I have been thinking about and looking for a way that would unite the nation and turn the tide against the right. I think there are three things to focus on, build a message around them and then start hitting that message home until it sticks. That's what they do to us. Lets use the tactic and see where it goes! It just might work.
What are the problems we face as a nation? We the common people? Simply stated, our issues are good jobs (including a wide range of middle and upper income jobs and lower wage jobs that pay at least a "living" wage), upward mobility (the American dream), and economic security.
So focusing on Jobs, the American Dream, and our Economic Security, what is driving the right to destroy these fundamental national priorities? It's their insatiable appetite for power and wealth. Theirs of coarse, not yours or mine. Everything they do is designed around and stems from their maniacal greed.
As expected the Republicans in the Senate said no to those whose livelihoods they gutted when they controlled Washington. Forget the fact that men like Mitch McConnell and yes, Ben Nelson who is a Republican and should get out of our party soaked up huge salaries while soaking the middle-class with policies that decimated them while enriching Corporate fatcats and the Chinese Communists. Of course the whole Republican Party, Mitch McConnell and Ben Nelson want you to forget. What they do not want is to bear any of the responsibility of their actions both in the past and now as working Americans who paid the price from Republicans and Corporate Democrats and the robber-barons in Corporate America getting fat, crashing the economy, and getting bailed out.
It is no secret that in this current environment with so many workers unemployed, underemployed and making less money that anger is rampant among American workers. It is understandable as working America watches the bankers who crashed our economy costing them millions of jobs get bailed out while in every town in America they are still hurting. This on top of the fact that Corporate America has stagnated wages on jobs they have not shipped overseas to virtual slave markets. Yes, anger is justified and rampant in many unemployment lines and workplaces. However, working America must be very careful of how to channel this understandable anger. You see, just like in past days forces of hatred are seeking to divide workers keeping them from forming a united front to really change this country and their own lots in life.
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.
My friend Paul Krugman (hey, he linked to me, I can pretend) posts this chart from Emmanuel Saez, which shows that in 2007 the top 0.01% of income earners in America took home 6% of the national income.
Let's get some scale here. In 2007 there were 301M people in America, which gives us 30,100 people in that top 0.01%. CIA Factbook says US GDP for 2007 was $14.11T in PPP US dollars. 6% of that is $846B. So the top 0.01% averaged $28 million dollars in income, each. Wow. That isn't quite correct since Saez is actually using "tax units" rather than people for his top 0.01% so this might only represent 12-15K actual IRS tax returns, and you probably can't divide GDP quite that neatly, but we're still talking about a tiny number of people taking an inordinate piece of the pie.
Following Krugman's link to Saez, I found this chart (which I snazzified):
Note this is now the top 0.1% (vice top 0.01% in Krugman's post). Check out the blue (the bottom chunk for the colourblind). That's employment income. Contrast the share of their income that salary made up between the classic gilded age (c1929) and the modern one, and see how much bigger a share is coming from salary (and bonus). Otherwhere in the data (fig4) Saez gives you the percentages of each category of income for the top 0.1%, where you can learn that in 1929, captial gains made up about 65% of the income of the top 0.1ers, and employment income was 20%. Skip to 2007, and employment now makes up almost 50%, with capital gains down at 20% (remainder is something called "entrepreneurial income" for which I can't locate a definition).
I post this because we are regularly exposed to anecdotal stories of how much this or that CEO makes, or some trader's obscene bonus, but it is important to have some data that shows this is a real phenomenon and not just a few isolated exceptions blown out of proportion. It turns out that $70 million here and $16 billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Upper management in America's corporations really are emptying the till like never before.
How many stories have we heard in recent years of CEO's and other executives looting, stealing, polluting and wreaking general havoc? The incentive to loot a company's pension funds is money. The incentive to outsource our jobs is money. The incentive to deny needed treatments to an insured patient is money. The incentive to pollute our rivers and air is money.
Generally the incentive to lie, cheat and steal is money. This is especially true in the corporate world where the reason for ... well, everything ... is money. This is normal, and can be kept in check. But the temptation that pushes many over the line is not just money, it is the possibility of the big, humungous jackpot. And that is what we have today.
It used to be that you could make, why, millions of dollars if you worked hard, built a company, invented something important, or had amazing talent. But today mere millions is for chumps. Today you can loot a fund, rig an energy market, forward-run stocks or threaten to bring down an economy and end up with a quick payoff of billions.
When excessive, massive paydays are possible, it opens the door to overwhelming greed and a resulting compromising of principles.
There is a way to prevent the destructive behavior we have been seeing from the top. People won't have an incentive to cheat and steal if they can't get the huge jackpot from the proceeds. Let's limit the possibility of collecting a vast and fast return. The vast and fast return is the motivator, so take it out of the equation.
Business reporter Leela de Kretser heaps scorn on Matt Taibbi for telling people things that were already common knowledge in the financial press about the Goldman Sachs vampire squid (never going to get tired of that phrase):
... Thanks to reporters at The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the New York Post, we already knew Goldman Sachs alumni had positions in governments and influential bodies around the world.
[We knew they were] the biggest contributor to Barack Obama's presidential run ... profited more than any other bank during the sub-prime mortgage mess ... been part of talks about whether to keep its competitor Lehman Brothers afloat ...
Unlike Mr Taibbi, we knew all of this - and didn't think it amounted to sinister conspiracy. Instead we thought this is what the biggest guy on The Street does.
The word 'conspiracy' doesn't appear in the original piece, The Great American Bubble Machine. It's just that when you describe it like this, all the greed and influence-peddling and market manipulation sounds bad to the masses:
Yesterday, a Huffington Post reader commented on my previous article about the campaign against Bruce Wasserstein's gouging of seniors to fatten his own pockets. "Sadly," they said, "nobody cares."
I will admit, it's tough to raise interest in an issue like this. Everything from high gas prices to the crumbling economy to the Iraq war is demanding people's attention--and that's before you have to deal with the filtering effects of the media that reduces complex issues to trivial "gotcha" games. But a small group of committed citizens got out on the streets yesterday to say "Yes, we do care about the health and well-being of our elders, and the workers who take care of them. Do you?"
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