of government regulation, gets brought back to earth by a taste of the meltdown’s worst medicine. As Dimon, no dummy, acknowledged on the conference call: ” “It’s very unfortunate … It plays right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there, but that’s life.”

The critique may well hold true for large deregulatory swathes of the new law — it didn’t generate massive Republican support for nothing, after all. But there’s one piece that’s getting unfairly castigated and it just happens to be something that could have enormous progressive potential. It’s the piece called “crowdfunding”: the Internet-enabled aggregation of lots of small sums of cash as way to raise capital for individuals or enterprises who would otherwise face an uphill battle getting the attention of banks or well-heeled investors.

The democratization of Wall Street could be a very good thing, especially if you’re looking for ways to invest your capital in local businesses that you value and want to succeed. The basic principle is not so hard to understand. New technological innovations can offer new ways of doing things. Last November, in my article “A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street,” I quoted the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Ian Galloway as he painted an enticing picture of the not-too-distant crowdfunding future.

“I can imagine a world not too far down the road,” says Galloway, “where you can walk down the street and pass a blighted piece of property, take a photo of it with your smartphone, click your CDFI [Community Development Financial Institution] app and have that photo geo-coded and sent to the local CDFI with your $25 investment in the predevelopment loan that would cause that property to be redeveloped.”

Sounds nice, no? But there was one major obstacle preventing the realization of that scenario. Securities regulations dating all the way back to the 1930s made it very difficult for anyone but the wealthiest Americans to invest in private companies and prevented online crowdfunding facilitators from offering any kind return on one’s investment — unless they jumped through an expensive series of regulatory hoops. Popular crowdfunding pioneers like Kiva and Kickstarter make do with donations, not investments.

The JOBS Act loosened those regulations. Now private startups will be able to raise as much as a million dollars through crowd-funding — although individual investments will be limited to a maximum of $10,000 or 10 percent of one’s net worth. The goal is open a whole new channel of funding that avoids the heavy-handed mediation of the big banks. You want to help that indie bookstore down the block expand its operations? Head to your nearest crowdfunding portal and plunk down some bucks.

But according to the critics, if you follow that urge, you’re a fool: the new legislation’s main result weill be a new generation of marks lining up to be fleeced by scamsters. Crowdfunding, writes economist Robert Reich, is just a means “by which people whose net worth is less than $100,000 can gamble away (invest) up to 5 percent of their annual incomes in any get-rich-quick scam (start-up) that any huckster (entrepreneur) may sell them…. ” Jack E. Herstein, NASAA president and assistant director of the Nebraska Department of Banking & Finance, Bureau of Securities, declares that the relaxation of rules on advertising, in combination with the crowdfunding elements, will mean that “investors need to prepare themselves to be bombarded with all manner of offerings and sales pitches. Congress has just released every huckster, scam artist, and small business owner and salesman onto the Internet.” Writing in Forbes, John Wasik argues that “although it seems to be a decentralized way of creating wealth — perhaps bypassing Wall Street — the vampire squid financiers who brought us 2008 will still find a way to game the system.”

So why won’t all that bad stuff happen? Crowdfunding advocates offer two related defenses. First, times are much different than they were in the 1930s, when the original securities regulations were written, and second: the “wisdom of the crowd” will step in to identify frauds and cheats, while promoting those who actually do deserve support.

Times are certainly different, As Amy Cortese, author of “Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing,” explained to me, back in the day, it was much harder to investigate a scamster’s background.

“It was usually some fast-talking huckster from the East Coast going out to the farmers and widows in Kansas and selling them shares in some can’t miss speculative deal,” said Cortese, “a mine somewhere or some land deal, and it was always far away and they had no way of vetting it. Now it is just a completely different environment on the Internet. People know other people, there are social relationships — I think there is just a greater level of scrutiny with a lot of eyes.”

“The best way for an individual investor to reduce the risk of fraud,” added Cortese, “is to keep it local where there are social bonds and relationships and knowledge of the market.”

Mike Norman, co-founder of the prospective crowdfunding portal WeFunder, believes that identity verification through social media and the collective intelligence of the communities that cohere around crowdfunding sites will cut through the flim-flam.

“That’s where the wisdom of the crowd really plays a mitigating effect,” said Norman. “If you are able to get a couple of hundred people to comment on a specific company and say for example ‘look I know something about zoning in Boston and this business is never going to get off the ground because the state is never going to allow this particular facility here’, and enough other people endorse that comment then you are able to use the Internet to crowdsource expertise, I think part of what is going to differentiate good portals from bad portals is their ability to actually make sure that the good information is rising to the top, rather than bad information, and a big piece of that is the ability to thumbs up and thumbs down, to endorse a certain comment or not.”

Not everyone is so sanguine. James Kwak, a blogger at The Baseline Scenario, dismissed the notion that social media could provide sophisticated consumer protection as absurd.

“Social networks and online communities tend to generate activity around things that are interesting, not things that are boring,” explained Kwak in an email. “So maybe if someone is selling equity in his project to mine gold from asteroids, then a lot of people would ask hard questions. But there is also enormous opportunity for boring fraud: Just imagine some legitimate, boring business idea, tell people you’re going to pursue that idea, and pocket their money. Given that only a small fraction of all the capital-raising ventures out there will get any serious attention, counting on the crowd seems optimistic to me.”

Maybe the skeptics will be proved right, and instead of using our smartphones to direct our capital to the local urban farming startup, we’ll end up getting an endless amount of spam on our phones trying to convince us to invest in the latest iteration of Florida swampland. But maybe this time we shouldn’t let our skepticism win out over optimism. As economist Robert Schiller explained in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Monday, not all financial innovation is bad. And if doesn’t work out quite as planned the first time round, then fix it!

[Crowdfunding] might be as well received as Wikipedia, which is constantly being updated and improved by a vast army of users. There may well be disappointments at first, but the concept can be tinkered with, like other democratizing financial innovations that have eventually delivered much good to society… Finance is substantially about controlling risk. If risk management is suitably democratized, and if its sophisticated tools are better dispersed throughout society, it could help reduce social inequality.

So don’t throw the crowdfunding baby out with all the rest of the venture-capital-and-Wall-Street-friendly JOBS Act bathwater. Give it a chance.

The answers matter. Though Wells Fargo is the smallest of America’s Big Four banks with a mere $1.2 trillion in assets, it is the nation’s top consumer lender. Behind the new advertising push lies the reality of Wells Fargo’s lending practices, investments and political contributions, which should interest anybody who banks there.

This allegedly illegal, race-based lending led the city of Baltimore to file suit against Wells Fargo in 2009, claiming it had robbed the city of tax revenue by mounting a systematic campaign to push risky mortgages on African-Americans through the targeting of black churches and neighborhoods. The suit was dismissed and reintroduced many times as lawyers from both sides battled, and is still unresolved.

Former employees have gone public with concerns about Wells Fargo’s lending policies. The company “targeted African-Americans through special events in African-American communities called ‘wealth building’ seminars,” according to an affidavit in the Baltimore lawsuit submitted by former loan officer Elizabeth Jacobson. She said the seminars steered Maryland suburbanites into risky subprime mortgages they were unlikely to be able to keep up with.

Internally the company referred to these buttered-up subprime mortgages as “ghetto loans,” according to another former Wells Fargo loan officer, Tony Pachal. He described the ways in which Wells Fargo coached loan officers to push risky mortgages onto African-American homeowners. Wells Fargo – like other big banks –profited by quickly repackaging and reselling these loans into complicated mortgage-backed securities.

Even since the subprime market collapsed in 2008, Wells Fargo continues to offer risky, racially tinged financial services. It is the only one of the Big Four banks that offers payday advance loans, which it calls “Direct Deposit Advance.” The bank argues this is not a payday loan because of additional protections it provides. But like payday loans, the interest rate of this service is in the triple digits. The Center for Responsible Lending says the advance translates into “a 261% annual interest rate over a two-week pay cycle.”

Wells Fargo is also invested in the payday loan industry. The bank guaranteed lines of credit to of six of the seven top payday lender agencies, according to a 2007 report by the center. Payday lending, which offers a small cash advance with an astronomical interest rate, often traps the poorest in a cycle of debt. In 2007, Ben Popkin of consumerist.com described banks’ financing of these lenders as “kind of like finding out the hardware store owner sells crack on the side.”

Payday lenders target black and Latino communities, according to other reports from the center. In an analysis of Los Angeles area municipalities, the geographic disparity of these lenders was stark: Pacific Palisades, an extremely wealthy community that is 88.6 percent white, has zero payday lenders. Van Nuys, a middle-income community north of the Hollywood, is 60.5  percent  Latino and has 24 payday lenders.

The bank justifies such practices by saying it wants to serve the Latino community. Latinos are an “underbanked” customer pool, said Lisa Westerman, a Wells Fargo communications representative in a recent interview. She told Salon that the average Wells Fargo customer uses under six products, while the average Latino customer uses over eight.

The bank, for example, has expanded its remittance services that enable customers to send money to family and friends in their home country. Westerman said the service is not hugely profitable; she referred to it instead as a “gateway product.”

“They tend to start out with remittances and then by coming into the bank they feel more comfortable coming in … for services,” she  explained. “It’s a great way to introduce the ‘under banked’ to the banking system.

Wells Fargo has pursued the Latino market for at least a decade, says Amir Hemmat, cofounder and CEO of SABEResPODER. In 2001 the bank became the first to accept the “matricula consular,” a form of ID provided by the Mexican government to its citizens living abroad. “It is assumed that the matricula ID largely services the undocumented population,” Hemmat said.

SABEResPODER, founded as a nonprofit in 2002, is key to Wells Fargo’s efforts to attract customers. It seeks to “improve the lives of Latinos in the U.S. by providing free printed guides on select topics of interest.”

These guides are distributed in waiting rooms, places where Latinos – and, often, undocumented immigrants – spend significant amounts of time. According to SeP, these educational materials – which have expanded to include videos and interactive displays – reach more than 8 million Latinos annually as they wait for consular services, identification documents and medical treatment. Today, the nonprofit information brand that has become ubiquitous for Latino consumers across the country still provides free information — but now with product placement.

This type of advertising works particularly well for companies looking to crack the Latino market, Hemmat said.

“You have to communicate solutions in order to influence behavior,” he explained.  “Show someone who looks like them, talks like them, going through the process and achieving success.” Accessing these customers at this stage, he said, creates “generational brand loyalty.”

Hemmat says that SeP’s partnerships with companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford and T-Mobile are just that – partnerships. He insists partners have “no editorial control” over the educational materials offered by the company.

SeP is a certified “B Corporation,” which is a social responsibility rating provided by a nonprofit organization B Lab. But there is no mechanism to ensure a B Corp’s for-profit side does not surreptitiously harm its public benefit. Learning about how to buy a car from a two-minute “educational” video that flashes over 20 different photos and clips of only Ford automobiles and dealers is probably beneficial to a Latino customer who does not know the ins and outs of negotiating a car purchase in America. The benefits of a video about banking that shows a Latino customer “achieving success” at a Wells Fargo branch are more dubious given the bank’s record of selling hazardous financial products to the Latino community.

Wells Fargo does not scant when it comes to giving money to Latino groups. The bank’s press Web page  has many announcements of scholarships , donations and political alliances. Wells Fargo has even partnered with the National Council of La Raza, the national civil rights group. La Raza is working with the bank to “beef up their internal fair lending scheme,” according to Janis Bowdler, deputy director of La Raza’s Wealth Building Policy Project.

Noting that Wells “has made some investments in foreclosure prevention,” Bowdler said, “we have not seen the final product yet but it is something that they tell us they are working on.” Wells Fargo’s partnership with NCLR includes a donation, the “lion’s share” of which goes to funding 55 foreclosure prevention counselors across the country, she said.

Is the bank showing a good faith effort to improve? Or is it seeking to co-opt its critics?

Jesse Van Tol, director of communications at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an advocate for economically neglected communities, said Wells Fargo “weathered the storm” of the financial meltdown better than other banks. The bank also has “a huge incentive to do well. They care about their reputation and brand, so they invest heavily in doing well in those areas.”

“It’s a good thing that banks are trying to serve low-income communities,” Van Tol stressed. “The question is whether or not they are doing predatory things in the process.”

Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate at Public Citizen, a D.C.-based consumer advocacy group, is more skeptical. “I’d be highly suspect if these efforts were little more than window dressing.” Calling Wells Fargo “acquisitive,” he noted that such outreach efforts “can be profound or frivolous.”

The partnerships often result in testimonials from community organizations, he noted.

“If you pay them $1,000 or $100,000, they’ll sing your praises under their letterhead,” Naylor said. He advised customers to beware of feel-good outreach efforts.

“Any bank that begins a sales pitch saying, ‘Trust me, I’m here to help,’ should cause somebody to keep a tight grip on their wallet,” he said.

Wells Fargo also continues to engage in investment and donation practices at odds with the human rights of Latinos and immigrants in the United States. According to information provided by SEIU and verified by Salon, Wells Fargo’s leadership makes political contributions to vehemently anti-immigrant politicians such as Reps. Michele Bachmann and John Kline. Over the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, Wells Fargo’s PAC, executives and directors have together given $9,500 and $12,250, respectively, to the two candidates.

As Wells Fargo recovers from the shellacking its image suffered over the past decade among minority and low-income communities in America, it continues its campaign of outreach. The bank denies all charges of race-based lending.

An aide to a Democratic senator, who is not permitted to speak publicly, said he expected all the big banks, Wells Fargo included, to circumvent new regulation by inventing creative products like prepaid and business cards that “nickel and dime” consumers.

“It’s clear that minorities are targeted for any number of these bullshit products,” he said. While the Dodd-Frank bank reform bill “rooted out” a lot of predatory practices, he said, that “doesn’t mean we won’t see a new product that on its face looks good but in 10 years’ time blows up in your face.”

“It happened in the past and it continues to happen,” he said. “It’s difficult to outsmart banks.”

Let’s start with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is at the moment clearly struggling with his natural impulse to throw every protester in jail without charges for the crime in interrupting the business of the city’s truly important people. His impassioned plea to the people currently participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest: The banks are our friends!

“The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line,” Bloomberg said, presumably meaning service workers on Wall Street, adding that “we all” share blame for taking on too much risk, not just the financial industry.

“And people in this day and age need support for their employers. If the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economic problems, we will not have jobs so anything we can do that’s responsible to help the banks do that is what we need.”

Wonkette’s Kirsten Boyd Johnson correctly notes that every single word the mayor says here is utterly nonsensical, unless you are, say, a billionaire mogul with deep ties to the financial industry.

Everyone else knows that the banks exist to make huge amounts of money by screwing everyone over, but banks are generally run by human beings (with the exception of Goldman Sachs, a Lizard Person From Outer Space operation), and those human beings have largely convinced themselves that they are very good and productive members of society. Hence, this sort of talk.

Which working-class people making $50,000 a year are the protesters protesting against, exactly? I’m not sure. The people who clean the offices of the financial firms that are actually being protested, maybe? The people who sell them fancy coffees? (This is just a slightly confused version of the old hostage argument against attacking the pillars of the vast, corrupt financial industry — if you hurt the banks they’ll hurt everyone else in America in retaliation.)

Still, Mayor Mike is to be commended for his political acumen. Desperate, terrified fealty to “employers” is a great, inspiring message. That should be his independent presidential campaign slogan. “SUPPORT YOUR BETTERS, OR ELSE.”

Diana Taylor, the mayor’s partner (in a personal/romantic sense, not in terms of business), gives an interview to Elizabeth Spiers, the editor of the New York Observer, boy real estate magnate Jared Kushner’s newspaper of record for New York’s media and real estate elite. Taylor manages to be less astoundingly dense as the mayor, but she still illuminates the mindset of the Gotham’s ruling class.

They hate democracy, or at least they hate the decisions made by voters (and who among us doesn’t, much of the time), but she is positive that everyone would see the light and support people like her (or her, specifically) if only those damned left-wing nuts and right-wing nuts who control the political parties hadn’t rigged the whole system.

Here’s the classic “I WOULDA WON IF I WANTED TO!” cry of the elite centrist who declines to messy themselves with an actual run for office, after flirting with the idea:

Last year, Senate Republicans approached Ms. Taylor about the possibility of running against incumbent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and for a while she considered it. “The Senate Republicans basically asked me to run and I thought about it, talked to a lot of people,” she said. “But then when I really thought about it, what attracted me to the idea was the race because I knew I could win that race. It was the thought of actually having to go and do that job, that was really not all that appealing.”

I bet Taylor would’ve been just as successful as her handpicked ridiculous Congressional challenger to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the hilarious Reshma Saujani.

Taylor explicitly defines herself in the traditional “centrist” way: socially liberal (she is pro-choice!) and “fiscally conservative” (she is pro-corporatist!). Contrary to popular belief, this is basically the opposite of how “most Americans” — especially genuine swing voters — actually feel. (To drastically oversimplify, your generic “swing voter” is uncomfortable with changing social mores and thinks the government should soak the rich to pay for regular folks’ schools and healthcare, basically.)

Of course, Taylor identifies as a Republican, but her platform is basically the same as that of the “moderate” wing of the Democratic party, which Barack Obama mostly belongs to, despite occasional liberal rhetorical flights. But it is those liberal rhetorical flights that Taylor deplores about him, because she doesn’t think he’s polite enough to her class:

She was even less sanguine about Obama. “I think that he’s a very intelligent man,” she said carefully. “And he has a lot to learn.”

Her voice took on a sharper edge. “For somebody’s who’s going to come in and be the great unifier—you know, that hopey-changey stuff—it hasn’t worked very well. The country is more divided now than it’s ever been. And he doesn’t appreciate other people and what they do. “

He doesn’t… “appreciate other people.” If only he knew how much the world’s top 1% had done for him!

Having given this some thought, she had a three-pronged list of his biggest mistakes. “There are probably more,” she said, but here were three. He wasn’t supporting business, Ms. Taylor said. “He should be a champion for this country and he’s not. Because that’s where the jobs are going to come from. They’re not going to come from government; they’re going to come from the private sector.” The second: Obamacare. He basically told Congress, ‘you know what? I want a health care bill, do something.”

“The last time I checked, the president was supposed to sit down and figure out what he wanted and then get Congress to go along with it. And we got a mess. And exactly the same thing with financial regulation and regulatory reform.” This was number three. “And we have a mess.”

This boilerplate center-right political analysis is self-evidently stupid to anyone who’s been paying attention to the legislative process over the last, say, 20 years (it is the “magic president” school of analysis) but it is always useful to understand how our betters think about the world. In Diana Taylor’s mind, the unemployment crisis is a result of… Barack Obama being insufficiently respectful of business, or somehow not “championing” business. The jobs will come from the private sector, once… Obama thanks them, profusely, for their goodness.

Next: Barack Obama mistakenly allowed Congress to craft legislation, a clear violation of the Constitution, which holds that Congress should sign or veto bills sent to it by the president. That’s what the Constitution says, right? I seem to have misplaced by pocket copy.

“The last time I checked, the president was supposed to sit down and figure out what he wanted and then get Congress to go along with it.” What a wonderful line! The last time you checked what, Ms. Taylor? Your email? “Doonesbury”? The Thursday Styles section?

Taylor goes on to decry “uncertainty,” claiming Dodd-Frank is somehow stopping banks from lending money to people who need money, and throws in this exasperated cry to the heavens:

“And this whole business of the FHFA suing all the banks around Fannie and Freddie; it’s crazy!” Inasmuch as Mr. Taylor would ever be inclined to pound her fist on a table to make a point, she seemed on the verge of it. “I’ve never—I mean, it just makes no sense at all to me!”

They’re suing the banks because the banks committed mass fraud, basically? It’s pretty easy to understand! (And don’t worry, they’ll let your bank friends off easy, probably.)

But Taylor doesn’t blame the banks for what the banks did. No, she places the blame where her class knows it belongs: On All of Us.

“I think it’s a problem with Congress. I think it’s a problem with the ratings agencies. I think it’s a problem with the banks. I think it’s a problem with the population at large. Everybody’s going like this” she threw her hands up in the air. “And at the end of the day, everybody’s responsible in some way or another.”

Everybody! Did you know that you, citizen, are responsible for the financial disaster and the ensuing mass unemployment crisis? You should probably call up Diana Taylor and apologize personally. You are making her so upset!

Dimon is a Democrat and former BFF of President Barack Obama, but one day Obama said “fat cat bankers” and everyone on Wall Street threw a tremendous tantrum. The president has gone on to lightly criticize the financial industry and endorse a plan to slightly raise income taxes on very wealthy people, which has reportedly driven scores of Democratic backers from the finance industry into the open arms of the GOP.

Here’s someone explaining the switch (this is an anonymous source talking to the New York Post, which has a vested interest in presenting the Democratic Party and Barack Obama as avowed enemies of capitalism and free enterprise, but I assume this is a fairly accurate explanation of Dimon’s thinking):

One insider said, “There is not a person on Wall Street, with the exception of the genetic Democrats, who would get anywhere near supporting Obama. The hostility to the administration is huge. Dimon will continue to look bipartisan, then work behind the scenes to get a Republican elected.”

Dimon supporting a Republican is only natural. Billionaire financial executives have obvious reasons to support a Republican presidential candidate. The Republican party line is that rich people should keep more of their money and the financial sector should be lightly or not-at-all regulated. But when the “longtime Democrats” who also happen to be bank executives make the switch to the Republican party, they for some reason feel the need to come up with justifications beyond material self-interest. Thus, flailing attempts at sustaining the Democratic party’s disappearing middle-class base by lightly soaking the rich are seen as horrific personal attacks on innocent bankers. This makes these billionaires seem like hypersensitive children, but that is apparently preferable to being seen as attempting to maximize their profit by directing political support to the people most likely to allow them to continue vacuuming up and hoarding the world’s wealth.

The Democratic party has been extraordinarily friendly to the interests of the financial sector since the Clinton era, but they are learning now what should’ve been obvious all along: It is impossible to be more billionaire-friendly than the Republican Party, because the Republican Party’s entire political philosophy is that government should exist solely to serve the interests of the wealthy.

Dimon’s argument hinges on the idea that it’s unfair to tarnish his industry as a whole because of the actions of a few bad apples. JPMorgan Chase, you see, is one of the “good banks,” which means it is one of the banks that survived the 2008 financial crisis and remains incredibly profitable. It does not mean that the bank is in any sense a positive force for good or a productive arm of a healthy economy, unless you think illegally foreclosing on military families and driving counties to the brink of bankruptcy while bribing officials are good, productive things for Jamie Dimon’s firm to be doing with its billions of dollars of revenue.

The moral is that we as a nation must never spook the skittish “job-creators” like Dimon, lest they leave us for greener pastures, as Dimon has left Obama for Romney.