Face it. We live in two nations, sharply divided by an enormous economic chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. This should be an obvious fact of life for most Americans. Just read the story in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal headlined "Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery." Or the recent New York Times story pointing out "that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million," a 23 percent gain over the year before.
In the midst of a jobless recovery, those same corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in reserves, refusing to invest in this country, as increasing percentages of their profits are garnered in tax-sheltered operations abroad. And the bankers who caused the economic meltdown have turned against President Barack Obama, who saved them; instead they favor a tea-party-dominated Republican Party that seeks to limit any restraint on corporate greed while destroying the ability of state and federal governments to bring some measure of relief to ordinary folk.
The whole point of the tea party is to focus concern over our stagnant economy on something called "big government" while ignoring the big corporations that have bought the government as an accessory to their marketing strategies. Big government is big precisely because it now exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational capitalism, whether through a bloated defense budget, trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or monetary policies that serve the interests of the largest companies.
It was their lobbyists who got Congress to end sensible regulations of financial shenanigans, and now, with the new tea party members of Congress as their most stalwart allies, they are yanking the teeth from the very mild regulations that Obama got through the last Congress. As the Associated Press reported: "Congressional Republicans are greeting the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama's financial overhaul law by trying to weaken it, nibble by nibble."
It is nothing short of demagogic for the Republicans to be complaining about the debt when it was the radical deregulatory policies that they pursued which caused all that governmental red ink in the first place. What a hoax to pretend that teachers' pensions or environmental protections are responsible for a debt that increased by 50 percent as a direct consequence of the banking collapse. Yet they want to gut even the tepid regulations that became law under the Obama administration, foaming at the mouth about sensible regulation as job killing when it is the uncontrolled greed of Wall Street that is at the root of our high unemployment.
Congressional Republicans are cutting funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as if those already underfunded agencies are centers of anti-business radicalism. The CFTC is run by former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler, who, back when he was in the Clinton Treasury Department serving under another onetime Goldman leader, Robert Rubin, teamed up with Republicans in Congress to gut financial regulation. He is one of the Obama regulators who has managed to delay even the minor controls that the Dodd-Frank law requires for the still wildly out-of-control $600 trillion derivatives market.
What a joke that the tea party assertion that radicals have taken over the Obama government is embraced even by lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, whose former executives have populated the Obama administration as widely as they did the two previous administrations. All they are missing this time around is that they didn't get to have one of their own named as treasury secretary, as was the case in both the Clinton and Bush cabinets.
This week, the Los Angeles Times reported on Goldman's renewed lobbying efforts in Washington aimed at watering down what remains of the promise of Dodd-Frank. True to Washington tradition, Goldman has hired Michael Paese, a former top staffer for the "liberal" Rep. Barney Frank to head its Washington operation, which last year spent $4.6 million lobbying Congress to soften the bill, a task now made far easier with Goldman's tea party allies in the new Republican-dominated House. As the Times noted, "Goldman has spent much of its money on hired guns from major Washington lobbying firms, including former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.)."
Between the faux populism of the tea party and the army of sellout ex-congressional staffers and politicians from both parties, the Washington fix is in. Short of hitting it big on a lottery ticket, the vast majority of Americans are sentenced to a future of lowered expectations, insurmountable personal debt and dismal job prospects.
They may not know it, however, thanks to the constant propaganda from a corporate culture dominated by images of a classless nation in which all consume the delights of the American dream, from the perfect smartphone to the perfect pill for bladder control, while merrily hacking away on the perfectly manicured golf course of one's fantasies.
Robert, do you even realize you just made the point that the current "Democratic" administration is just as full of corrupt big business execs as the last administration?
"Between the faux populism of the tea party "
Really? Perhaps if you write it a hundred times every day for the next 2 years, maybe just maybe your wish will come true.
People are waking up to the realization that the current Left/Right political paradigm is a fake and that the cheerleaders in mainstream media that cheer for the Democrats are just as fake as the cheerleaders for the Republican party. Both party's are 2 faces of the same power hungry beast.
So keep up the cheering because the more you do it and the harder you try the more obvious it becomes to the public that the whole thing is and has been a lie and that its time for change outside of the current Left/Right faux choice.
When Goldman is making record profits and still sending jobs to Singapore, you have to realize that they just screwed you
As he kneels slavishly to his banking cartel kingpins, one could be assured that this Treasury Sec knows the polished secret hand shake.
While one indeed had a more nefarious role in causation the other has served to bolster or amplify those policies for the privileged.
The gamesmanship and theater that the political duopoly is playing on the public is becoming evident.
...you are noticing, I just wish others would do so as well.
What an excellent fiction. You have a bit of everything: greedy bankers, duplicitous tea partiers, evil CEO’s, poor hard working exploited middle class workers who have never missed a day of work and must walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to and from the factory, but you left out the Koch’s circling your cabin in Montana using stealth helicopters as they seek to put a listening devices in your food while selling your daughters to the Chinese for ‘mail-order brides’.
A few points:
a) What CEO’s make have nothing to do with what unskilled factory workers make. Both have their own supply-demand and price dynamics and, unfortunately, we now graduate so many unskilled workers that they exceed demand. That is what is driving down the price of labor. What the CEO makes is extraneous.
b) Companies are not investing in America because the tax and regulatory environment makes it impractical. They are expanding, in Canada where the corporate tax rate is going to 15%, or Singapore where it is 17.5%, or even in China where they nearly PAY you to open a factory there. Why? Because corporations create jobs, and having them pay low tax and create jobs is better than rapaciously gouging them and creating NO jobs.
But in America we would rather worry about what the CEO’s have in their pocket rather than encouraging them to create jobs. Gone are the days when this type of class-warfare worked.
Kai
where to begin. How about -by and for the people-
CEO's and executive director's have been unsupervised just enough, whereby they were short-term incentivized (beyond lavish) for hollowing out (read:insolvency) their own corporation.
Not only did they keep the fraudulent ill-gotten riches but the public, via their underling politicians and FED Treasury, made good, not only their corporations debt but let them cash-in on the synthetic (read: make believe) counter-party derivative garbage.
...now if one had waded into the deeper end of the narrative pool...you would realize that's just the beginning of the corruption and looting.
p.s. the only part of your first sentence that is fiction is the part you actually wrote on your own..."who have never missed a day of work and must walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to and from the factory".
...but it's all to clear that's how you roll.
Your point (a) is also correct inasmuch as "What CEO’s make have nothing to do with what unskilled factory workers make." is true. This is another problem of disconnect, the CEO of a real corporation should be paid whatever they are paid this is fine. The problem is the CEOs of financial institutions, in many cases, should be in prison anyway. It is obnoxious, and rightfully so, to many people that they are unemployed and without homes due to the actions of these individuals - and somehow these people get raises paid for out of taxpayer bailout money?!
I am not sure what your first statement about the ‘disconnect’ between the wealthiest and corporations. Could you please restate in a more cogent manner? Thanks in advance.
Your second statement paragraph was just convoluted but I pulled a few issues out of the conflated mess:
a) Why should CEO’s of financial institution be in jail?
b) What percentage of CEO’s in the US are in financial firms? The above is about CEO pay, most firms are non-financial in nature, specifically as pertains to the article above.
c) How did the actions of financial firms force people to buy homes they could not afford?
d) What people get bailouts? Are you talking about the unions, car companies, unemployed people and the home owners that make a bulk of the unpaid TARP and stimulus funds still outstanding Wall Street already paid back. We are at a profit in respect to those bailouts.
Kai
The CTFC had it's teeth pulled by Clinton democrats which was the real legislative bullet-in-the-head for our economy.
Remember, the Tea Party started their protesting with TARP.
The relevant fact is that Obama hasn't turned against them, evidenced by him still being surrounded by their agents. In the final analysis we can't tell if Goldman has really turned against Obama, but we can tell that they are indeed utilizing everything at their disposal, including Tea Parties. Most importantly, they are paying for all of that with your money! ;-)
The Supreme Court declared (using extra-Constitutional powers that it therefore does not have ...) that it is "corporate freedom of speech."
But the actual Constitution (Article 2, Section 4, Word 25) calls it: "Bribery." And puts it right next door to: "Treason."
It does not take a rocket scientist to understand clearly how this works. It only takes a historian.
It is the hope of these criminals that "The Tea Party, Inc." will siphon away the growing discontent of the American public, diverting it into a channel which can easily be controlled (and neutered). But I do not think that it will work. The bald criminality of the situation is simply too overt: we are at the point in any dime-store novel where the bad guy rips off his good-guy suit and says, "BWA-HA-HA-HAHA!" because he no longer feels that he has to conceal who he actually is. His plans have succeeded, he thinks, beyond his wildest imagining. The good guys, he thinks, can't do anything to stop him.
But, as always, there are still twenty pages left. . .
Capitalism - with all its warts & boils - only works IF the incompentent are allowed to fail, and if the criminal element has to do some jail-time.
We've not been living under a real capitalistic system for quite some time folks. We've got socialism for the rich & powerful, and fend for yourself (largely) for eveybody else.
You said it Mr Sheer. There have been a plethora of articles on Huff'Po recently pointing out that
Wall St owns Washington, owns both parties. Lock, stock, and barrel. Many of the hardcore partisans
out there are too invested in the "my team" mentality too hear this fundamental truth. Thank you
Mr Sheer for once again pointing at the raw, unvarnished fact of it.
But when you ask 'baggers what concerns them the most, they say the deficit and government regulations. That's just not a normal, sane human response. It's the response of a corporation posing as a human being(s).