Corporate and financial elites have largely succeeded in seizing the current economic crisis of their own making to ram through attacks on social programs they've always despised. With the politicians and the Supreme Court in their pockets they apparently believe that now is their time to contort the institutions of American society into a consortium servicing their narrow class interests. But the protests in Europe and on Wall Street are evidence that a growing number of people are on to them.
Even the sober capitalists of Europe have had enough with the United States telling them what to do. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's glacially cold reception he recently had on the other side of Atlantic while meeting with E.U. mucky-mucks speaks volumes. Geithner's mission appears to have been little more than to make sure those crazy "socialistic" Europeans don't do anything rash like pass a small tax on international financial transactions. Geithner's haranguing fell on deaf ears and illustrates the diminished capacity of the United States to throw its weight around in the global economy. Even hardcore capitalists are displaying a lack of faith in U.S. economic leadership, compounding the legitimacy crisis that has already engulfed millions of less exalted members of the global community.
"Economics have been one driving force, with growing income inequality, high unemployment and recession-driven cuts in social spending breeding widespread malaise," a page-one New York Times article states. "Alienation runs especially deep in Europe, with boycotts and strikes that, in London and Athens, erupted into violence." Today, the "paper of record," which proved useless in exposing the major cataclysmic event of our age (the housing bubble and mortgage fraud), recognizes the folly of austerity measures as a magic economic elixir.
For a nation that not long ago had its share of riots and rebellions, such as those that rocked Watts, Newark, and Detroit in the mid-1960s, (along with the Rodney King riot of 1992 and the Battle in Seattle in 1999), the dangers of wave after wave of savage budget cuts to vital social programs as well as what's going on in many European capitals should be a bit sobering.
Since the 1960s there have been roughly two schools of thought in America on protests that turn into riots. One school concludes that the way to deal with that kind of violence is to deploy more water canon, rubber bullets, and tear gas.
The other side tries to place these events within their social context. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy articulated this more sociologically sound interpretation. Although both leaders insisted that law and order must be restored in riot-ravaged cities and that there was no excuse for destroying property, they also asked: What are the underlying social causes of the rebellions?
The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to analyze the '60s riots, concluded that extreme poverty, hopelessness, and racial discrimination created a societal tinderbox that was ready to explode into flames. (In Detroit alone there was over $50 million in property damage, 7,000 arrests, and forty-three people killed.) The Commission's findings were never given a fruitful airing.
In 1965, after touring the bombed out neighborhoods of Watts and being spurned by L.A.'s mayor, King left the city in disgust, saying that the political leaders displayed "a blind intransigence and ignorance of the tremendous social forces which are at work here." He went on to launch the Poor People's Campaign and lead a mass movement that would make its central demand government action to alleviate poverty.
Robert Kennedy, who also toured Watts, pushed for legislation to deal aggressively with urban poverty and initiated a bold experiment in the impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Seeking solutions and understanding the social conditions that produced riots became the chief animating expressions of both MLK and RFK's concepts of justice in their final years. The fact that both King and Kennedy were assassinated at a time when they were pushing for changes in the class and caste structures of American society tells us something about the bitterness of that period -- a bitterness that might return if our political "representatives" continue this long backsliding into tolerating (and in some cases even promoting) ever greater levels of poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. The racial discrimination inherent in the current crisis jumps out at you in the form of shocking statistics that show that African Americans have been among the most victimized by not only the predatory lending practices and cuts to social programs but also the layoffs, unemployment, and shrinking opportunities.
Social programs originally enacted to blunt the social costs of the private sector's dumping of "externalities" on the public are now being systematically dismantled. The noise about bowing down to the needs of the "Job Creators" won't alter the basic inequality and injustice that make up the core of the problem. The captains of industry and finance at some point must be forced to recognize that the costs of repression and the attendant calls for more radical reform will render their austerity measures failures.
All of this austerity targeting working people is not only digging a deeper economic pit but it's rapidly lowering the quality of life. People are starting to catch on that their suffering is directly related to the abuses of a tiny wealthy elite's desire not to pay one cent in additional taxes. These corporate and banking elites, in case you haven't noticed, are becoming very unpopular. Do they really think they can use their power over our governing institutions to turn the screws on working people without ever suffering any kind of backlash? The failure of the private sector to meet basic human needs at some point will spawn a legitimacy crisis that leads millions of people to stop believing in the "efficiency" of global capitalism. In the 1980s, what brought on the collapse of the Soviet bloc as much as anything else were the actions of tens of millions of people living under those regimes who simply stopped believing in the system. This is pretty serious stuff.
During the Cold War one of the big criticisms of Soviet communism was that the individual was coerced into serving "the system." Yet today we're hearing the exact same message from capitalist elites telling us that the individual must serve the interests of the "Job Creators," i.e. giant corporations and banks. Working people are being told that they must sacrifice their hopes and dreams, their unions and pensions, sometimes even their homes, for a vague promise that someday in the distant future their quiet servitude to the system will be rewarded when prosperity begins "trickling down." (Best of luck with that.)
There's a keen sense out there that the millions of good-paying public sector jobs that have been sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street's malfeasance are never coming back. The wretched state of things is becoming the new normal. It's now considered "good news" when the unemployment rate in some cities reaches 11.9 percent. In past years the County and City of Sacramento have spent up to $700,000 on temporary shelters for homeless people during the winter. This upcoming winter, due to the fiscal crisis, the city plans to spend $0 -- Zero. These kind of dismal local stories are being repeated all over the country. And what are the elites talking about? They're talking about more budget cuts, more austerity, more coddling of the giant corporations and banks. Hail to the "Job Creators!"
If destroying the livelihoods and futures of millions of Americans was perfectly legal and not a single financial services mover and shaker is going to go jail for the epic fraud committed it tells us something: the whole grand rip-off was pulled off with the help of our elected "leaders" whose priorities are so wrong they all should be run out of Washington on a rail. This perfectly legal grand larceny against the country must not go unpunished. And it's up to the people to start doing the punishing.
The primordial moment for this pursuit of justice has begun. It lies with the people who are now occupying Wall Street and, with a little luck their numbers might grow until some remnant of "justice" is done. What's missed is that if the whole sordid episode goes unpunished amidst all the suffering out there more and more people are simply going to stop believing in the system they're being told they must serve.
Follow Joseph A. Palermo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JosephPalermo1
Troy Jackson: Jesus' Call: Move From Greed To Greatness
The so called "job creators",(the wealthy), have only one interest, and that is not to create jobs, and raise the American standard of living, it is to accumulate wealth, and power, and control.
It is difficult for people who lack wealth, power and control to understand the driving force behind this greed. So we give the benefit of the doubt, and believe in fantasies like "trickle down economics".
Bush Tax cuts were sold as a jobs program, and instead caused the biggest economic failure in the history of the US.
Wealthy Americans seem to have a callous disregard for poor Americans, and Republican politicians are overwhelmingly biased against the working class.
It boggles my mind when I meet working class Americans who are devoted to Republican Tea Party politicians, who have no interest in improving the quality of their lives, and use scare tactics, abortion, guns, and religion, as their cynical call to prayer.
As it is, the wealthy have more rights and more access -- by virtue of their wealth -- than the millions of ordinary people who built their wealth. Time to disturb the comfort of extreme wealth!
It's way past time to stop admiring the superrich and start asking how they got that way. Question it all -- the movie ticket you can't afford, the price of groceries, the outrageous cost of travel, the skyrocketing cost of housing, the killing cost of health care, and on and on.
You are spending a king's ransom and earning a peon's wages!
Identify the culprits. Fight back.
Nothing changes if we sit at our keyboards and rage. We've got to GET IN THE STREETS!
Find a PROGRESSIVE organization that is actively fighting the oligarchy, and join. MoveOn.org is one. There are many others. Pick one:
http://www.startguide.org/orgs/orgs00.html
GET ACTIVE. TODAY. NO MORE COMPLAINING AND PUTTING IT OFF!
If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem
.
.
stand up for your rights"
Question is, how does it get changed? When do the "Jobs Creators" become actual Jobs Creators? Seems to me Corporate America has three choices:
(1) Bite the bullet and hire even if employees are not needed. It's good for business, it's good PR, It's good for America.
(2) Accept higher taxes and let Big Government be the "Jobs Creator"
(3) Continue down the same road as we are going and watch the U.S. go down the drain like a t_rd in a flushed commode.
It is great to read terrific articles that I agree with. It boosts the ego to know someone is writing what most of us are thinking. However, the problem continues to plague this great Nation and we the people are pretty much helpless to address the problem at this time. We have another year to wait to be heard...
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! VOTE 2012 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Many jobs can be created by individuals that want to own their own business. One of the things that made our country great were the hundreds and thousands of family businesses and the pride of starting and owning a business. That is the 3rd choice but everyone seems to be afraid of it and yet if we do not get back to those basics of letting the individual flourish we will be doomed to the continuation of what we are heading to...bankruptcy.
The current global financial charade is unsustainable and the ramifications of decades of abuse is becoming evident by what you are seeing in the streets around the world of "civilized " nations. There is a pervasive feeling our representatives will not take action to alleviate the crisis and people acutely aware of this realize their future will be framed by their collective action with fellow citizens.Governments have been bought and sold long ago,we are on or own.
The economy is demand driven, not supply constrained and that is very, very easy to prove. Just turn on any television and observe the commercial advertisements. Companies spend many billions of dollars to air those commercials to increase demand. If they were supply constrained, then it wouldn't make any sense to spend all that money to increase demand.
No company hires workers because of tax breaks. Companies hire workers when they have increased demand. If you have no customers, then it really doesn't matter what your tax rate is.
• Consumer spend more, but their incomes fall
The Commerce Department said Friday that consumer spending rose 0.2 percent in August after a revised 0.7 percent increase in July.
Incomes fell 0.1 percent. That's the poorest showing since a similar 0.1 percent drop in October 2009.
Consumers spend more but spending power reduced. This was taken from a Netscape news item this morning. Income falls, demand will follow.
I only worry that it's going to have to get really bad before the apathy in this country is dispelled.
The following petition or Constitutional 2012 election will do it.
http://www.change.org/petitions/eliminate-capitalistic-military-regime
1) All elected positions are chosen by the people.
2) President and vice are elected on distinct [separate} ballots.
3) Each state and DC will choose their own representatives for president and vice during the primary and certify the winner and losers to congress for a recount and notifying the public of the possible 51 president and vice candidates for November's election. In November the people elects their choice.
4) The incumbent president and vice has to be elected by one state or DC or are automatically out but if all states and DC elect them they are automatically in.
5) Congressional Representative and Senatorial districts will chose candidates of their choice and elect one during November's election only, if a tie they vote a tiebreaker.
6) That process eliminates all candidates naming themselves, parties, campaigning, contributions & presidential conventions [state & city elections will follow the same process].
7) Unconstitutionally party elected incumbents allowed the nation's present state are disqualified for reelection &retirement pay.
http://themoderatevoice.com/116733/cbs-poll-71-disapprove-of-republican-handling-of-debt-limit-crisis/
My question for the GOP: Since you were elected to create jobs, and if "uncertainty" is as bad for job creation as you have claimed for the last couple of years, why did you create so much of it?