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Edited on Mon Sep-22-08 03:46 PM by ddeclue
For decades now, ever since the days of Ronald Reagan we’ve heard the conservative Republican mantra repeated over and over:
Privatize, deregulate, and downsize government.
There’s never been a merger they’ve been against – banks, airlines, oil companies, credit card companies, insurance companies, energy utilities and phone companies.
We were told there was only an upside to these mergers, never mind that they increased corporate power at the expense of consumer, labor, citizen, and government power. Never mind that these mergers made it harder to find a job, harder to bargain for a fair wage, harder to bargain for a fair price and harder to enforce rules to protect people, the environment and even national security.
Now we are being told that these merged institutions are simply “too large to fail”. Where was that important piece of information when they were asking us for permission to merge?
There’s never been an industry that’s had too little regulation for them – Savings and loans, airlines, telecoms, energy companies, real estate, stock brokerages, and banks. Their claim was “just get the government out of our way and we’ll make all of you rich”.
Well somebody got rich, but it wasn’t most of us.
They’ve effectively privatized health care already and turned it into a commodity that the poor and middle class increasingly can not afford – over 45 million Americans are without health insurance today because a family of 4 has to pay $1200 a month for basic coverage a figure that is rising 10 to 20% a year and those who have it are still likely to be bankrupted by the first major medical problem they face.
When the people have cried out for affordable healthcare, they haven’t been told that they were “too large to fail” but rather that they were “too small to matter”. So what if you go bankrupt because your spouse had a heart attack or cancer? That’s a problem for the marketplace to resolve.
Now they want every American to bail out insurance giant AIG but they won’t provide those same Americans with affordable health care coverage because they’re too big to fail and we’re too small to matter.
They’ve privatized a college education too.
Beginning with the GI Bill after World War II and reaching its peak in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the government treated a higher education as a national investment in our most important asset – “We the People”.
Loans and grants like the Pell Grant made it possible for anyone who studied hard and worked hard to go to college and have a better life for themselves and their children.
Since the 1980’s however, they have increasingly decided that college is for them and their children – not you and yours. If you can’t afford $60,000 up front for your college education, they’ll loan it to you at expensive rates – if you qualify for the loan that is.
And they aren’t satisfied with privatizing college, they want to privatize primary and secondary education too through school vouchers which are not enough to pay for private school but are enough to defund public schools and bankrupt them.
They don’t believe in public schools because:
Your dreams are too small to matter –theirs aren’t.
Owning your own home used to be an American dream too.
Wages have been nearly stagnant for a decade now because our good jobs have been shipped overseas where these companies that are too big to fail can find workers who they can pay a few cents an hour, workers without representative democratic government to protect them and workers without a right to collectively bargain for their labor – rights we have taken for granted in this country for a century or more now.
Meanwhile the price of a home has climbed 10 to 20% a year in many places and to force housing prices upwards in spite of these flat wages, the banks have created risky loan packages to artificially inflate demand that were ultimately doomed to fail and then resold them to institutional investors on Wall Street to make a quick buck and avoid the inevitable consequences of these doomed loans.
Had they not been allowed to play these financial games, had an agenda of common sense regulation ruled rather than corporate greed pushed through by corporate lobbyists, housing prices would have tracked the flat wages because the law of supply and demand would have forced the issue.
Now they tell us that these Wall Street investors are “too big to fail” – Well what about the rest of us?
When it was Bourbon Street, they dragged their feet to help those trying to recover from Hurricane Katrina and it was too little and too late. Apparently the Lower Ninth Ward and Coastal Mississippi were too small to matter.
When it was Main Street with hundreds of thousands of homeowners being foreclosed upon, that “wasn’t the government’s problem – we should let the market work” we were told. We were too small to matter too.
They’ve also largely privatized our company pensions by turning them from a guaranteed payment by our employer for a lifetime of hard work into a risky 401K or IRA investment in a stock market where it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two levels of transparency available – one for the ultra-rich who are given the real story and one for the rest of us who have to fend for ourselves amongst all the marketing hype that passes for financial news on TV and in the newspapers.
We’ve seen these investments go up in smoke at places like Enron and now it appears that we are at the edge of a disaster that will make Enron and the 1980’s S&L crisis look “bush league” If you’ll pardon that pun – they’re too big to fail and they are going to take us down with them if we don’t help.
For decades they’ve been about privatization – they were all about privatizing their profits and not sharing the wealth - now that they’ve gotten into trouble they have all become socialists overnight who want us to help them socialize their debts. Why?
Because they’re too big to fail – we’re too small to matter.
They’ve tried to privatize our social security safety net, arguing that that money would be better off invested in the stock market and trying to claim that Social Security was going to be insolvent in a few decades if we did nothing.
Thank God we did exactly that when George W. Bush pushed this plan a few years ago – nothing .
Had we let them invest our Social Security money in the stock market, Social Security would be insolvent right now not in 20 years.
They’re too big to fail – but hey - your grandma’s too small to matter.
The conservative Republican economic dogma has failed spectacularly this week and now they want the rest of –the ones who are too small to matter – to bail them out without any strings attached. They don’t want us to hold them accountable for their colossal blunder, they just want a trillion dollar ($1,000,000,000,000.00) blank check from us so that they can try the same thing again.
I say now is the time to take our country back. Now is the time to take our dreams back. Now is the time to take our future back from all those who think that “Greed is good” and that we don’t matter.
If they want our help, it must be with strings attached:
• It’s time to elect a new leadership to the White House that puts people first – put Obama in – show Republicans the door. If we keep voting for more of the same leaders we will get more of the same results.
• Demand real regulation of key national industries like banking, investments, healthcare, telecommunications, airlines, and energy.
• Break up these big monopolies that are “too big to fail” and enforce the Sherman Anti-Trust act. Prohibit any more buyouts of companies not already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• Restore common sense bankruptcy laws in this country – if they’re too big to fail, we should have the same kind of protection too – reverse the recent changes to bankruptcy laws that are strangling families finances.
• Put caps on credit card interest rates that are prime + 5%. These companies are making obscene profits and trapping regular people in debt for their entire lives and giving them no chance to get ahead.
• Cap executive salaries to some reasonable ratio of the lowest salary paid by that company – I would say 250 to 1 is reasonable to me. If the stock room clerk makes $20,000/yr, the CEO should make no more than $5 million. Many of those responsible for this mess are walking away with tens of millions in bonuses and golden parachutes while their employees get to file for unemployment and use up their dwindling savings and find an even lower paying job.
• Raise the minimum wage to exceed the poverty level by a significant amount. At the very least it ought to be $10/hr – which is what the 1969 minimum wage would be today were it adjusted for inflation.
• Make those who profited the most in short term capital gains pay the most to clean up the mess. The motivation to turn a quick buck on Wall Street has short circuited the real productivity in our economy and created a hollow economy where little real wealth is being created in terms of actual goods and services and substituted a phony paper economy in its place.
• Require those who sell goods and services in this country to abide by American health, safety, labor and environmental laws unless they can demonstrate that their own laws constitute a higher standard. Tax any company who moves offshore to avoid these American laws an equivalent amount plus a penalty to create a financial disincentive to doing so. They are avoiding the costs but we end up paying them with tainted pet food and vegetables and lead based toys for our children.
• Pay off people’s defaulted mortgages first and let that money “trickle up” to the lenders rather than paying off the lenders and leaving the borrowers hanging. This way Wall Street gets its money but Main Street gets it first.
• Make affordable health care and education universal basic rights of all Americans, not commodities to which only the rich can afford.
We are all in this boat together – if they’re “too big to fail” – it’s time that the rest of us start mattering again.
Sincerely,
Douglas J. De Clue
Democratic Activist
Orlando, FL
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