Asked why he robbed so many banks, Willie Sutton famously said, “Because that’s where the money is.”
In the past two years, we’ve witnessed a spree of robberies that have turned Sutton’s comment on its head. Banks are where the money disappeared, cleaned out by bank executives with a gambling addiction using everybody’s money but their own. They were rescued from their own thievery after successfully convincing two successive Presidents to empty the federal treasury to keep the entire US economy from total collapse. And now they’re paying themselves a king’s ransom in compensation for being so good at all they rob. Sutton was a rank amateur compared to this gang.
Meanwhile, back at the country, the locals have been waiting on the sheriff, a posse, a cavalry, anyone, to go after the stolen loot and put the bad guys in the hoosegow. Except technically, that’s impossible, as most of the robberies occurred within the law as it currently exists.
But what was the sheriff and his Congressional posse thinking when they decided to consult those robbers about what new legislation would make them change their thieving ways? Brazenly, the robbers insisted the government should provide them shiny new shovels for the next time they need to empty the nation’s vaults.
Frank Rich, yesterday:
Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.
He points out a chief source of the country’s disillusionment came from the naked display of Congressional pandering and corporate greed in the health care deform bill:
Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.
I’m a huge skeptic of doom prophets, but this time the downward trajectory of our nation’s fortunes really are worth considerable alarm. Citizen outrage is now pandemic and deservedly so.
Forget the partisan thing about “Those stupid TeaBaggers!” and “Those Socialist Lefties!” It’s time to step out of the line of that incessant fire and review what has us all on edge, demanding more from our elected representatives.
Consider banking reforms, beginning with this interview of Senator Bernie Sanders by Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC. Ask yourself: why did the SEC seal the AIG files for 10 years?
On another front, there’s last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which overthrew 100 years of past SCOTUS rulings with a narrowly divided court granting corporations broad free speech rights during elections. So broad they’ll finish off the same rights of all but the wealthiest real persons. A friended woman on my Facebook wrote about the confirmation hearings of recent Republican justices:
“Stare decisis” the principle of honoring prior court precedent. Didn’t then-nominees Alito and Roberts say they would abide by it? Under oath? Didn’t they just overturn a previous SCOTUS ruling to give businesses the right to in effect buy elections? Isn’t this the sort of lying under oath that the process of impeachment was meant to correct? [Hmmm… Ending Democracy vs. Blow Job, which is worse?”]
Thank you, Barbara Haikal. It’s certainly a good question why judicial impeachment’s not even being discussed. Yet.
President Obama responded to the ruling by promising a strong response.
“With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics,” said President Obama in a statement. “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans… That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision.”
Even the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act was gutted by the ruling, so it’s not a left/right issue. In simplest terms, the necessary cure is full public financing of all Congressional and presidential campaigns.
Will the President tackle that and is he capable of delivering? The Biggie Business Gang has successfully thwarted such reforms for decades as they’ve wielded their lobbying and concomitant campaign funding decision muscle without even blushing once.
(I could carry on into the corruptions of the Defense budget that regularly cause serious deformations of our foreign policy, exposing us all to physical harm. Are our two major wars kept going to stimulate business activity or to keep troops and mercenaries from retiring and enlarging our already too large unemployed labor pool? Good question, but for the sake of brevity, let’s keep the focus on direct economic and election policy.)
Both the contested election of 2000 and this latest decision show a court pattern of deference to those with the greatest capacity to thwart the popular will of the majority of voters. The system we have displays favoritism to the two major political parties, to the too-big-to-believe businesses and the shrinking labor unions and to the wealthiest individuals, all at the expense of the other 94% to 95% of us. The People. The folks who are supposed to hold the ultimate power over our government.
And let’s not forget that the declining numbers of Big Labor Unions, which have been the only limited protection force to stave off the financial predators, are largely due to the same Big Business Gang. They’ve exported our manufacturing and customer support jobs overseas and lobbied hard to limit the ways remaining workers can unionize.
Nobody can seriously claim there’s not a lot of hidden hanky-panky going on between Big Banks, Big Brokers, Big Insurance, Big Pharma and the politicians they’ve bought to serve them. There’s plenty of blame that can be directed at elected members of the majority Democratic Party, from the Clinton Administration’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, to the dozen or two Congressional Democrats that have stymied the efforts of more than 250 of their peers to reform the system and revitalize the economy. The Republican response has been completely dismal with 100% voting in lockstep to oppose everything the Democrats propose. Their strategy’s transparent: keep tens of millions of Americans at the same level of suffering and the Democrats will bear the blame next November and beyond.
Oh they’re concerned about jobs, alright …. theirs.
Bob Herbert sums up the economy’s delayed rescue perfectly:
The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.
What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.
Those at the bottom of the economic heap seem all but doomed in this environment. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston put the matter in stark perspective after analyzing the employment challenges facing young people in Chicago: “Labor market conditions for 16-19 and 20-24-year-olds in the city of Chicago in 2009 are the equivalent of a Great Depression-era, especially for young black men.”
The Republican Party has abandoned any serious approach to the nation’s biggest problems, economic or otherwise. It may be resurgent, but it’s not a serious party. That leaves only the Democrats, a party that once championed working people and the poor, but has long since lost its way.
Sure, Obama’s rhetoric has grown strong in the wake of the Massachusetts special election of yet another eager obstructionist. Yet even in its heat, he promises bipartisanship, the equivalent of bringing a tooth fairy to a gunfight.
And that’s where we come in. You and me.
Sure, Paul Volcker and Elizabeth Warren offer us a place to put our hopes into meaningful, effective reforms. Even if they succeed - and the consensus isn’t there yet - the biggest missing elements are an immediate Jobs Growth plan and a longer term reform of the campaign finance system to rein in the extensive bribery that has kidnapped enough of our representatives to preclude our paying the ransom.
We also need to recognize how to prioritize the tasks ahead. As Glenn Greenwald points out quite convincingly, our immediate problem really isn’t last week’s Supreme Court ruling. That was merely the final nail in a rotted coffin. A replacement will take time.
Author/announcer/activist Thom Hartmann points out where that longer term fight must be targeted. At the original claim of corporate personhood which was bought and put forth dishonestly.
My thanks to FB friend and author/educator Laurence Overmire, who passed this on to me:
“The history of how the idea of Corporate Personhood became law is shocking and stems from a Supreme Court case in 1886: Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. The following is excerpted from Thom Hartmann’s “We the People” (Coreway Media Inc., 2004, pp. 76-80):”
“[The railroads] mounted challenge after challenge before the Supreme Court, claiming that the 14th Amendment should grant the railroads human rights under the Bill of Rights. Finally, in 1886, they pulled off a coup.
“In 1886, Santa Clara County, California, sued the Southern Pacific Railroad over non-payment of taxes and, in losing the lawsuit, paved the way for the corporate takeover of the United States of America… Before the Supreme Court hearing was held, the railroad – apparently not willing to rely merely on the strength of its arguments – had courted Justice Stephen Field with, among other things, the possibility of support for a presidential run. In the National Archives, we found letters from the railroads offering free trips and other benefits to the 1886 Court’s Chief Justice, Morrison R. Waite. To top that off, one of their own was the Court Reporter, a highly prestigious position in those days, with a salary even higher than that of the justices themselves.
“The railroad argued that the Fourteenth Amendment – which freed the slaves in 1868 by guaranteeing all persons equal protection under the law regardless of race – had also freed corporations because they should be considered ‘persons’ just like humans.
“The attorney for Santa Clara County, Delphin M. Delmas, fought back ferociously… ‘The whole history of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates beyond dispute that its whole scope and object was to establish equality among men – an attainable result – and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings [corporations] – an impossible result…
“[Chief Justice Waite] refused to rule that the railroad corporations were persons in the same category as humans. In a handwritten note Waite wrote: ‘We avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.” And nowhere in the decision itself does the Court say corporations are persons.
“However, in writing up the case’s headnote – a commentary that has no precedential status – the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president named J. C. Bancroft Davis, defied his own Chief Justice and improperly opened the headnote with this sentence: ‘The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
“By the time the Reporter’s headnotes were published the Chief Justice was dead. Quickly, corporate attorneys picked up the language of Davis’s headnote and began to recite it like a mantra. ‘Corporations are persons’… Soon the Supreme Court itself, in a stunning display of either laziness (not reading the actual case) or deception (rewriting the Constitution without issuing an opinion or having open debate on the issue), was quoting Davis’s headnote in subsequent cases. While Davis’s original headnote didn’t have the force of law, once the Court quoted it as the basis for later decisions, the new doctrine of corporate personhood became law.”
That original proposition has to be disputed and rejected, and the intent of the Constitution’s founders would support such a move, based on the thoughts of Jefferson and others about corporations.
Jefferson:
I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
As that link points out, Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas and Sandra Day O’Connor are among other noted Supreme Court justices who’ve disputed the notion of corporate personhood.
Jefferson also wrote:
The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.
Preserving freedom of speech and the press is crucial, yet with the federal government’s dispensation of (TV) broadcast rights, the press has already been confined by the power of money. The Old Media has been largely bought up by Republican and conservative business barons, who control the spin of the events so Democrats, progressives and liberals are always cast as the bad guys causing all the misery though the opposite is true right now. The Democrats are merely janitors doing the cleanup for the suffering caused by a majority Republican Congress and President from 2001 through 2008, but they’re working too slow to keep the smell of rotting lives out of the air.
We can no longer look to any big men upstairs for the answers. But looking around the progressive activist internet, an awful lot of heat’s being wasted debating Obama’s worth and on strategies rooted in conflicting philosophies. The responses have become so predictable that it can rightly be called Keyborg Activism. A million botmonkeys typing might reproduce Shakespeare, but the nation’s belly needs bread right now, not bard.
Instead, our inspiration must come from folks who’ve proven they can master the impossible. And this is the perfect day to highlight one of them.
Imagine a 90 year old woman spending 14 months walking 3200 miles across our country to deliver the message to Congress that campaign financing reform is the ultimate way to limit the powers of Big Money from controlling votes. That happened ten years ago and Granny D is celebrating her 100th birthday today.
And she’s not done talking and instructing us yet. Just three days ago she issued this response to the Supreme Court’s free speech decision about campaign ads:
The Supreme Court, representing a radical fringe that does not share the despair of the grand majority of Americans, has made things considerably worse by undoing the modest reforms I walked for and went to jail for, and that tens of thousands of other Americans fought very hard to see enacted. So now, thanks to this Court, corporations can fund their candidates without limits and they can run mudslinging campaigns against everyone else, right up to and including election day.
The Supreme Court now opens the floodgates to usher in a new tsunami of corporate money into politics. If we are to retain our democracy, we must go a new direction until a more reasonable Supreme Court is in place. I would propose a one-two punch of the following nature:
Use the link and read her suggested paths forward and note one of her closing observations:
I urge the large reform organizations to consider this strategy. They have never listened to me in the past, but they also have not gotten the job done and need to come alive now or get out of the way.
And to the Supreme Court, you force us to defend our democracy - a democracy of people and not corporations - by going in breathtaking new directions. And so we shall.
And here she is on YouTube from an interview last week.
Have you found the power of one yet? If the centenarian can still walk two miles a day, how much more energy must you have to get out and take up the torch and pass it forward?
Trustbusting Republican President Teddy Roosevelt proved no corporation was too big to fail, but they were too big to be allowed to exist without government regulations. If our government doesn’t shrink them down to a healthy size, then we can do it, by pulling our monies out of the big banks and entrusting our assets to smaller community financial institutions.
Take up the fight. Read The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey and consider what you or a small group could do to disrupt the worst corporate offenders. Organize boycotts. Start touting a million citizen march on Wall Street. Expand the black market transport of Canadian pharmaceuticals into this country.
Whatever. It’s really the power of LOTS of ones, but each begins with the power of you. Don’t buy for a minute that joining a FacsBook Group or signing a petition will be anywhere near enough. Look in the mirror. Look at your backside. It can move mountains when you keep it off the upholstery. And if you keep looking to Obama or Congress or anyone else to save our country from failing, you’re gambling, just like the banks were.
