Open Left - economy

Trumka: Jobs Crisis-Fix It Now

Seth D Michaels — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:52:53 GMT

Today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other leaders joined together to call for urgent action to create jobs and rebuild the economy.

In a live webcast panel discussion, the consensus was clear: Without quick action, an entire generation could be mired in economic turmoil. The nation can, and must, put people back to work-while addressing critical needs for the future of our communities.

The scale of the jobs crisis is obvious: Since the beginning of the recession, more than 8 million jobs have been lost. The official unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, with more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed. These figures are even more severe among African American and Latino communities. Young people are at risk of permanently stunted opportunity, and the jobs crisis is rebounding throughout the country with increased hunger and poverty, massive numbers of home foreclosures and diminished access to health care.
In addition to Trumka, participants in today's discussion included NAACP President Benjamin Jealous; National Council of La Raza (NCLR) President Janet Murguia; Leadership Conference on Civil Rights President (LCCR) Wade Henderson; and Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. EPI President Larry Mishel moderated the conversation, which Jealous called the beginning of a national human rights movement for economic opportunity.

Henderson said the nation's jobs crisis requires urgent attention-because it's not just an economic imperative to put people to work, it's a moral responsibility:

Make no mistake, for us this is the civil rights issue of the moment. Unless we resolve the national job crisis, it will make it hard to address all of our other priorities.

Trumka laid out five critical points that must underlie a new jobs agenda:

1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
2. Rebuild America's schools, roads and energy systems.
3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
4. Fund jobs in our communities.
5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.

Trumka said that the coalition will push the White House and Congress to act on these recommendations immediately, starting at President Barack Obama's Dec. 3 Jobs Summit.

We can not afford to do nothing, Trumka said, and we can't afford to go back to an economy built on stagnant wages, inequality and consumer debt. We need to create good jobs that support families and communities.

Murguia added that we need specific programs to make sure all communities, especially those that have been disadvantaged, get the opportunities, training and assistance they need.

There are people who need work in our communities and there is work to be done rebuilding the country, Bhargava said. By investing now, we can make real, needed improvements and we can give people the jobs they need. But to do that, Bhargava said, we need to break through the "shell of complacency" around too many legislators in Washington. We need to organize communities around an economic agenda that really helps them.

All of the leaders present affirmed their commitment to building grassroots pressure on Congress to act now on job creation. Families across the country know we need solutions that are at the scale of the serious problems we're facing and, Trumka said, they will be looking to see whether lawmakers are listening to them or just acting on behalf of Wall Street. Trumka criticized the fact that small minorities in the Senate can hold America hostage by blocking much-needed change and promised that union members and Working America members would fight hard against elected officials who are obstructing progress.

The way things are is not the way they have to be, Trumka said. We need action now to create jobs, and we have the resources to do it.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

Weekly Audit: Saying 'No' to Corporate America

The Media Consortium — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:03:38 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

By proposing financial reforms that won't curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don't demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.

The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, "a David and Goliath fight." It's basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.

Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the "so-called free enterprise system"-you know, the "free market"-in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.

In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.

With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we're not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We're watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government's top priority is securing profits for corporate America.

"The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market," Wedel writes.

GRITtv's Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation's government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.

"I don't think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It's the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let's face it, they financed Obama's campaign," Perkins says.

The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D'Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn't pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.

One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we're seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem-if the economy can't keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we'll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.

All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation's resources at the people's expense.

In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.

"A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference-the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again," Benen writes.

And the only argument against this plan is that we "can't afford it." That is-the government's fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can't spend money to help people in real economic trouble.

But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about "fiscal responsibility." If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.

"Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else," Hayes writes. "Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is, 'I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.'"

The government has to start saying 'no' to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.

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.

Trumka to Launch Jobs Initiative Tomorrow

Seth D Michaels — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:58:06 GMT

Tomorrow morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will announce a major new initiative to create and save jobs.

(Watch the live webcast at aflcio.org/createjobs starting at 9 a.m.)

Trumka will be part of a noted panel in "Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis" at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
Other panelists, representing constituencies particularly hard hit by the current economic crisis, are Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change; Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP; and Janet Murguía, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. Lawrence Mishel, EPI president, will moderate.

The Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis and Trumka's announcement come as President Obama is preparing for the December jobs summit on job creation. According to the latest data, the official unemployment rate of 10.2 percent rises to 17.5 percent when the underemployed are included.

Tune in tomorrow at aflcio.org/createjobs for this critical conversation on the future of our economy and jobs, or follow us here on Twitter.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

The stimulate China's economy, cause Democrats to lose act of 2009

Chris Bowers — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:43:38 GMT

As posted last night in Quick Hits by Daniel de Groot, the Obama administration want to use leftover TARP funds to pay down the debt. I guess the idea is that China's economy needs more stimulating than our own:

The Obama administration, under pressure to show it is serious about tackling the budget deficit, is seizing on an unusual target to showcase fiscal responsibility: the $700 billion financial rescue.(...)

The Treasury Department said about $210 billion in TARP funds remains unspent, including about $70 billion returned from financial institutions. A further $50 billion is expected to be repaid in the next 12 to 18 months.

This is a terrible, terrible idea. There are times when paying down the debt is prudent--like the early part of this decade--but right now we need that money to create jobs. Immediately.

Paying down the debt now would just send the $210 billion left in the TARP funds to China and other countries to who we owe money. A much better use would be for it fund a $200 billion jobs package that Congress is looking to move over the next one to three months.

Unfortunately, the administration's idea of using the remaining bailout money to pay down the debt is already catching on with Blue Dogs and Republicans. Anti-health care, pro-coathanger, Representative Larry Kissell has introduced, and is gathering cosponsors for, a bill in Congress to match the Obama administration's plans. Here is a Dear Colleague letter he is circulating in the House right now, trying to gather more co-sponsors on top of the four Republicans, four Blue Dogs, and freshman Ann Kirkpatrick who have already joined up:

(The letter Kissell is sending to other House members can be found in the extended entry.)

Support the Repaying the American Taxpayer Act of 2009

Co-Sponsors(9)*denotes original cosponsor: Bright, Foxx, Griffith, Coble, Lummis, Myrick, *Kirkpatrick, Minnick, Kratovil

Dear Colleague:

When the first allocation of hundreds of billions of TARP dollars was used to buy preferred stock in hundreds of financial institutions, our constituents were assured this was necessary in order to free up lines of credit for everyday Americans who needed to buy a car, a home, or pay their bills. Instead these banks horded the funds rather than put them out on Main Street as available credit. Many continued to award obscene bonuses to their executives in order to "retain" their expertise. Meanwhile, those everyday Americans who were assured their tax dollars were going to a good cause have continued their struggle to get a small loan or a credit card.

I was not in Congress when the first half of TARP funds were voted on but I joined a majority of my colleagues in opposing the second half of funds. Due to the initial lack of oversight and accountability, TARP has been a mismanaged program from the beginning. Furthermore, Americans were sold on the promise that revenues from the sale or return of TARP related assets would be applied toward the public debt. What the American people were not told was that as long as the U.S. is running a deficit, the revenues from TARP related funds would simply return into the Treasury's general fund. That is why I introduced H.R. 3020, the "Repaying the American Taxpayer Act of 2009."

Specifically, H.R. 3020 would amend the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to require revenue from the sale of TARP related assets to be directly paid toward the national debt while simultaneously reducing the debt ceiling for every dollar of TARP money returning to Treasury. Only by lowering the debt ceiling accordingly can Congress truly prevent Treasury from turning around and immediately borrowing more money. This bill would also insert language requiring that dividend payments received off the preferred stock the government owns in public companies be treated under the same rules. Finally, this bill would require the Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) to include in the SIGTARP Quarterly Report to Congress, a section outlining confirmation of these transactions and subsequent lowering of the debt ceiling. I understand enactment of this bill may require Treasury to return to Congress earlier to ask that the debt ceiling be raised; however, I believe money for the purchase of TARP related assets was money that never should have been borrowed in the first place. Accordingly, it shouldn't be treated as revenue when it returns to the Treasury's general fund.

If you would like to cosponsor this bill, please contact XXXXXX at XXXXXX or via email at XXXXXXXX. I look forward to your support.

Sincerely,
Larry Kissell
Member of Congress

Yeah, that's right, support hardworking Americans by sending their tax money to China, instead of to create jobs. Good friggin' plan.

And that's not all! In the extended entry, I discuss how the White House is pushing for either spending freezes or massive cuts next year, because apparently they are more concerned with avoiding labels than with actually creating jobs. More in the extended entry

Combined with proposed spending freezes and / or cuts, using the remaining bailout money to pay down the debt would be a disastrous move by an administration more concerned with avoid labels than anything else:

The White House is in the early stages of considering what bigger moves it might make for next year's budget. The Office of Management and Budget has asked all cabinet agencies, except defense and veterans affairs, to prepare two budget proposals for fiscal 2011, which begins Oct 1, 2010. One would freeze spending at current levels. The other would cut spending by 5%.(...)

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is pressing for substantial spending cuts to go with any tax increases to try to avoid the "tax and spend" label that has bedeviled Democrats, according to administration and congressional officials.

Avoiding labels will not help Democrats at the ballot box one iota. Only stimulating our economy and creating jobs will do that. FDR and Democrats did not win landslide victories in 1934 and 1936 by engaging in a Hoover-like attempt to freeze spending and pay down the debt during a time of crisis. They spent, and spent big--resulting in Asian Tiger-like a GDP growth of 10.9% in 1934, 8.9% in 1935, and 13.0% in 1936.

If you want to know why Democrats and FDR did so well in 1934 and 1936, it is because they delivered results. Huge, huge GDP growth. the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are not delivering anything close to that.

This is more than a fight over another piece of legislation. Determining what to do with the leftover TARP funds is going to be a fight for the survival of not only our economy, but of the political future of the Democratic Party. The remaining $210 billion in TARP needs to be spent to fund a $210 billion jobs bill, or else the entire party goes down in flames as the result of meager job growth next year.

Don't repay Chinese bankers with the $210 billion. Give Americans jobs.

The next big fight: a $200 billion jobs bill paid for with TARP money

Chris Bowers — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:30:00 GMT

In the next one to three months, Congress will go forward with a $100-$200 billion "jobs bill." In short order, it will become the biggest political story in the country, as well as an enormous political opportunity for progressives.

The reason it is such a big opportunity is because the plan is completely unformed. In a conversation last night with a source on Capitol Hill, I learned the following:

Right along with Harry Reid in the Senate, the Democratic leadership in the House is also pursuing this idea. So, its going to happen.
The Democratic leadership does not currently know what we will be in the bill, and are actively soliciting suggestions of almost any sort from the caucus membership. So really, start making suggestions.
It could range in size from $100 to $200 billion, which is a wide range. Again, we can play a role in determining how big it becomes.
Some members of Congress, including the leadership, are open to using TARP bailout money (still $317 billion of it left) as the primary funding mechanism. This would make the bill a huge political winner, as the bailout is directed away from Wall Street and toward Second Street (which is actually the most common street name in the United States).
It will happen quickly. In the House, it might even happen before the month long, December-January holiday break, as members look to tell their constituents they have passed a jobs bill as quickly as possible.

More in the extended entry)

No groups are really mobilized to fight on this bill, so the playing field is wide open. If we move quickly, we can play a role in what will effectively become a smallish, though still very needed, second stimulus.

There is certainly a possibility for a whip action here--calling up members of Congress and asking them if they would want the bill to be funded with the leftover TARP money. And there is also a possibility of whipping on some smart, smaller uses for the money that bubble up from online conversations.

Lastly, there is a real element of desperation to this fight. This jobs bill will be pretty much the last chance Congress has to turn the economy around before the 2010 midterms. If Democrats don't pass a sizable bill with an immediate impact on the economy, whatever small role that progressives currently have in the governing might be entirely wiped away in less than a year.

There will be opposition, of course. Many New Dems, along with elements in the Obama administration, won't want to take any money away from Wall Street. Republicans will just demand tax cuts. Blue Dogs will be hard to predict, given that they have become very anti-bailout, but some might demand the money be used to pay down the debt.

Whatever the opposition, this is a fight that Open Left is going to engage, even as we continue our ongoing campaigns for the public option, reproductive rights, and marriage equality. Any thoughts you have on how to be effective in this fight are more than welcome--this really is brainstorming time. And, since our fundraiser is still ongoing, any contribution you make to Open Left will help start up this fight, too..

Weekly Audit: The Unemployment Epidemic

The Media Consortium — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:53:20 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

On Friday, we learned that the U.S. unemployment rate officially broke 10% for the first time since the early Reagan years. This is about as bad as it gets for a modern, developed economy. No economic force takes a heavier toll on a society than rampant joblessness, and few personal setbacks take a deeper psychological toll than being out of a job for months on end. If Congress and President Obama don't do something to create jobs fast, both are going to pay a hefty political price when next year's mid-term elections roll around.

So how bad is it? In October, the economy shed 190,000 jobs and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.8% to 10.2%. That percentage is the most optimistic reading of the labor market in Friday's report. If you take people who want full-time jobs but are settling for part-time work, then add those who have simply given up on finding a job, the rate is a massive 17.5%.

The problem is not that either Obama or Congress have failed to act on the problem, but rather that they have not done enough. When Congress was moving on Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package back in February, we were shedding upwards of 700,000 jobs a month. So the stimulus package has worked-it's probably helped keep unemployment from jumping to 12% or 13%. But this is cold comfort to the nation's 15.7 million unemployed, 5.6 million of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

As Robert Reich notes for Salon, Obama's economic advisers dramatically underestimated how bad things would get when they crafted the stimulus package. As a result, the package was too small and unemployment has remained high. Obama needs to go back to Congress and demand more economic relief funding. Republicans will continue to whine about government spending to excuse their obstructionism, of course, and conservative Democrats will probably start sweating, too-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) helped cut back the original stimulus bill in February to help boost his "centrist" credentials. This of course had nothing to do with economics or policy. Government spending is what saves the economy in a recession. In a downturn as severe as this one, it takes a lot of spending to turn things around.

But as Reich notes, Nelson and his cohorts will have a lot more to worry about in the 2010 elections if the economy doesn't actually improve over the next year. And few economists think it will. The Congressional Budget Office, which is run by a conservative economist named Douglas Elmendorf, projects an average unemployment rate of over 10% in 2010. That's worse than this year. Democrats from swing districts need to support economic relief packages. Continued economic malaise will severely hurt them at the polls.

Congress finally took some action on joblessness on Thursday, voting to extend unemployment benefits for an additional 14 weeks. If we want the economy to recover, we need people to spend money, but if people aren't working, they don't have any money to spend. So the government cuts people checks to help them get by and stimulate a demand for goods and services. Even most conservative economists thinks this is a good idea.

But as Kevin Drum notes for Mother Jones, the soundness of the policy did nothing to prevent Republicans from fighting the effort to extend benefits tooth-and-nail. The bill had to overcome three-that's right, three-filibusters in the Senate from Republicans, who held up the bill for weeks for no apparent reason. In a blog post for The Washington Monthly, Steve Benen explains the economic cost of this obstructionism: In the weeks of delay, 200,000 people looking for work stopped receiving benefits.

But extending unemployment benefits will not solve our economic woes. The total program is just $2.4 billion, a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars the government put up to salvage Wall Street. $2.4 billion is not enough to reverse the unemployment trend. Cutting the checks certainly helps, but as Matthew Rothschild emphasizes for The Progressive, we need an economic policy that actually puts people back to work. We've known for months that the stimulus was too small and watched the labor market continue to deteriorate. We need more than tweaks at the economic margins, we need a robust job creation plan.

As Stephen Franklin notes for Working In These Times, we already know that the recession has created a significant jump in the nation's poverty rate. According to official government statistics, the rate climbed from 12.5% to 13.2% in 2008, the largest increase since 1991. But the National Academy of Science thinks the government statistics are misleading, as they account for rising costs associated with medical care, transportation, child care and different regional living standards, as Franklin notes. Taking these factors into account, the National Academy of Sciences calculates the actual poverty rate to be 15.8%. That's an additional 7 million people living in poverty, for a total of over 47 million. That's more than the entire population of the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas combined. What's worse, we don't have poverty statistics for this year, when the most severe economic damage was been dealt.

Workers are facing tough economic prospects around the world. Writing for The Nation, Kristina Rizga details Latvia's economic turmoil. Just like the US, overexcited bankers in Latvia inflated a massive real estate bubble that took down the entire economy when it burst. But with the bubble burst, much of the country is now out of a job and stuck with a mortgage worth far less than what they paid for it. It's almost exactly the same story we've seen at home.

No domestic economic problem is more pressing than our epic levels of unemployment. We need another round of stimulus to get people working again. If not, we'll see the same public unrest here as in Eastern Europe.

The election spin is irrelevant--talk to the pocketbook

Chris Bowers — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:12:51 GMT

We can sit around and complain that the post-election spin is not properly giving credit to Democratic and progressive victories in the House, in mayoral campaigns, and in many ballot initiatives outside of the painful defeat in Maine. Or, we can realize that in this instance, given the magnitude of the problems facing the country, spin is insignificant compared to the ~~power of the force~~ economic conditions facing the average American.

When you are highly engaged in political news and activism, there is a tendency to overestimate the importance of winning the messaging war. However, there probably isn't a single American who will vote in 2010 based on how well one side or the other messaged after the 2009 elections. The post-election spin is distant, abstract horse pockey compared to the job market, the health care market, the housing market, and other very real economic problems people are facing in their everyday lives.

As Mike wrote this morning, Democratic performance in the 2010 elections will be based on whether Democrats "deliver the goods," aka, the economic improvements they were hired to produce. If economic conditions still suck in 2010, then Democrats are toast no matter what sort of spin or other abstract positioning in which we engage.

We can already see that in the outcome of the elections last night. Democrats were reduced in the two states where they had been in power for eight years during the economic difficulties (New Jersey and Virginia), but were still able to make gains at the federal level (swept the House seats), where they have really only been in charge for one year. The lesson is clear: if you are in power during an economic catastrophe, voters will replace whoever you are with just about anything.

For now, at the federal level at least, voters still blame Republicans. However, that will no longer be the case by 2010. By that point, we will own either the continue economic slump or the ongoing economic recovery. As such, in both political and human terms, it is imperative that there is an substantial improvement in the economic livelihood of average Americans over the next year. To do this, Democrats are not only going to need to make sure that the health care bill contain benefits that will kick in during 2010 (something which Democrats in Congress are increasingly aware of and delivering), but that there can be additional stimulus spending over the next year.

There is no going to be any way to pass a second omnibus stimulus bill. Support simply is not there for it, either in Congress or in the public at large. However, there are two things that can be done (more in the extended entry):

Pass a series of smaller programs, such as more cash for clunkers, extending unemployment benefits, and extending COBRA benefits.
Use the remaining $317 billion of TARP for non-Wall Street related stimulus. To its credit, the Obama administration has not spent any of the second $350 billion of the Wall Street bailout on Wall Street itself. It spent just under $100 billion on homeowners and the auto industry, and $317 billion remains in the account. Even though some of the remaining money comes from financial institutions paying back the easy loans they received, this still means that that Obama administration has not actually spent any of the second, post-Bush $350 billion on Wall Street.
This is money that can, and should, be used for a second stimulus program. Keep finding effective, targeted, non-Wall Street ways to spend this money: grants to states about to cut jobs, loans to small businesses who can't get credit, more assistance for homeowners, more cash for clunkers, etc. It is a huge opportunity that can be used to provide the economy the stimulus it needs, while circumventing a Congress that would never pass a second omnibus stimulus bill.

There are times when spin matters, but this is not one of them. Babbling talking heads on television and pithy columnists online have little, if any, persuasive power compared to the pocketbook. Democrats have to speak to their pocketbooks, and that is done through effective policy, not through effective talking points.

An Economic Recovery for Everyone

The Opportunity Agenda — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:13:06 GMT

Today, the public will get a look at how funds distributed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are being spent when the reports from agencies receiving these stimulus funds are released.

While many questions will surround the release of this information, it's likely that a critical part of this story will be lost unless we ask the right questions about this spending. Namely, is this stimulus really creating a recovery for everyone?

This is an important consideration given that many groups of Americans have consistently been left behind in ways that hard work and personal achievement alone cannot address. This was true even before the economic downturn began to affect everyone else, and it's likely that the crisis has further worsened gaps in income and assets that existed already.

To get an idea of what some Americans faced before the crisis, just look at 2007, the year before the crisis began affecting everyone:
-Of those living in poverty, 10.9% worked year round, fulltime;
-The African American male unemployment rate (11.4%) was more than twice as high as the white male unemployment rate (5.5%), and the Latino male unemployment rate was also much higher (7.6%); and
-Women made only 78.2% the median income of men, African Americans only 75.2% of whites, and Latinos only 72.6% of whites.

These are just a few examples of the unequal reality many communities faced back when some felt we were all riding high. The economy these statistics illustrate, though, is not exactly a portrait of the American Dream in action, and it's not the kind of economy to which the stimulus money should be returning us.

This past September, the economic outlook remained dismal. Jobs were scarce—as of September 2009, 15.1 million people in the U.S. were unemployed, putting the overall unemployment rate at 9.8%, which was 0.1 percentage points higher than August's rate. And, consistent with the racial unemployment gap in 2007, communities of color were again hit the hardest. The unemployment rate for African Americans, 15.4%, was 71% higher than the unemployment rate for whites, whose rate was 9.0%. The rate for Latinos was also disproportionately high, at 12.7%, even though it had declined 0.3% since August. Approximately, 10 months later with the first round of reporting being released today, it's important to consider that we still have a ways to go to improve the state of opportunity.

With thoughtful investments-such as expanding skill-building job training, investing in education, and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure-we can both restore consumer confidence and help struggling folks to catch their stride. Such investments would not only address the country's short-term woes but also invest in our long-term strength.

Some will say we have to concentrate on stabilizing the economy first, and address the challenges described here second. But that simply won't work. We need to have trained and ready workers at all levels of our workforce; we need to ensure that all communities experience investment and growth; and we need to protect all consumers from the kinds of financial products that have destabilized our economy in the first place. We are all part of a greater whole - both economically and morally. Overlooking struggling communities won't work, but it also is simply wrong to allow the inequalities our economy has perpetuated to continue.

So our goal for recovery has to be bigger than turning back the clock to 2007. If we ask the right questions now, and make the right investments, we have a real shot at a future in which American opportunity is within reach of everyone here.

Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.

Weekly Audit: Dismantling the Wall Street Casino

The Media Consortium — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:05:21 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

Weekly Audit: A Tale of Two Economies

The Media Consortium — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:32:27 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

Got a buck on ya?

btchakir — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:55:34 GMT

I was tripping around the web and found this on The Political Carnival:

ATLANTA, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Georgia will stop posting signs along highway construction projects funded by economic stimulus funds, because the signs cost too much money, officials said.
The signs were first considered a nice indication that stimulus funds were putting Georgians to work but they became a target for ridicule and criticism once it was determined that they cost $1,200 apiece, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

- and -

New York dropped the sign idea this summer when some contractors quoted prices above $4,000 for some of the larger signs.

hmmmmm. This sounds like an awful lot for a sign, although it says nothing about size, nor what material is used, nor any number of things that could account for such prices for... signs!?!

Now, I guess there is also a contractor markup to figure here. I think, however, I agree with Paddy at The Political Carnival:

"This is just stupid. I can go to any local Fast Signs and have one of those magnetic ones whipped up for under $100 and just keep reusing it. How the hell does a sign end up costing this kind of money?"

I couldn't really leave it here, though. So, I got curious and went to look at The Manual of Traffic Signs, which has a web presence. In it I found a listing on the price of traffic signs, which was five years old... but the most recent pricing I could find:

Sign panels:
• Regulatory/Warning/Marker: $15 to 18 / sq.ft.
• Large Guide Signs: $20 to 25 / sq.ft.
• Electronic Variable Message Sign: $50,000 to $150,000 each
Sign Posts:
• U-Channel: $125 to $200 each
• Square Tube (Telespar): $10 to $15 per foot
• Large Steel Breakaway Posts: $15 to $30 per foot
• Cantilever Sign: $15,000 to $20,000 each
• Sign Bridge: $30,000 to $60,000 each
Foundations:
• Square Tube: $150 - $250 each
• Breakaway Post: $250 to $750 each
• Cantilever / Bridge: $6,000 - $7,000 each

Interesting... these signs are pretty expensive as listed, and there is no information with Georgia's complaint as quoted as to the size of these signs and how they are suspended or mounted. But even a 4' x 8' steel sign should only cost $500.00 dollars or less (unless the costs have gone up 400% or so since 2003)... and even if it were suspended from a bridge, say, by a U-channel, the whole of a sign would cost $680.00.

So why do we get quotes at $1200 to $4000 for a small sign when a huge Highway sign goes for under $700.00? Is the contractor markup so high? And we aren't using a state agency to put them up... because?

Time to get a handle on costs of these things and, if you'll excuse me, I don't think going to private consultants is paying off on this or anything.

Under The LobsterScope

Short-Term Deliverables

Mike Lux — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Albuquerque, a fairly Democratic town, just elected a Republican mayor because of low Democratic voter turnout. Democrats are in danger in both of the big gubernatorial races coming up in New Jersey and Virginia. The generic congressional polling numbers are in a statistical dead heat, and Democratic base voter enthusiasm is trending down.

There is no reason for Democrats to panic, as demographics are still trending in our favor and the Republican brand is still in tatters, but the warning signs for my party are out there and should not be ignored. What Democrats need to be extremely well focused on is short term deliverables for real people. On health care, on jobs, on banking legislation, on immigration reform, on climate legislation - on all of these major initiatives and more, they of course should be thinking about what's best in the long term, but better damn well be focused on delivering real and tangible benefits to voters before the next election, or Democrats will suffer a bruising defeat in November 2010.

Let's start with health care. When you are working to re-structure 17% of the American economy - and probably the most byzantinely-structured 17% there is - there are a lot of complications, and it is obviously going to take some time. Some of the features of the plan will need time to phase in, which is understandable. But some of the benefits need to be apparent to Americans right away too. If we spend a year and a trillion dollars passing health care reform, and no one sees any benefits to them by November 2010, we Democrats have a really big problem in the next election.

Another key point on this issue: if a public option doesn't go into effect for a while, say until 2013, insurance companies better not be free to raise their rates at will until they finally have competition, when the public option enters the scene. There is nothing that will guarantee voters turning away quickly from health reform, and the politicians who voted for it, more than letting insurance companies hike up their insurance costs over the next four years, and we know they would have because they already promised to do it.

Health care reform needs to have immediate benefits - no pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps, all of those insurance regulations we've been hearing about need to kick in immediately. But even more importantly, if a public option gets delayed, there has to be a short term way to keep insurance company greed and power in check. To leave the public utterly at the mercy of the arrogant insurers who have already promised they would raise their rates after this is passed - like consumers were left at the mercy of credit card companies for many months after the consumer protection bill passed - is not only unfair to people but is truly terrible politics. If you think these insurers won't jack rates through the roof, and then blame the rate increases on reform, you are truly naïve. Don't make voters feel like it was a bad idea to pass health reform because they are seeing only the downside in the short term.

On the economy, the macro-economists in the administration like Larry Summers love to say that, "jobs are a lagging indicator", that eventually in the long run, that jobs will start getting created. Even if they are right (and I tend to be skeptical when economists tell me that in the long run, things will eventually trickle down to working people), neither the economy nor the Democratic Party can afford for there to be another year where no jobs are being produced. To have that many people in trouble exacerbates the foreclosure crisis, weakens the housing market, forces more cuts in the state and local budgets, and a higher federal deficit: and it is a complete political disaster for Democrats. Jobs need to be created ASAP, lots of jobs, not a few here and there, and should not be seen as the lagging indicator that will take care of itself someday. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes liked to say, we are all dead, but the Democrats will be dead in the short term unless we start producing lots of jobs quickly. The stimulus is certainly helping, and Obama deserves credit for that, but it is not enough. Democrats need to think bigger on creating jobs.

On financial reform, as with health care, much of what needs to be reformed will take a long time to kick in, and in fact much of the goal will be to keep disaster from happening in the future - a harder thing to get credit for. (Which by the way, is the main thing the Obama White House is claiming about the economy - that we would have had a disaster if not for the US. It's a hard thing to win votes on.) But a strong policy of consumer safety in financial products will be noticed by people who went through the outrages of being ripped off over the last few years, and there are other things that could be done that voters would notice and cheer. How about a tax on financial transactions, structure to cost the most for the biggest traders, where the proceeds would go to new job creation? Based on private polling I was shown recently, that would get about 85% support. How about anti-trust actions against the biggest banks? How about throwing some of the worst violators of the financial system in jail, and returning their ill-gotten gains to the people they ripped off? There are plenty of things to do in the financial sector that would get voter attention and would be seen as an immediate benefit.

On climate change, the first item of business should be dramatically expanding green jobs. On immigration, families ought to be reunited right away. On issue after issue, we need to get things done, and make sure that what we get done has immediate benefits to regular people.

George W. Bush was a disastrous President, rated by many historians as the worst President of all time, and he handed Democrats a terrible mess that we will be digging our way out of for years. But blaming the other guys for bad times doesn't cut it in American politics, and it shouldn't: we need to deliver real things to real people. Trying to convince voters that it would have been so much worse if it wasn't for us, and that our policies will help them someday in the long run, is not a winning strategy. We need to deliver things that make a difference in voters' lives now.

Weekly Audit: Save Jobs, Save the Economy

The Media Consortium — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:56:54 GMT

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

Last month, the U.S. unemployment rate surged to 9.8% as 260,000 people lost their jobs. Although the stock market and corporate profits appear to be recovering from last year's financial catastrophe, work is harder to find. President Barack Obama and Congress need to act now to get people working again and help soften epic unemployment in years to come.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

The current job prospects are dim. Without additional economic stimulus, the Congressional Budget Office projects that unemployment will average 10.2% in 2010, and 9.1% in 2011. That means things are going to be as bad as they are today for nearly two more years. That's an eternity in economic time. Two years ago there were banks called Washington Mutual, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Wachovia. Two years of nearly double-digit unemployment means a massive increase in poverty, and the eradication of economic opportunities for an entire generation that grows up without access to basic needs.

Unemployment holds greater significance than any other economic statistic. As the editors of The Nation write, "Except for a military threat, no issue confronting a president is more serious than widespread unemployment."

The official unemployment rate also drastically underrepresents the scope of economic suffering. As The Nation's editors explain, over 15 million Americans cannot find any work at all. Another 9 million people are settling for part-time work because they can't find a full-time job. When you include people who have simply given up looking for a job after months without success, 17% of the country is either out of work or underemployed. That's roughly equal to the entire rural population of the U.S.

It's important to note that today's hefty percentage of joblessness is not a result of Obama's economic stimulus package. As economist Dean Baker emphasizes for AlterNet, we'd be staring at 11% or 12% unemployment without that effort. New America Media correspondent Suzanne Menneh details a great stimulus package success story. The Mosaic Youth Theater in Detroit gives at-risk youth the opportunity to do constructive, creative work putting on dramatic productions, and has had a dramatic impact on its performers drop-out rate. The theater was facing heavy recession-induced cutbacks before Obama's stimulus plan was enacted, but with a $50,000 grant, the theater can continue to employ teachers and directors.

The problem, Banker argues, is that the stimulus was too small. The president's economic advisers expected the recession to be milder than it has been, and then scaled down the package when political pressure was applied.

While political realities do place limits on Obama's options to create more jobs, voters are not going to find fault with the president for fighting joblessness. One of the easiest ways to boost employment, Baker notes, is to offer employers a tax credit for hiring more people.

Writing for The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz emphasizes another straightforward way to stymie layoffs. State budgets are incredibly strapped right now. The loss of tax revenue from plummeting home values and lost income has left local governments with few choices. To get the bottom line to work, states are slashing some of the most critical positions in society: Teachers, cops and firefighters are being laid off. Putting together a fresh package of aid to states can save these jobs, and as Fernholz notes, good luck to the politician running on an anti-teacher, anti-firefighter platform.

But unemployment is not the only front in the economic battle. As layoffs mount, credit card bills get higher, mortgage payments get harder to meet and many cash-strapped households turn to predatory payday loans to make ends meet. As the current wave of foreclosures demonstrates, consumer protection in the realm of finance has been absolutely dismal for decades. But despite the obvious shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework, the Obama administration's push for better consumer protection is morphing into all-out legislative war between the bank lobby and anybody interested in the public good.

Art Levine explains the situation in a post for In These Times' Working blog. Financial firms spent a massive $223 million lobbying the government against new regulations in the first half of 2009 alone. The Chamber of Commerce, the top lobbing group for U.S. corporate executives, is spending $2 million on ads smearing Obama's plan to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The new regulator would do just what its name implies: make sure banks can't gouge you on credit cards, mortgages, debit cards and payday loans. But the Chamber's new ads make the ridiculous claim that the new regulator will destroy local businesses like your neighborhood butcher or baker.

The good news, Levine notes, is that Obama isn't taking the attacks lying down. The President sharply criticized the Chamber in a speech on Friday, and groups like Americans for Financial Reform are pushing to make sure lawmakers look at the issue from the perspective of consumers, not just bank profits. The House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to mark-up the consumer bill on Wednesday. Creating a strong CFPA is absolutely critical to making sure our economy answeres to ordinary people. Levine quotes It Takes a Pillage author Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, to emphasize that banks will not act in the public good on their own.

"We still have a bizarre and misplaced faith that huge corporations-which are deisgned for the sole purpose of making profits-are somehow able to act ethically and restrain themselves," Prins says.

Even if your own pocketbook has never taken a pounding from the banking industry, the legitimacy of your government is at stake. As Glenn Greenwald explains for Salon, even after wrecking the global economy, banks have been able to sabotage efforts to avert foreclosure while demanding enormous bailouts at taxpayer expense. The chain of command is clear: The banking industry still showers lawmakers with campaign contributions, while individual bankers can still get the ear of top policymakers charged with major economic decisions. How easy is it for Wall Street bigwigs to influence policy? Laura Flanders of GRITtv highlights an AP report that details Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's phone records. Geithner has spoken with Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit more times this year than he has with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the key legislator pushing Geithner's own financial reform package. And Goldman Sachs CEO Llyod Blankfein has talked to Geithner more times than Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Ct), who is Frank's regulatory reform counterpart in the Senate.

Many top policy makers, in fact, come to government from high-profile positions on Wall Street. The result has been almost direct control of the legislative branch of our government, and ideological control of the executive branch.

"Earnest, substantive debates over this or that policy are so often purely illusory, as the only factor that really drives outcomes is the question of who owns and thus controls the political system," Greenwald writes.

The government is supposed to represent all of us, not just the wealthy and not just major corporations. The past two years have made clear to everyone that the government often must take strong actions to limit the damage created by private-sector calamaties. We need another round of economic stimulus to get people working again, and we need a fair set of rules to make sure working people don't get duped by predatory bankers.

Weekly Mulch: Obama's Nobel Prize

The Media Consortium — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:53:41 GMT

By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger

President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his accomplishments in international diplomacy, climate change and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The Nobel Committee praised Obama for his "constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," but, Richard Kim of The Nation wonders if the award comes too soon, as Obama has not yet committed to attending the international climate summit at Copenhagen.
Kim notes that if we want to significantly reduce carbon emissions to advert climate change, "the U.S. will have to bring a lot more to the table than it is currently offering." And in terms of nuclear weapons, a nuclear-free-world is currently a far off goal with many obstacles before it can become a reality. With this award, we hope that Obama will not be complacent in his efforts but take this honor with a sense of accountability to follow through with his initiatives.

"Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met, so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone" said Obama in response to winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

On the home front, Americans are struggling to balance a healthy economy and a healthy environment. Rinku Sen and Billy Parish of In These Times report that both issues have a "disproportionate impact on communities of color." The Labor Department reported last week that youth unemployment has reached a whopping 18.2%, with large racial gaps. People of color often live in neighborhoods with unfavorable environmental conditions and work in hazardous industries, like agriculture and food production. There are prominent racial hierarchies and unfair working conditions. "White flight" trend from inner cities to suburbia creates the need for more highways, driving and carbon emissions. To face this problem, groups like California's Green Media Youth Center and the national organization, Green For All, are working towards an inclusive green economy:

"These policies are a good start, but if they're to survive and lead up to the additional billions and effective implementation that we need to get control of unemployment, we have to be prepared to fight on the race front, as well as the green. All signs indicate that opponents will bait American racism with brutal inventiveness. If the right's attack on Van Jones isn't enough of a warning, then we should take our lessons from the health care debate. We can expect conservative pundits to call equity guidelines reverse racism, or to put up immigrants rather than corporate pollution as the true cause of environmental collapse," Parish and Senn write.

Although emission goals have become more stringent, many argue that getting there will stimulate the economy, not stifle it. The planet is warming at an accelerating rate. In order to avert catastrophic climate change, climate scientists have adjusted their original target of 450-ppm (parts per million) carbon emissions by the year 2050 to 350-ppm. This would mean that instead of aiming for 80% carbon emission reductions by 2050, we would need to cut carbon by 97% by 2050 in order to avert catastrophy.

Seem impossible to accomplish in a budget-neutral world? In a report (PDF) for Economics for Equity and the Environment Network (E3), Eban Goodstein, Frank Ackerman and Kristen Sheeran explain for Grist how we can afford to achieve 350. They estimate that with just 1-3% of the world's total output, we could create jobs, rebuild global forests to reduce carbon emissions and globally shift to clean energy. In fact, they believe that these investments might even save consumers money, given the high price of oil.

They also argue that it is more expensive to do nothing: "The bad news on the climate front is NOT that the costs of preventing climate change are becoming too expensive. Estimates of the costs have remained relatively stable, while estimates of the likely costs of inaction are becoming unbearable. Whether the final number is 450 or 350, we face no insoluble technical or economic challenges. This is still a problem we can afford to solve. Stopping global warming remains fundamentally a problem of political will."

The E3 authors also note that there are no reasonable studies that claim that a 350-concentration target would destroy the economy. If we act now, we can afford the economics of 350. However, inaction will pose a dangerous threat and grave economic costs on future generations.

And while we don't wish a global recession on anyone, Andrew Leonard writes in an article for Salon that these hard times have helped reduce carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report carbon emissions have experienced the largest drop in over 40 years, including the 1981 recession following the oil crisis.

Leonard urges us to take advantage of this opportunity: "If we take aggressive action now to promote renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation, in combination with tough new regulations, we might be able to turn a temporary decline into something more permanent."

Finally, efforts to tie local economies with environmental programs are underway to promote growth. Chelsea Green featured the Slow Money Alliance campaign this past week, a week-long pledge drive that aims to "empower individual investors to reconnect with their local economies and build an entirely new financial sector." With just five dollars, we can help change the world and solve a lot of complex, interconnected world problems, including the environment and the economy. The campaign hopes to seed a new economy and promote sustainability. "The only way we will ever solve fundamental problems is if we re-envision the way we look at the world and value things. We can value things differently through Capitalism in a way that builds a constructive economy, an economy that is based on preservation and conservation rather than merely extraction," writes Anthony Nicalo, founding member of the Slow Money Alliance.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Weekly Audit: Protect Consumers, Not Wall Street

The Media Consortium — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:47:51 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

The economy is still getting worse. Foreclosures are surging above last year's epic highs and the unemployment rate marches upwards every month. As the misery grinds on, Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in Congress are pushing hard to distract the public from the real causes of the current global economic crisis. Corporate America is trying to pin the blame for our empty pocketbooks on President Barack Obama and the phantom socialist menace, and cable news pundits are taking the bait.

As David Korten explains in a blog post for Yes!, this surge of distractions is a conscious political strategy designed to sabotage reform. "Wall Street's greatest fear is that the public might demand Congress and the president shut down the casino," Korten writes. "Any issue that shifts attention away from Wall Street and pins the blame for job loss and mortgage foreclosures on President Obama works in its favor."

The banking lobby is kicking and screaming over President Obama's plan to overhaul consumer protection in finance. As a result, the battle over the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) has become the most heated economic controversy in the nation's capital, even though the issue isn't controversial where ordinary citizens are concerned.

The existing hodgepodge of bank regulators completely failed to stand up for consumers as the housing bubble grew and burst. Our current bank regulators are charged not only with consumer protection, but safety and soundness regulation, which basically means making sure that banks don't fail. Preventing bank failures often means protecting bank profits, even when those profits come at the expense of communities. Instead of relying on the same inept and conflicted agencies, consumer regulation of credit cards, mortgages, student loans, payday loans should be funneled into a single, new agency with no other priorities: The CFPA.

As Greg Kaufmann details for The Nation, recent economic history isn't stopping Wall Street's favorite lawmakers from pushing against the CFPA. Kaufmann highlights some of the most outrageous comments from a hearing on the CFPA last week. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) claimed that if the CFPA had existed a few years ago, there would be no ATMs or frequent flyer miles. David John, a researcher from the Heritage Foundation, said that employees of the new agency would spend too much time trying to find their new desks to actually do any regulating. Bank lobbyist Ed Yingling tried to erase the last ten years with his claim that "no real case has been made" for better enforcement of consumer protection in banking.

These are not serious arguments. They are intentional distractions designed to kill an obviously productive policy. Kaufmann's headline says it all: "Do They Take us for Schmucks?"

But loudmouth Republicans like Hensarling aren't the only politicians we need to keep tabs on. Plenty of lawmakers on the Financial Services Committee won't stand up and make crazy speeches about ATMs, but will still go to bat for Wall Street behind the scenes. As I emphasize in a piece for AlterNet, with outsized Democratic majorities in both chambers of commerce, conservative, pro-Wall Street Democrats pose just as great a threat to our economic security as loony Republicans.

If you think that sounds pessimistic, consider Ralph Nader, who Matthew Rothschild profiles in The Progressive. Nader knows corporate America has its hands on nearly every lever in the U.S. political system. Lobbyists don't just hurl money at lawmakers, they spend tremendous sums on misleading advertisements to sway public opinion. Rothschild quotes from a recent speech Nader gave on his current book tour. He argues that progressives don't just need concerned citizens on our side. They need concerned citizens with money to counter the flood of corporate cash in the political system.

"There is a poignance in listening to Ralph Nader these days," Rothschild writes. "Here is a man who, for the last 45 years, has hurled his body at the engine of corporate power. He's dented it more than anyone else in America. But he knows it's still chugging, even more strongly than ever."

Even when lawmakers talk tough about Wall Street, it's not obvious what's really going on. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) recently rolled out an extremely ambitious plan to overhaul the bank regulatory system. It has very little common ground with Obama's plan, and in some respects would be an improvement. Obama's plan is very strong on consumer protection and not much else. But Dodd's plan is so ambitious, it seems like a politically impossible waste of time, one that could easily delay reforms into next year. Dodd wants to consolidate all four bank regulators into a single agency to prevent a race to the bottom and strip the Federal Reserve of all of its regulatory responsibilities. They aren't bad ideas, but they have absolutely no political momentum. Dodd has been holding hearings on the financial crisis since 2007-- he could have started pushing for this plan a long time ago. By introducing it so late in the process, major legislative delays seem inevitable. The longer it takes to pass a regulatory bill, the more time the bank lobby has to water it down. Writing for Mother Jones, Nick Baumann suggests this may be exactly what Dodd intends.

"Maybe getting it done by 2010 isn't the point. Dodd is up for reelection that November. If he manages to win by talking populist while raising money from Wall Street, he'll have plenty of time afterward to figure out what to do next."

For now, the economy is still absolutely horrible. Writing for In These Times, David Moberg translates the statistics from the government's most recent unemployment report and deciphers some recent polling on the economy. Things are bad, and people know it. Many economists believe the recession may have technically already ended. The Gross Domestic Product, a statistical measure of the country's economic output, may no longer be declining. But the unemployment rate keeps going up. It was 9.8% at the end of September.

Moberg notes that if the rate counted the long-term unemployed who have given up looking and people who want full-time jobs but settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is a staggering 17%. Over one-third of the 15.1 million would-be workers encompassed by the 9.8% unemployment rate have been out of a job for at least six months. Voters overwhelmingly believe that government policies have helped Wall Street, while just 13% think the government has given a lot of help to the average working person.

Economics and politics are inextricably linked. To strengthen our economic foundation, we need policymakers who are willing to stand up to corporate America and corporate media and serve the citizens who elect them.

Michael Moore's Brinks Job with Bankers in Tow

Rusty5329 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:22:38 GMT

originally posted at Sum of Change

Sum of Change and Zej Media are proud to present to you, Michael Moore's Brinks Job with bankers in tow...

On Tuesday, September 29th, in Washington, DC, Michael Moore premiered his new documentary, titled, "Capitalism: A Love Story". Moore arrived at DC's Uptown Theatre in a brinks armored car, with three bank executives in chains in the back. The men marched through the crowd of protesters, who chanted "Fund health care not wealthcare!" and "Boo the banks!"

Moore's attention-grabbing, hard-hitting entrance is symbolic of his films. He employs powerful, if sometimes extreme, tactics to highlight aspects of an issue. On Tuesday night, his arrival at the premiere highlighted the bailed out banks, and CEO's walking away with the public's money. The business men in chains light cigars with burning money, decked out in tuxedos. It was everything you expect from Moore, a fun and entertaining, yet important message.

For more, visit Sum of Change and Zej Media

Weekly Audit: We Need a 'People's Bailout'

The Media Consortium — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:08:01 GMT

By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger

The economic free-fall is finally slowing down, although nobody expects the recovery to be very pleasant. Job losses and foreclosures are expected to increase well into next year. But even if our economic system gets back to normal, it's important to remember that gross inequalities are embedded in the global order. At home, minorities face significant barriers to economic security, while abroad, children in poor countries are denied access to basic nutrition. This is especially disheartening in the wake of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, which demonstrated that the world's economic leaders are more focused on bailing out banks than eradicating global poverty.

Robert Reich sums up the domestic economic scenario succinctly for Salon. The stock market is humming along, even as most Americans are tightening their belts. It's a counterintuitive situation: Wall Street is celebrating an economic recovery, but the consumers that drive our economy are still cutting back. Reich explains that the government has stepped in to fill the hole caused by consumer spending. Business executives may scream "Socialism!" when the tax man comes around, but without massive government help, those same CEOs would be watching their earnings and companies collapse.

Without the jobs and tax cuts created by President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package, we'd see more red ink from just about every industry. The entire U.S. mortgage market is currently supported by the federal government via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while other special initiatives like the Cash for Clunkers program brought the auto industry out of its recession-induced coma this summer.

The trouble is, while a few programs have been good for ordinary citizens, most of the government's economic salvage operations are aimed at giant corporations. Of all the paradoxes in today's economy, the most significant can be found in the financial sector. Bank stocks are up, even though banks are in serious trouble. Their customers are broke, foreclosures are soaring, and analysts are predicting a fresh round of multi-billion-dollar losses on commercial real estate loans soon. So what makes an investor want to buy a bank stock right now? Nothing but the government's limitless willingness to bail out banks.

How much bailout money did the government actually spend? We've all heard about the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), but the real haul for bankers is much, much bigger, as Nomi Prins and Christopher Hayes detail in a piece for The Nation. A whopping $17.5 trillion has been dedicated to subsidies, guarantees, below-market-rate loans, and other special perks for the financial industry. That's roughly one-fourth of the entire global economic output for a full year, and more than the entire annual productivity of the U.S.

Prins and Hayes make use of a clever thought experiment: What if, instead of spending the money on big institutions, the money had gone to a small-time gambler? It's an apt comparison. Taxpayer money went to financial speculators who used our homes and neighborhoods as poker chips in a global casino. The dozen or so bailouts the government has enacted seem absurd when we think of them as cheap financing for bets on the craps table. The number of programs is staggering. Bank executives love to proclaim that their banks didn't really need TARP money, they just accepted it because the government wanted them to. Next time you hear that boast (sometimes it sounds more like a whine), remember that every big bank in the country issued debt guaranteed by the government, then scored ridiculously cheap loans from the Federal Reserve while others got federal help through AIG, Fannie and Freddie.

"A fraction of the $17.5 trillion bailout could have been used to cut the principal of homeowners' mortgages (using homes, even devalued ones, as collateral) and cover student loans at zero percent interest," Prins and Hayes write. "Rather than pouring it into the top layers-the banks-a people's bailout would have cost less and been more humane. And it likely would have prevented the ongoing increase in defaults, foreclosures and general economic anxiety."

There are very good reasons to maintain a healthy financial sector, but only if banks actually do something useful. Banks are supposed to lend money to enable socially productive economic activity. This bailout money has not been spent on anything socially productive. Instead, it's covered losses from predatory lending and boneheaded speculation.

The dominant cause of the recession was the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble, which banks helped inflate with all outrageous loans. For decades, the value of a family's house was the foundation of most American middle-class wealth. When home prices took a nosedive, so did the spending power of every homeowner. Even borrowers who had affordable mortgage payments were hit hard. For borrowers stuck with expensive, predatory mortgages, the result was a wave of foreclosures. Writing for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll highlights a hard reality: Recovery in the housing market will not lead to middle-class financial security. It will be at least a decade before home prices reach pre-crash levels.

It's critical to remember how the recession is deepening existing inequalities, particularly along racial lines. In a post for In These Times, Michelle Chen explains how African Americans and Latinos are consistently paid less than whites during boom times, and are pushed even further down the ladder when things go bust. Communities of color are more likely to be targeted by predatory lending, which can devastate entire neighborhoods for generations. That means people of color are more likely to be foreclosed on, more likely to be laid off, and less likely to have access to basic necessities like health insurance.

The statistics are stark. In a story for New America Media, Christina Fernandez-Pereda, notes that while the overall unemployment stands at 9.7%, for minorities, the actual number is much higher. A full 15.1% of Blacks are unemployed, while unemployment among Asian Americans has doubled since early 2007. A full third of Latinos between the ages of 16 and 29 are unemployed.

The bank bailout has done nothing to improve the status of the global poor. The G-20 made grand promises to help those who need it most in developing countries this year, but so far, the talk has resulted in very little action. As Hayley Hathaway explains at Sojourners, only $50 billion has been dedicated to the 78 countries where humanitarian risk is greatest. As Hathaway notes, that's less than 25% of the TARP money received by the 20 largest U.S. banks.

Without major action, between 1.4 million and 2.8 million children will die of malnutrition in the next five years. Instead of pushing major humanitarian aid, the G-20 has promised $750 billion to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF was supposed to act as an international lender of last resort-if a nation's financial woes got really bad, they could get a loan from the IMF while they restructured. But IMF money ends up flowing to private-sector banks, and governments in need are forced to cut spending on programs that help the poor. When the G-20 met in Pittsburgh last week, a major topic of discussion involved giving developing nations a greater voice in IMF policies. But despite this talk, wealthy nations remain committed to the status quo, protecting the interests of their bankers eyeing future international bailouts.

For most people, it will be a long time before our economic recovery is a reality. But as the economy crawls out of the ditch, it's critical to build our future on a stronger foundation, one where we don't allow millions children to starve and where skin color does not determine economic security.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy and is free to reprint. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.

Learned Helplessness.

NABNYC — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:51:56 GMT

Learned Helplessness.

There have been many reports in recent years that the U.S. government used psychiatrists and/or psychologists to assist in designing torture techniques to be used against Muslims in the middle east in connection with the U.S. War Against Afghanistan and Iraq. And maybe additional wars to come.

The reports are that the U.S. military trains its own people to survive torture and, in connection with that training, devised certain methods of torture that they believed no human being could withstand. Or at least at the conclusion of the use of these types of torture, the human psyche would be destroyed even if the body continued to function.

The desired outcome from the torture was to create in the prisoners a state of "Learned Helplessness." This is a term that comes from experiments done on dogs by an American psychiatrist who was invited by the CIA to lecture the U.S. military on his experiments, and his conclusions. Those lectures were, in turn, used by the CIA and the U.S. military in developing these torture techniques designed to destroy the human psyche.

The experiments done on animals, specifically dogs, showed the following: one group of dogs were put into a cage and given certain options for their behavior. They could, for example, try to escape, they could push a lever. But no matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, they continued to be subjected to electrical shocks. They learned that they had no ability to stop the abuse. No matter what they did, the torture continued. When those dogs were allowed out of the cages, they simply laid down and submitted, no longer tried to avoid further abuse and torture. They had learned that they were helpless to have any control over their own lives.

This is the desired goal of the U.S. widespread torture programs in the middle east, as well as those which have been conducted in Central and South America by people trained by the U.S. at the School of Americas.

The original experiments were used as part of an investigation into depression and other forms of mental disease in which people feel helpless to do anything to improve their lives. No matter how bad the conditions, they are psychologically trained to believe that they must submit, they are helpless to change or to stop the abuse. This is probably a good explanation of the battered spouse, but also of large numbers of people in our society who are in unhappy relationships, or who are abused and mistreated in their work, but feel unable to try to make any changes. Often, changing jobs isn't a real solution if a country allows workers to be mistreated and underpaid, denied benefits or rights. So a state of learned helplessness exists in the American workforce. For good reason. They've been mistreated and abused, fired if they stand up for themselves, and have learned that they are helpless to stop the abuse.

Is it possible our entire society has been conditioned into a state of learned helplessness. No matter what people do, the government continues to simply take bribes from the corporations, lie to the people, conduct foreign wars of choice, steal our money, send our jobs overseas, give tax breaks to the rich and deny healthcare to the rest of us. This despite the historic number of people who got out and campaigned last year. All the people who believed in change are right now being taught the underpinnings of the state of learned helplessness.

Think about it: the Democrats control the House, have a 60-seat control of the Senate, and control the white house, and despite that they refuse to end the wars, they refuse to provide a real healthcare program for people, they refuse to create job programs, they refuse to hold the Bush administration responsible for its numerous violations of our constitution and other laws, they refuse to hold Wall Street responsible for its criminal theft from the public. They have, quite simply, done nothing for progressive or even for liberals since taking office, except to routinely bash us by calling us names. "The left won't like it," but they need to live with it. And we, as it turns out, are just now learning that we are completely helpless to do anything to affect what our government is doing.

Below is link to an article on the psychiatrist who developed the theory, and how it is the CIA and U.S. military used his theory to develop a program of torture designed not to get information, but instead to destroy human beings, to drive them crazy, to take away their will to live.

Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that torture is often used after a coup to create a state of submission in the civilian population. Torture a few thousand, make it public, make it particularly brutal, get the information out to the rest of the public, and most people are likely to stop resisting, just do what they are told and try to survive.

We've heard a lot about the "ticking time bomb," by which people argue that we need to torture to find out whether someone has a nuclear weapon ready to go off in our country. But no one has ever provided any factual support to show that's why we began a program of systematic torture throughout Afghanistan and Iraq. Isn't it more likely that the torture program was designed from the outset to destroy human beings and create a state of submission among the other civilians, so the U.S. could keep its permanent military bases in the region, steal all the oil, bomb and attack the neighbors conveniently, with the majority of the population too terrified to do anything to stand up against them.

http://www.informationclearing...

http://NABNYC.blogspot.com

Trumka Demands Real Reform on Wall Street, Across the Economy

Seth D Michaels — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:13:06 GMT

On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making the U.S. economy work for working people.

Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO leadership team's national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive vision for the economy-and to fight back against the corporate agenda that left workers behind.

We've let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have undermined the economy, Trumka said:

Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For the pain they've inflicted on families who face financial ruin-unemployment, wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.

We need a different model for our economy, where good jobs, not bad debts, drive our growth. Our real economy needs a financial system that will support it, not a high-risk system that only supports itself and the wiliest speculators.

Trumka supported President Barack Obama's call for a new consumer protection agency that would have real power to crack down on unfair practices. He also called for tougher regulations on the hedge fund and derivative trading that contributed to our economic crisis.

The banks that have been propped up with billions in public funds can't be allowed to go back to the way things were, Trumka said. We need to make sure they're subjected to oversight, and that our investment is turning into jobs and broad-based economic growth, not executive bonuses. Trumka promised that the union movement would take the lead in educating and mobilizing the public to fight back against finance-industry abuses.

Speaking on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Trumka explained why we need to hold Obama and leaders in Congress to their promises and make sure they enforce real protections for consumers in the financial industry, because the current system has failed:

Today, Rachel, I talked to a woman in Atlanta, and she was making $1,162 a month on a fixed salary, and they gave her a $900 a month mortgage. That type of predatory lending should have been picked up by one of those agencies. It wasn't.

Trumka said that union members across the country will watch carefully to make sure elected leaders are looking out for working people, not big banks and corporations:

What we're going to do is make sure that they live by that. We'll educate our members, we'll mobilize our members. I think our members will hold them accountable on Election Day.

Trumka also spoke with Maddow about health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

Thinking about America at the end of the decade...

btchakir — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:24:37 GMT

The past decade, which allowed the Bush Administration, American corporations and the great financial giants to turn the country into a dispeptic ulcer, which was mostly Bush and some Obama administered, has left us in a slump. It has taken so much energy to try and turn things around that we wonder if we can summon up more just to keep going.
I am amazed that so many people can protest the absolute need to control the economy by first bringing the rapidly increasing costs of health care under control while realizing that it is a common right for all of us and not merely a profit source for the greedy insurance ogres. And I mean that potentially sick people are pointing guns at their own heads with the encouragement of the Dick Armeys and Glenn Becks whose actual goals are financial returns from industry or big TV ratings.

When I ran the post yesterday about the educational poll of Oklahoma High School students, and thought about how many of them would fail the basic citizenship exam given to immigrants becoming Americans, it made me look around the blogs, especially the more right-leaning blogs, to see if anyone on the other side was concerned with the massive change in national intelligence that was occurring. I didn't find much, although there was a rather heavy reliance on an upper class versus lower class standard that was forcefully being promoted (and I was very upset with the amount of it which centered on the kind of racial epithets I haven't heard since the late fifties and early sixties.)

And I looked at the "Tea Party" events as pushed by Fox News and the several organizations put together by the same rich folk who tried (and actually succeeded) in "Swift Boating", that is Destroying, John Kerry's service contribution to the country in Viet Nam, and found them reinforcing the educational plummet of average Americans. It is obviously too easy to make people work against their own best interests... and extremely difficult to turn them around once they are trapped in all the brouhaha.

I am hoping that Obama's cross network push on the Sunday Morning News Shows (even on Fox) will be the start of a potential turn around... but I also know they will not focus on what's good for America when they can focus on Jimmy Carter bringing up the Race Issue as the major controversy, which it is not... definitely not. Television news tracks to the most dramatic crap, whether actually important or not, because it brings in viewers for corporate sponsors (and on the Sunday Morning shows, so many of these sponsors are Insurance or Financial players, or big industry types like ADM or Northrup-Grumman.) In a twelve or fifteen minute appearance, Obama will lose six minutes on this garbage without even blinking. Most likely, we will be right where we started when the day is through.

What is amazing is how influenced people will be by the news media's inability to handle real issues while pushing garbage. Pew Research notes in a recent poll that the media is headed more towards inaccuracy and unfairness as seen by citizens who are swayed by their broadcasts:

Does this mean people KNOW they are being pressed by inaccurate news as they are MANIPULATED by it? And does it matter?

I have been signing more and more petitions to get Congress to move in the direction I thought, after the 2008 elections, they were going to move anyway. Many I have put on this blog and encouraged readers to respond to as well. Has it made a difference? I don't think so, but I remain hopeful.

The 2010 elections are going to be the results indicator of all of this. We see the Congressional competition going on now with tremendous effort by the right to regain a foothold no matter what they say or do. One would hope that wisdom might prevail. In reality, we will continue to fear what is coming and think about the possibility of ducking it all and moving to Canada.

Under The LobsterScope