One year after President Barack Obama secured passage of his critical economic stimulus package, the U.S. Senate is finally taking anther look at how to create jobs and repair the economy. These issues are more important than ever, but absurd Republican obstructionism and timid Democratic negotiation are once again threatening good public policy.
Not really bipartisan, is it?
As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the Senate Finance Committee reached a "bipartisan" agreement to supposedly spur job creation last week. Republicans demanded billions in tax cuts for wealthy people, but kept on caterwauling about the federal budget deficit. In exchange for $80 billion to dedicate to jobs-an extremely modest figure given the state of the labor market-Republicans asked for hundreds of billions in giveaways for the rich. And that's just to get the bill through the Finance Committee, much less the full Senate.
In a piece for Working In These Times, Michelle Chen notes that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the plug on the Finance Committee "compromise," but stripped out a critical extension of unemployment benefits for laid-off workers in the process.
The Republican uproar over such modest job figures is an economically preposterous political ploy, and Democratic cave-ins to their demands are both bad politics and bad economics. Chen notes that 70% of Americans support a $100 billion jobs bill. And we know what kinds of programs help spur employment-many of them were passed in the stimulus bill last year and have saved millions of jobs.
Stopping the Bleeding
In an interview with Christopher Hayes of The Nation, Economic Policy Institute Fellow Josh Bivens explains that Obama's economic stimulus package has worked well, effectively stopping the job hemorrhaging that the economy was experiencing immediately before Obama took office. Here's Bivens:
"We haven't returned to growth on employment ... but the rate of contraction has slowed radically. Immediately before the Recovery Act is passed, we're losing on the order of 700,000 jobs per month ... In the past three months, we're now down to something like between 50 and 75,000 jobs lost per month, on average ... it really is a stark before and after."
Racial inequality and the recession
The trouble is, the stimulus was only big enough to prevent the economy from getting much worse. It was not large enough to return the economy to serious job growth. And the brutal effects of the recession are not being shouldered equally. As LinkTV's collaboration with ColorLines illustrates (video below), the Great Recession is hitting people of color much harder, but the story of racial inequality is being lost in stories about statistical economic recovery in the financial sector. The special profiles several families of color struggling to make ends meet in the worst recession since the Great Depression, which features Depression-era unemployment rates for African Americans.
"What we don't see on TV are the [people] who never had a home or a good job to lose in the first place. These are the millions of poor people whose chance to cross the line into middle class has always been cut short by another kind of line, the color line," says host Chris Rabb, founder of Afro-Netizen.
Rabb, ColorLines and LinkTV describe a social safety net that has been shredded by opportunistic politicians. Instead of focusing on ways to guarantee good jobs, politicians since the Reagan era have demonized black single mothers by exploiting racist stereotypes in an effort to justify slashing federal supports for the poor and unemployed. The result is a fundamentally unstable economy. Our society has weak demand for goods and services in good times, and that demand completely falls apart when economic conditions deteriorate. And while these socially destructive initiatives have been described as "pro-business," the truth is, businesses don't like societies where millions of people are impoverished. They don't have any customers.
Predatory lending strikes again
The recession hasn't exactly been a picnic for the middle class, either. In an article for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll profiles the mortgage mess that Ocwen Loan Servicing created for borrower Deanna Walters. Unlike millions of other borrowers dealing with mortgage headaches, Walters wasn't actually behind on her payments. She was making payments regularly, but Ocwen was misplacing them, and charging her thousands of dollars in improper fees. Walters even paid the fees, but Ocwen eventually foreclosed on her home and sold it in an auction without even informing Walters.
As Kroll emphasizes, Ocwen's antics aren't unique. There is an entire class of companies known as mortgage servicers that specialize in deceiving and bullying borrowers out of their money. They often use illegal tactics, and as I note for AlterNet, have been systematically exploiting a badly designed foreclosure relief program from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Funding projects that will put people to work
As prominent economist Dean Baker argues for The American Prospect, there are dozens of productive programs that would put millions of people back to work-if they could just get the funding. The government could quickly and easily provide money to improve public transportation, develop open-source software, fund objective clinical drug trials and (my favorite) support writers and artists, whose work would subsequently be available for the public to enjoy for free.
Taxing financial speculation
The federal government can afford these programs right now, especially without any additional tax revenue. But if we're really worried about the budget deficit, we can always turn to reasonable new sources for taxes. As Sarah Anderson details for Yes!, an obvious place to look is financial speculation. Since excessive and risky trading helped bring down the economy in 2008, a tax discouraging this behavior could make the economy stronger and reap as much as $175 billion a year for the public.
Our economy wouldn't face troubles of the same order as those it must overcome today if so-called conservatives had not spend decades pursuing a radical agenda to shred the social safety net. The stimulus package has not spurred job growth to date because of cuts demanded by Congressional Republicans, nearly all of whom refused to vote for the bill anyway. Our economy needs a jobs bill now. It'd be nice if Republicans would show some interest in governing, but if they continue to refuse, Democrats must act on their own.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Bailout pay czar Ken Feinberg raised a ruckus last week when he announced plans to slash cash payouts to executives at seven companies that have received massive levels of taxpayer support. While better oversight of the bailout barons is helpful, the best way to change Wall Street pay practices is to adopt a set of tough, comprehensive regulations that cover everything from the executive suite to the loan department. As is, many of the executives Feinberg cracked down on will still make millions this year from stocks and other perks, while the very banks that depend the most on bailout money are spending like mad to lobby against reform.
Feinberg's new salary limits only apply to executives at Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, GM, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial. But while these new rules are an effort to reduce the incentive for executives to take big risks for short-term gains, the rules of the game for non-bailout barons haven't changed at all. Risky securities trading and unenforced consumer protection regulations still allow financiers to make a killing by gambling on mortgages and credit cards.
As Greg Kaufmann explains for The Nation, Feinberg has been barred from altering some of the most egregious bonus arrangements at even the biggest fund recipients, as the employment contracts were signed prior to the government's bailout. AIG plans to pay out $198 million in bonuses in March 2010, and none of Feinberg's recent rulings will change that. As Kaufmann also notes, back in March, AIG agreed to pay pack $45 million of the bonuses it shelled out early this year. After over seven months, just $19 million has been repaid.
The government's hands-off approach to AIG employment contracts is a rather flagrant display of deference to executives. Nothing stopped the government from renegotiating contracts for union laborers when it bailed out Chrysler and GM, as Dean Baker notes for The American Prospect.
Lest we forget, the government literally owns AIG, and would own both Citigroup and Bank of America had it demanded a market rate of return for its investment. Taxpayers injected several times the stock market values of both Citi and BofA into the troubled banks, but settled for a 36% stake in Citi and preferred stock in BofA. As Mike Madden emphasizes for Salon, Feinberg is still letting executives make several times the median household income in cash alone-nevermind stock-and it's unlikely that his move will spark changes among bankers outside the handful of companies ordered to make changes.
"Executives are still taking home paychecks that dwarf what the average American earns. And it's not clear whether any other companies will get on board with the Treasury plan unless they're forced to," Madden writes.
Congress hasn't taken any significant steps to curb Wall Street paydays since the crisis broke, but lawmakers did take two other important steps toward banking reform this week. Two different House committees passed bills to rein in the wild world of derivatives trading and establish a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). In a video piece for the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Amanda Zamora and Lagan Sebert detail the legislative battle to create a CFPA, which has faced an enormous lobbying push from both banks and the top lobby group for the corporate executive class, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Zamora and Sebert note that top bank lobbyist Ed Yingling is arguing that if regulators simply enforced the existing consumer protection laws, all of the major abuses in mortgage lending and credit cards would have been prevented. Even for a corporate lobbyist, Yingling's disingenuousness is absolutely breathtaking. He acknowledges that existing regulators are not enforcing consumer protection laws, says he wants the laws enforced, and then says it would be a bad idea to create a new agency to enforce those laws.
The CFPA won't have any mysterious new powers. It will have the same authorities on credit cards and mortgages that existing federal regulators have. But the current regulators are focused primarily on bank profits, which often run directly contrary to fair play with consumers. Yingling and Wall Street are really afraid of a serious regulator who will stand up for consumers. They're terrified that the CFPA will actually enforce consumer protection rules against powerful banks-but are talking as if all they want is effective enforcement. It's a lie, pure and simple.
On Monday and Tuesday, thousands took to the streets in Chicago to protest a meeting of Yingling's lobby group, the American Bankers Association (ABA). Esther Kaplan details the protests in a piece for The Nation, complete with video footage. The ABA retaliated against Kaplan's reporting by revoking her press credentials, but it appears to have been worth it, as her piece describes everything from citizen outrage to police intimidation and awkward banker solidarity. As Democracy Now! explains, the ABA has spent decades lobbying against rules to strengthen the economy and prevent banker abuses, and is now at the heart of an effort to use taxpayer bailout money to lobby Congress against financial reforms.
So far, their efforts seem to be paying off. Last week, one of the CFPA's chief advocates, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), co-authored an amendment significantly restricting the agency's enforcement powers. As Sebert and Zamora note, Miller agreed to exempt banks with $10 billion or less in assets from regulatory examinations by the CFPA-roughly 98% of all banks. The existing, corrupted regulators who didn't lift a finger to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis will be the people actually going to the banks and reviewing their books. While the CFPA could send along one of its own regulators to participate in the exam, the new agency can't tax the bank to pay for it, which would make it very difficult for the CFPA to keep an eye on smaller banks.
Even worse, there is nothing to prevent a giant bank like Bank of America from moving all of its most egregiously predatory activities into a series of small corporate subsidiaries. By exploiting this loophole, 100% of U.S. banks could be exempt from CFPA enforcement, including the giant banks most heavily involved in subprime mortgage abuses.
The other big piece of Obama-backed financial legislation to make its way through Committee last week had to do with derivatives, also known as the wild Wall Street securities that brought down AIG. The best way to fix the derivatives mess is to require that derivatives be traded on an exchange the same way stocks are, so that companies can't make crazy bets without regulatory and market scrutiny. But Obama only wants "standardized" derivatives to be processed through a central clearinghouse-like an exchange, except without any public pricing information. And so long as a derivative contract can be deemed "customized," it would be totally exempt from even this limited reform.
But as Art Levine notes for AlterNet, the derivatives bill actually got worse in committee. Plenty of non-financial businesses use derivatives to legitimately hedge real risks: Airlines try to insure themselves against swings in oil prices, for instance. Lawmakers agreed to exempt any contract with these companies, termed "end-users" in the financial jargon, from central clearing requirements. The trouble is, big Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms can be classified as "end-users," opening a fatal loophole in the legislation. The five banks who control 95% of the derivatives market will just conduct all of their most reckless trades with hedge funds and avoid oversight entirely.
A modest reform on paychecks for bailout recipients is nowhere near sufficient to protect our economy from banker excess. If Wall Street is going to serve any productive economic function, it has to be subject to serious consumer protection rules, and its derivatives casino has to be dismantled.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The U.S. economy has diverged: Wall Street is living high on the hog, while everyone else is struggling. The Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 10,000 for the first time since last October this week, even as unemployment continues to spiral out of control. And while President Barack Obama has taken some very real steps to help ordinary people, his administration's efforts to save Wall Street have far outstripped their support of workers.
Matthew Rothschild details these disparities for The Progressive. Regulatory reforms are moving through Congress at a snail's pace and the wreckage from the mortgage bubble is increasing. Wage cuts are more widespread today than in any era since the Great Depression, even as bankers capitalize on taxpayer bailouts to score epic profits and outsized bonuses.
"One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class," Rothschild writes. "The other economy is for everybody else."
So how can a few big banks make so much money while the rest of the economy suffers? As Kevin Drum explains for Mother Jones, the kind of banking that helps the economy is a pretty simple business of taking deposits and making loans. But a lot of what we now call "banking" really just consists of making bets on just about anything you can dream up.
"Banks aren't using all this cheap money to increase lending. They're using it to fund bigger and bigger bets in the fixed-income sector - the same sector that brought us junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, interest rate carries, collateralized debt obligations, and all the rest of Warren Buffett's 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
The banks, in other words, are gambling with taxpayer money. A host of big finance companies have reported earnings in the past week, and the numbers are ugly: JPMorgan Chase reaped $3.59 billion in third-quarter profits and Goldman Sachs is planning to payout $23 billion in bonuses from speculative trading, while Bank of America and Citigroup are hemorraging money on mortgages and credit cards. The Wall Street casino is alive and well, but anything that is actually tied to the real economy is a disaster.
According to a new report from the U.S. Treasury, lending among the largest recipients of the Troubled Asset Relief Program fell by 17% from July to August. Small businesses can't cope with the cutoff in financing. A lot of businesses stay profitable over the long-term by borrowing money to meet short-term expenses. A baker can borrow money to buy flour and pay the bank back when she sells her bread. With bank lending on ice and consumers cutting back on spending, many small businesses are failing. Thousands more will be at risk in the next couple of years while unemployment remains elevated.
Writing for Salon, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich notes that these economic struggles are not reflected in major stock indices. Stock are soaring as big corporations who don't need bank loans score short-term profits from cost-cutting, i.e., mass layoffs. Obviously, this strategy can't work for very long. When millions of Americans are out of work, they can't afford to buy the things companies make.
There's an important lesson in our current economic state-of-affairs, as Katrina vanden Heuvel emphasizes for The Nation. The bailout has not done what Henry Paulson told us it would do. To be sure, it saved the banks-- even the strongest banks would have failed last fall without extraordinary government support. But it has not increased lending and kept the economy from disaster. The Obama administration, which has extended the Bush administration's support for bank balance sheets and bonus checks, is facing a political nightmare if it doesn't show produce some stronger economic results for ordinary citizens.
"Heading into 2010, the Obama administration must put itself back on the side of working people," vanden Heuvel writes.
The administration must address two critical problems in order to restore the nation's economic credibility. Putting the unemployed back to work is at the top of the list. Anything that saves jobs will help, including aid to states to keep teachers and cops on government payrolls and tax credits for companies that hire new full-time workers.
Something must also be done about the foreclosure epidemic. Nothing underscores our economic disparity like continuing housing mess, which has been in full-blown crisis mode since 2006. Despite a multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout, foreclosures are surging to all-time highs. Writing for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz details the prolonged problems with the Obama administration's current foreclosure relief program.
While millions of troubled borrowers are eligible for the plan, which reduces monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels, foreclosures are still outpacing loan relief efforts by more than two-to-one.
Banks are dragging their feet and the administration has imposed no penalties on lenders who don't live up to the program's standards. Instead, the Treasury Department is offering banks cash incentives to keep people in their homes. Bank of America, which has received $45 billion in direct government bailout funds, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees and other perks, has modified merely 11% of the mortgages it controls that are eligible for the plan.
Fernholz offers several potential improvements to Obama's foreclosure relief plan, including more aggressive government policing of the current plan and allowing foreclosed homeowners to continue to live in their homes as renters. With up to 12 million foreclosures projected by the end of 2012, just about anything the administration does will help.
The economy is a measure of social well-being, not a stock market index or a corporate earnings statement. Policymakers need to prove they can respond to the very real needs of all their citizens, not just those with financial clout.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
As we all know, the Senate screwed us over in the spring when they took the enforcement mechanism, cramdown, out of Obama's carrot-and-stick plan for stopping foreclosures. Not surprisingly, the plans signed into law without cramdown isn't working. The big bailed-out banks are still taking homes away from people who would have been able to afford them if the bankers had wrecked the economy, and record numbers of families are going homeless.
I have an idea for helping out some of these people and cramming down their mortgage principals that doesn't require legislation. I'm interested to hear your thoughts, see if you all think this is workable and worth pursuing...
The idea, which I'm thinking of as "community cramdowns," is to organize big crowds of citizens and activists, backed by support from local credit unions and alternative banking institutions, to go to foreclosure auctions, buy peoples homes and then give them back to them. The key here is that people would have to keep out other potential bidders. This would require forming an intimidating crowd at the scene of the auction to prevent other interested investors from placing their bids. Hundreds of people, lots of signs and a message of compassion for the struggling homeowners would likely prevent most interested buyers from participating in the auction.
After the home is purchased, it's given back to the original homeowner with a new mortgage from the community credit union at the new, lower principal with fair rates that they will be able to pay back. Just like any other transaction like this, the homeowners would have to show proof of income and display under penalty of perjury that they can afford the new mortgage. This kind of arrangement should work for the same crowd of homeowners that judicial cramdowns would have worked for.
The Farmers' Holiday Association did something like this successfully during the Great Depression with farms that were being foreclosed on. Obviously, there is a lot to be worked out in how to make this work with homes in 2009. But it seems, to me, possible and like the kind of thing we need to be taking on by ourselves given the way our government is completely bought out by the big banks.
Please add your thoughts in the comments. Tell me why this is a stupid idea (or a good one, if it is)...
It's becoming pretty clear to me that Obama is a fraud, maybe the greatest fraud ever foisted upon the American electorate in history, or in modern American history for sure...
I was an Edwards supporter early on, and until he withdrew from the race and also of course Dennis Kucinich but in the end had to vote for Barack Obama so as to save America from John McCain..
Now I'll make this short and just don't have the time to list all of the disappointments and outright betrayals we've seen from President Obama and in only just 120 days..
On Thursday, lawmakers bowed to pressure from the bank lobby and killed a crucial piece of anti-foreclosure legislation, poisoning the economy in an effort to keep money flowing to Wall Street. Meanwhile, jobs continue to disappear, retirement accounts are evaporating and families are struggling to cope with economic hardship.
For the last week or so there has been a faint drumbeat of positive economic news. Consumer confidence ticked slightly higher in March, new home sales actually increased in February, durable goods orders have increased, inventories declined, and stocks rallied. Certain "market watchers" have told us to jump back into the stock market, the media is reporting signs of "economic hope", and Ben Bernanke talked about the economy's "green shoots", prompting an online debate about recovery hosted by The New York Times.
The response to this rather superficial positive news - after all, foreclosure activity increased again in February and the unemployment rate rose to 8.5% - was necessarily swift. Paul Krugman pointed to an increase in industrial production in 1931; Tyler Cowen warned about "suckers' rallies" and what will happen when Bernanke is eventually forced to hike interest rates; the new Baseline Scenario holds that "The one positive sign is that some forecasters are beginning to recognize that growth in 2010 is not a foregone conclusion"; at Vox EU economists plotted frightening graphs showing how the global downturn is in some ways worse than the Great Depression; and a gargantuan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday very chillingly sourced both the Great Depression and the current economic collapse to a consumer debt crash. In sum, the economic picture became worse for its comparison to the titillating glimmers of economic rebound.
Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced that a housing bill which could come up for a vote this week would include the "cram-down" provision, which would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of mortgages for borrowers on their primary residence (currently judges have the ability to do this on secondary residences). This is an important provision, which most economists believe will be the best tool homeowners can have for them to stay in their homes, and for lenders to agree to loan modifications. The banksters hate this idea, mainly because they know it would blow the whistle on their consistent violations of the spirit and the letter of the Truth In Lending Law, in their mania to lock as many people into mortgages as possible without regard for ability to pay, so they could sell those mortgages on as securities, and so on and so forth. This ultimately is the fault of the lender, who are clearly the irresponsible ones in the whole scenario.
Along with my friends at Brave New Films, I talked to Rep. John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee and the author of HR 200, the cram-down bill, about this provision and why it's needed at this time.
Somewhere in America, a man loses the job he has held for more than thirty years. Somewhere in America, a woman cleans out the office she had occupied for close to a decade. Elsewhere in the United States, a teen unsuccessfully tries to find work. He knows he needs to help his Mom and Dad; each toiled in the factory that closed just down the street. A young woman searches for a professional position, just as she has for the two years since she graduated form the University. Each of these individuals is not startled by the headline, Economy Shed 598,000 Jobs in January. All ask, where have the "experts," Economists, and elected officials been?
Cross-posted at Project Vote's Voting Matter's Blog Weekly Voting Rights News Update
By Erin Ferns
Partisan political operatives in Michigan are taking voter caging operations to depths that would surprise even the most cynical observers of American elections. If their plans are put into action, thousands of Michigan foreclosure victims may find that they will not only have lost their homes this year, but also their vote.
9:10 am: On to comments from Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who discusses the importance of ACORN driving their public policy leaders. "Lyndon Johnson would never have signed the Civil Rights Act if people were'nt on the streets in the civil rights movement." In South Africa and places across the world that have seen significant social change the story was the same., it was the people on the street driving for change.
This is why ACORN continues to be such an important movement for grassroots democracy and social change.
9:00am: Well I'm here again at the ACORN Convention for Day Two of the ACORN National Convention. We're welcomed by Detroit City Councilman Cockrell urging strangely for those in attendance to hit the casinos in Detroit...
---DAY TWO---
12:00pm: Rep. John Conyers, see the video here: here.
11:28 am: Congressman Maxine Waters comes on the stage.
"Whenever we get together with ACORN, Maude Hurd (ACORN National President) and I reminisce about the time they put her in jail in DC and we laugh it was raining hard in Washington and I went to try and get them out of jail, because they had been in our committee room raising hell! That's what ACORN is supposed to do," said Chairwoman Waters.
Referencing the theme for the conference"Building Dreams Across America" Rep. Waters said, "A lot of folks expect you to walk away and not have those dreams" but we need to all wakeup and believe we can make the dreams happen.
"This organization [ACORN] doesn't just talk about doing things, they actually do things."
"Too often when it comes to taking people to the street, people come to Washington and can talk the talk but can't walk the walk."
Waters thanked ACORN members for helping to move progressive movement to reach goals like extending unemployment benefits in a veto proof majority. "I don't think [the President] is fool enough to veto it. I dare him to veto it."
11:10 am: Olivia Dorsey from Philadelphia has been a member for ten years and watched ACORN grow to fight for economics justice.
"We don't let anyone rip up our community and we demand fair play."
She discussed recent actions against Jackson Hewitt, and H&R Block to stop the rip off rapid payment and to stop the worse tax preparation." Set up free community tax sites, delivered $44 million back to our communities.
"People who work hard deserve fair pay, and deserve pay sick days." ACORN is currently leading in state fights for paid sick days and living wage campaigns around the country.
Also they have been on the frontlines of the payday loan fight.
"The people united will never be defeated."
10:30 am,: Reverend Jim Wallis, author of the "Great Awakening", introduced.
"We have seen 40 years in the wilderness since 1968, its time to come out of the wildernesss."
Rev. Wallis, related a story on his recent book tour and a caller called in to say, "we need some good news" and the Rev. Wallis had some good news for the crowd, "the hold on politics of the religious right on faith and politics is over."
Not to say there is anything wrong with religious leaders but he went on to say you can't say God is on one side or another because "God is not Republican or Democrat" and religious people should stay an independent swing vote to make sure issues of justice are addressed by both parties. According to the Rev. Wallis, we need a movement with a spiritual grounding, like the civil rights movement, harking back to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's last campaign in Memphis, and the passing for Robert Kennedy and the Poor People's Campaign 40 years ago.
The number of people in poverty is unchanged in 40 years. Working mothers have to take on multiple jobs, foreclosures, food crisis, education, 9 million have one or two jobs and still raise children in poverty, these are big mountains according the Rev. Wallis.
But the Rev. Wallis says, "The bible says if you have faith the size of a mustard seed what can we move?"
In his latest book (just finished it personally, recommended reading), Rev. Wallis outlines the biblical roots of the call to fight poverty and inequality at home and abroad and the growing movement within the mainline protestant churches, the Catholic Church and a new generation of evangelicals moving to fighting for social justice in the midst of immense challenges like Hurricane Katrina and genocide in Darfur.
According to church historians says Rev. Wallis, unless your spirituality changes something tin society it can't be called "revival" citing as an example William Wilberforce who put forth his bill nine times for at the time what was a radical idea, to end slavery in England.
"Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change," said Rev. Wallis.
Breaking into electoral politics, Rev. Wallis said no matter who you support, there needs to be a strong outside force pushing the next administration for justice.
"Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy was president and Martin and Malcom were there pressing from the outside."
You can't change the politicians, you need to change the direction, and ACORN is an organization that can change the direction of the country by pressing from the outside and I have no doubt ACORN will be making their voices heard regardless of who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
9:25 am: Maude Hurd, president of ACORN, welcomesthe crowd "We need a government that will protect the common good." She highlighted ACORN's platform on health care, foreclosures, living wages and the other common challenges now hitting low income communities and working families hard across this country.
"I ask anyone here, how many more cities will have to be destroyed before we find a Government that will be prepared and Act. Three years after Katrina and the only thing that will help New Orleans is a regime change. Its time for a regime change now."
"Once there was a place we could go to to do this all at once, it was called Congress. Now its just us, ACORN and our allies fighting for justice, its time for a regime change."
In communities across the country with ACORN affiliates, people know about the organization, in their red shirts they've been known to descend on city council meetings, the steps of state capitals, the headquarters of predatory lenders making the voice of working families known.
"Mark my words, we have big shoulders, we may not win all the battles, but they have to beat us first and they are going to have to whip us good, we're going to fight them until we win, living wages, our houses, urban renewal, stopping predatory lending, voting rights, ..we are on the move.. let's get to work!"
8:15 amI'm here in Detroit as 2,000 members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now parade into the Grand Ballroom of COBO Center amidst chants of "We're fired up and we ain't taking it no more" or "We are the ACORN, the mighty mighty ACORN".
ACORN is made up of 300,000+ member families made up of low and middle income residents organized in communities across the country fighting home foreclosures, organizing to rebuild the Gulf Coast, taking on living wage campaigns and working to bring about national healthcare and end poverty. The theme for the Conference is "Building Dreams Across America" and setting an agenda for restoring the American Dream.
ACORN members can be viewed as the ground troops on the frontlines of the most pressing domestic issues in this country, driving locally and nationally for the type of just government all Americans deserve. hey do this not only by organizing their neighbors on pressing issues and taking direct action but by running one of the largest and most effective voter registration programs this country has ever seen. Check out this video to find out more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLCSnbN1lRI
Speakers at the event include Senator John Edwards; U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-Calif.); Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners; U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, (D-Mich.) and many others.
