What is self justification?
Self-justification describes how, when a person encounters cognitive dissonance, or a situation in which a person's behavior is inconsistent with their beliefs, that person tends to justify the behavior and deny any negative feedback associated with the behavior.
These are questions that I regularly consider when I am consuming media and attempting to be objective about candidates and their past. Not every candidate is perfect. In fact, none of them are.
The 2020 presidential primary is going to be filled with a great bench of qualified candidates. I have never been more excited to vote. The last time I got to vote it was for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and knocking out the IDC in NY! This represents a huge progressive shift in NY state and one of the reasons big things might happen this year.
First, and foremost — OneWest bank caused a lot of harm — to a lot of people. The 2006 crash (worst since The Great Depression) — hurt a lot of people who have still not recovered.
That’s a basic fact.
A diary on the rec list sources Dailykos comments as the source of clearing Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris of any wrong doing concerning her inaction concerning OneWest and Trump appointee Mnuchin.
www.dailykos.com/...
This is what we are discussing:
Steve Mnuchin and OneWest Bank were, according to a memo obtained and reported on by The Intercept, guilty of “widespread misconduct” in the form of over 1,000 legal violations. The memo was the result of a year-long investigation and it asserts that OneWest Bank operated to intentionally boost foreclosures. The Campaign for Accountability called for a federal investigation of Mnuchin and OneWest Bank claiming they used “potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes.”
Yet despite internal memos explicitly mentioning numerous prosecutable offenses by Mnuchin and co., then California Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to prosecute.
She’s never given an explanation for her decision and Mnuchin later donated $2,000.00 to Harris’ campaign. It was his only donation to a democratic candidate.
Her only direct acknowledgment of the memo uncovered by The Intercept was when speaking to The Hill the day after the story was published. It was a non-answer that simply restated already established facts:
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made[.] [W]e pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”
theintercept.com/...
In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.
But Harris’s office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case.
“After years peddling the kind of dangerous mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the economy, Mnuchin swooped in after the crash to take a second bite out of families by aggressively — and sometimes illegally — foreclosing on their homes,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement last month.
Mnuchin, the former CEO of OneWest, was already facing challenges in his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings on account of his bank’s ruthless foreclosure practices, ranging from locking out one homeowner during a Minneapolis blizzard to foreclosing on another over a 27-cent payment shortfall.
OneWest and many other banks hurt a lot of people.
Senator Kamala Harris would be better served in the upcoming primary by having supporters who will acknowledge her inaction was was a mistake. Finding empathy, acknowledging you were wrong, and then learning from it are hallmarks of a great progressive leader.
It is when we dig in and in engage in self justification to the point of saying no crimes were committed during the biggest financial melt down since the Great Depression in order to make a single point about a candidates past — not as glaring — that we engender feelings of animosity in others.
This will lead to another primary schism. There are those that think admitting any wrong in ones past is tantamount to political suicide. That’s a Trumpian view.
I’ve had the last year or so to warm up to Senator Harris — and I’ve liked her more and more with her actions and words (especially during the SCOTUS farce).
Senator Warren is my first pick and it’s an easy one for me given that I trust she has a good idea about tackling inequality in the U.S. I don’t have to imagine she is going to instantly “look forward, not backward” or have her justice department declare banks are TBTF.
Senator Harris is my second pick but I still have deep reservations given OneWest, and the larger problem that Bush (younger & Sr) sent more white collar criminals to jail after significantly lesser events.
Her supporters and those who have declared for her will win more people over by saying:
*She should have gone after OneWest. I’m confident she will hold Trump and Wall Street accountable NOW. (then given reason)
I’m thinking about this from an outcomes perspective.
I hope others will too.