Last week, Social Security advocates learned something they had long suspected. Arguments for cutting Social Security aren't really about economics or the deficit. They're all about waging war on social services.
The same conservatives who spent the past year senselessly screaming about the U.S. budget deficit are now demanding an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The extension simply doesn't make sense, and the policies implied are a recipe for massive job loss in the middle of the worst employment crisis in 75 years.
A New Way Forward is sponsoring demonstrations nationwide today in more than 60 cities, calling for real structural change in the financial sector:
NATIONALIZE: Experts agree on the means -- Insolvent banks that are too big to fail must incur a temporary FDIC intervention - no more blank check taxpayer handouts. (see Krugman on nationalization)
REORGANIZE: Current CEOs and board members must be removed and bonuses wiped out. The financial elite must share in the cost of what they have caused. (see Simon Johnson on reorganizing)
DECENTRALIZE: Banks must be broken up and sold back to the private market with strong, new regulatory and antitrust rules in place-- new banks, managed by new people. Any bank that's "too big to fail" means that it's too big for a free market to function. (see Mike Lux on decentralization)
Open Left's own Mike Lux is an honorary national co-chair, along with Jane Hampshire Hamsher of Firedoglake.
Unlike the wingnut's "Teabagging" movement, A New Way Forward doesn't have a whole cable news network promoting its activities. What it does have is a coherent analysis and a viewpoint about what needs to be done. One of the local organizers, Greg Coleridge, director of the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program at the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee, appeared on Democracy Now! yesterday (video and transcript here). His organization is sponsoring the protest being held in Cleveland on Saturday. Every community in America is suffering from this crisis. It is not a Wall Street crisis, it's an American crisis--and Cleveland is one of its epicenters.
A new group named "A New Way Forward" is organizing nationwide local protests for a people's bailout next Saturday, April 11, at 2 PM EDT. Many are already set up, and others are still being organized. William Greider is a strong supporter of their efforts, and an excerpt of a recent op-ed he wrote (on the flip) sketches out a useful framework for thinking about what a truly people-oriented bailout and financial restructuring would look like. A New Way Forward says:
Big bankers ruined our economy and now they are gaming the political system so they can profit even more off the crisis they caused. They must be stopped.
On April 11th, 2009, the public will come out in cities across the country to express their frustration and disapproval with how our elected officials have handled the economic crisis. No one has been left unscathed; this protest is yours.
Greider's reporting however exposed that even Stockman, doubted the fiscal prudence of Reaganomics. After the article's publication, Stockman absorbed public humiliation when President Reagan took him "to the woodshed." I trace that article as a seminal moment in my own political awareness.
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