“Which side are you on?” That question, posed by Florence Reece in a pro-union song she wrote in 1931, echoes across the country today, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and demonstrations like Take Back the Capital this week. Millions of Americans caught in the drip of an economic crisis caused by Wall Street’s actions, who have waited years for relief as they’ve struggled with unemployment, foreclosures, and financial devastation are speaking with one voice, demanding of our elected leaders an answer to that most relevant question: “Which side are you on?”
Yesterday, Senate Republicans answered that question once again. They stand with Wall Street. They stand with the one percent.
It seems ages ago (Doesn’t it?) that progressives were pushing hard to get Elizabeth Warren appointed to head her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We know how that worked out. Despite our best efforts, Warren didn’t get the appointment and moved on to become Senate candidate Warren, challenging Scott Walker for his Senate seat.
When it became clear that Senate Republicans would block Warren’s appointment, no matter what she or anyone else said or did, President Obama appointed Richard Cordray. The response from progressives was mixed. Many of us were, understandably disappointed that Warren didn’t get the appointment. Some viewed it as a betrayal. Some viewed it as a chance to for the CFPB to fulfill its vitally important mission.
“To whom much is given, much is required.” As he stood with the Progressive Congressional Congress to present the People’s Budget yesterday, Democratic Minority Whip Hank Johnson echoed the words of John F. Kennedy as he compared the caucus’s budget to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Kennedy borrowed those words from the Bible, Luke 12:48: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. The People’s Budget stands in stark contrast to conservative budget proposals that turn Kennedy/Luke quote on its head: “To whom much is given, not much is required.
In the metro-D.C. area, if it isn’t electricity it’s the water. The wind shifts direction or a simple summer storm is all it takes to knock out one or the other — and, many times, both. But we don’t just have a problem with power. Our biggest challenge is the politics of powerlessness, and the problems it leads us to steadfastly refuse to solve.
Like any parents, we want the best possible future for our children, and we’re doing all we can to prepare them to attain it as our parents did for us. Being the grandson of sharecroppers and the son of 1st generation Polish immigrants, to us that means getting an education, being able to land a “good job” with the possibility of moving up the economic ladder. But the current rate of long-term joblessness, and Washington’s apparent lack of political will to remedy it make me wonder if our elected officials see long-term unemployment as a crisis to be averted or “the new normal” — a “correction” that must simply be accepted.
It’s something that’s true of many Americans, whether employed or unemployed. But it has a special resonance for Americans who have worked hard, and are wiling to work, but face a jobless recovery. These are Americans whose needs and concerns will get special attention during a jobs plenary at America’s Future Now! in Washington starting June 7.
OK. Maybe just a Barnum world — P.T. Barnum, that is. This legendary promoter of famous hoaxes comes to mind once again as I watch the various congressional hearings related to the financial crisis, or read of the testimony from those hearings. Why? Because the most famous thing he probably never said — “There’s a sucker born ever minute” — could be, and perhaps is, the unofficial motto of Wall Streets banksters and the conservatives (plus some Democrats who should have known better) that aided and abetted them.
And, no, it hardly matters that Barnum is said to have denied uttering the famous words. The phrase was coined in connection to Barnum’s role in the Cardiff Giant hoax, an amusing bit of history about a battle between hoaxers and hucksters who didn’t much care if their customers knew what what they were paying for or got what they were paying for — so long as the scam paid off, and the scammers got paid in the end.
Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.
So let’s begin.
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters – the black protesters – spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.
Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.
Well, maybe the president is a bigger person than I am. Where I come from, we don’t just hold grudges. We nurse them and watch them grow.
And, like a lot of Americans, I do begrudge the likes of Dimon and Blankfein their multi-billion dollar bonuses. Not because I “begrudge people success or wealth,” but because I begrudge anyone their ill gotten gains — especially as others are made to support them and suffer the consequences of their actions.
Besides, if I can hold bear a grudge against a person, why can’t bear a grudge against corporations? After all, aren’t they people too?
Mike Elk couldn’t have been more right in his thinking about what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have thought of the Teabaggers, Birthers, etc. He would have seen that those faces that at first glance seem twisted in anger are really twisted in pain. He would recognize those faces as well as the source of the fear and anger distorting them.
It’s not about adopting their politics, compromising our own, or even tolerating their tactics. It’s about reclaiming “We” — The same “We” that Dr. King and civil rights workers sang about, and that I remember singing about myself in church, on the occasions when we sang “We Shall Overcome.”
If you’re tired of hearing about the recovery you can’t feel, while seeing headline after headline about how well Goldman Sachs is doing — or who’s getting big bonuses on Wall Street now, while the rest of the country is facing the grim reality of long-term joblessness — you might want to come to Chicago on October 25 – 27, where thousands of Americans will “come together on the streets of Chicago to demand a banking system that puts the American people first and a Congress that makes it happen!”
If you’re enraged that the same banksters we bailed out are doing everything in their power to stop much-needed consumer protection, and you’re ready for a showdown, come to Chicago and tell the banksters “No!”
Or what would possess John Thain to hand out nearly $4 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives, just as Merrill was being sold to Bank of America, and after taxpayers ponied up $20 billion to cover what would have been a losing bet for Bank of America?
Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that it not because they’re “stupid,” as Rep. Barney Frank said. It’s not because “They don’t get it,” as Sen. Clair McCaskill said. These folks may have cooked up exotic financial instruments that even they didn’t understand well enough to keep from wrecking the economy, but the know they know what they’re doing. They “get it,” as far as the consequences are concerned. They just don’t care.
Actually, it’s bullies that kick sand your face. But that’s OK. Not all idiots are bullies, and not all bullies are idiots. But some idiots are bullies and some bullies are idiots. It’s when bullies and idiots team up — with the latter doing the former’s bidding — that we’re in real trouble. I’d say hold on to your lunch money, but they’ve already got it.
How better to describe the way we were herded, cajoled and threatened into coughing up a bailout package. Remember it had to be passed now, now, now? Or else something terrible would happen to us? As a result, we’re paying their bonuses.
If, as Sen. McCaskill said, congress had no idea that these firms would turn around hand out bonuses, buy jets, schedule junkets, etc. after receiving bailout funds, it’s because they didn’t know who they were dealing with anti-socials and narcissists will turnaround and do just that. Because it’s true that they don’t get it, and they don’t care.
…This may very well be the problem with the Wall Streeters and why they “don’t get it.” They have an utter lack of awareness about any connections to the rest of us, even when the rest of us are suffering an economic downturn brought on by the very sector that so richly rewards them even as many of us are hurting.
And when confronted with it, they blink with wonder and ask “What does that have to do with me?”
And when confronted with their outsize compensations juxtaposed against the painful economic reality most Americans are living with, they blink with wonder and say “But I deserve it.” And mean it.
And when confronted by the above, we give it to them.
Now, what does that say about what’s wrong with them? And what’s wrong with us?
We’ve spend trillions to stretch a safety net beneath these, the wealthiest Americans. We were told disaster would ensue if we didn’t. We are doing so even as the the last thread of the social fabric that was the safety net for the rest of us, is about to snap.
According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.8 percent. But those statistics understate the severity of the jobs crisis. The official statistics do not include the 875,000 Americans who have given up looking for work, even though they want jobs. When these “marginally attached” workers and part-time workers are added to the officially unemployed, the result, according to another, broader government measure of unemployment known as “U-6,” is shocking. The United States has an unemployment rate of 17 percent.
And even this may understate the depth of the problem. By adding the 3.4 million Americans who want a job but have not looked for one in over a year, businessman, philanthropist and Obama advisor Leo Hindery Jr. infers an actual unemployment rate of 18.8 percent. In other words, nearly one in five Americans is unemployed or underemployed.
The sound you hear is the sound of the social fabric in America rotting and beginning to snap. Thanks to the unemployment insurance system adopted during the New Deal years, and thanks in part to the stimulus that the Obama administration and Congress passed earlier in the year, we do not have hordes of out-of-work Americans standing in line at soup kitchens and riding the rails from town to town. Even so, the invisible decay of America’s social order is just as real as the highly visible decay of abandoned McMansions in new developments that are turning into ghost towns across the continent.
The economy is now coming up short by 9.4 million jobs, including 6.9 million positions that employers have eliminated and 2.5 million jobs that were needed to absorb new workers but were never created.
And unemployment is on the rise, jumping from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August. For several demographic groups, the unemployment rate is already in double digits, including men (10.1 percent), Hispanics (13 percent), African-Americans (15.1 percent) and teenagers (25.5 percent). In all, 14.9 million workers are now jobless, of which fully one-third have been out of work for more than six months, the highest level of long-term unemployment by far in any post World War II recession. There are now nearly six workers available for every job opening, up from 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007.
Worse, hiring is not expected to rebound anytime soon, even if overall economic growth resumes this year. Employers are likely to fill any additional workloads by adding hours to truncated workweeks and ending worker furloughs. Wage gains, which are always repressed when jobs are scarce and unemployment is high, will be an even longer time coming as employers restore pay cuts put in place during the recession before giving raises.
Without job growth and pay raises, consumer spending will not revive substantially because alternative sources of spending power — home equity and credit cards — are largely tapped out. And without an upsurge in spending, businesses will not add workers, and so on, in a decidedly unvirtuous cycle.
If you want to speak out against any of the above, and join your voice with others demanding accountability and commonsense financial reform NOW. Come to Chicago next week, and speak out!
From the beginning of this economic crisis, policy makers seem to have forgotten (or perhaps learned too well) a basic economic rule. It’s one I used to have paraphrased in a sign on my desk in a previous job: You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have quality. Pick any two.
Put another way: You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get. Judging from the sizes of their campaign contributions, the ever-rising cost of the bailout, and the distressing lack of accountability (so far), the financial sector knows this well. From the deregulation and lack oversight that got us here, to the trend towards returning to something like business as usual, they’re getting what they paid for.
OK. I plead guilty to this When I got my iPhone 4, I gave Parker my old iPhone 3G (with parental controls in place, phone service deactivated, everything restored to factory settings, history wiped clean, and internet access and the App Store on lockdown) to play games on, etc. But does that make me a “Scrooge”? Puh-leeze. An eight-year-old needs the latest iPhone?
It’s happening again. I’m getting that “I’ve got a book in me, if I can make time to write it,” feeling. Of course, that “if” is the big, and the deciding, factor.
It’s not that I don’t trust the guy, and maybe the whole Weinergate thing has me a little gun shy, but am I the only who thinks Obama tweeting for himself may not be the best idea?
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