Washington is a strange city. You’re confronted with billboards for things normal humans can’t buy, like fighter jets. Small groups of lobbyists cluster in corners of office buildings and swap inside information in hushed tones. And there are the invites. Loads upon loads of invites to seminars and open-bar events and celebrations, all for obscure reasons. Washington trades on these invites. While at a glance they can seem confusing or meaningless, they typically have an ulterior motive. You can build a story around the real and sometimes insidious reasons for the gathering. The Prospect gets a lot of these emails, and each week, we’re going to share one of them with you, and take you inside what might be going on behind the scenes.
Screenshot
Axios is a D.C. publication that seems like it was developed in a lab to annoy me, combining an almost contemptuous belief in the public’s short attention span with corporate underwriting. Its bite-sized reporting is often good, and several talented writers ply their trade there. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Axios exists to manufacture a consensus where business concerns are prominent, public needs take a back seat, and political theater obscures the realities of our quiet desperation.
Here’s a perfect example. Mike Allen, inventor of the Playbook mentality of political analysis and co-founder of Axios, is hosting a conversation this Thursday morning on “hometown” issues. Whether Mike has a hometown at all, or whether he’s a cyborg built to attract corporate sponsorship, is unclear. But the event has all the trappings of a normal D.C. panel, in this case on affordable-housing issues. You have the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee (which doesn’t really have jurisdiction over affordable housing, but whatever), the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, and the head of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It all sounds great until you see that it’s “presented by Wells Fargo.”
I’m sure Wells Fargo’s communications department can cobble together some narrative showing the bank as a leader on affordable housing. It would have to ignore how it contributed to making ten million families homeless through foreclosure and eviction after the financial crisis. During that crisis, Wells Fargo employees boasted of giving “ghetto loans” to “mud people,” pushing subprime products that predictably left people of color destitute. It hired entry-level “vice presidents of loan documentation” to forge paperwork that kicked people out of their homes, some of whom were current on their loans and deserved to stay. It hired contractors to break into and loot homes it deemed abandoned, stealing family heirlooms rescued from the Nazis in one case. Even after the crisis, Wells Fargo loaded hidden fees on mortgage borrowers, paying for delays that its own mortgage underwriters caused.
Again, the bank has probably also donated some homes to charity, or given to Habitat, or some other image-burnishing activity. That doesn’t erase Wells Fargo’s history as a deceiver of borrowers and foreclosure machine. And nobody should take an affordable-housing forum sponsored by Wells Fargo seriously.
Axios has written extensively about Wells Fargo, sometimes critically and sometimes in ways showing them to be excellent corporate citizens. But giving Wells entry to sponsor an affordable-housing panel negates this coverage. It’s a needless olive branch to a serial criminal offender, a deeply corrupting PR whitewash. But it’s standard operating procedure for Mike Allen, who’s made a career out of implicitly defending the corporations that have funded his journalism, and trading favors with the same. It’s just another day in his “hometown.”
Do you have a ridiculous D.C. invite you want to share? Email us at DCinvites@prospect.org.
