I feel like I’m pissing into a cold headwind, and I wonder if you feel the same. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs each raked in more than $3 billion in profits in the third quarter. Stop a moment and take that in. $3 billion each. In the fallout from the financial crisis last year, some firms, like Goldman and Morgan, actually got bigger -- and with transfusions of no-strings-attached taxpayer money -- stronger, while others emerged weaker, less able to compete. Incredibly, financial power in this country is now consolidated into even fewer hands, making firms like Goldman and Morgan “too big to fail, ever,” which is almost the same thing as a license to print money. These firms now have nearly unlimited latitude to take enormous risks because they know that Washington politicians will always intervene to save their bacon.
A year after the global financial system nearly plunged over the cliff, the boom is on for politically connected firms whose alumni prowl the corridors of Congress or hold influential positions in the Obama Administration. Of course, bust is the flip side of boom and for millions of Americans the bust shows no sign of abating. Obama’s stimulus package did little for working Americans once Congress was done gutting it and re-arranging its priorities to placate nay-saying Republicans. Unemployment remains stuck in the double-digits, state governments struggle to provide services to a growing population of needy human beings, and small businesses scrimp to make ends meet. Wall Street may be celebrating its recovery with champagne brunches and gargantuan bonuses, but Main Street is still eating Spam and waiting for the kind of assistance that was lavished on the financial industry.
Don’t hold your breath. The real deal is jobs and wages, putting people to work, but don’t expect to hear much about either on ABC, NBC or Fox – or from the Obama Administration for that matter. All mainstream media outlets care about is Wall Street and runaway balloons.
The joke is on you and me, on every taxpayer, and every person who still believes the American Dream is attainable.
What’s the average wage slave to do? The political system is indifferent to our needs and desires, unaccountable even as we foot the bill, and the financial system is rigged against us. As the poet Allen Ginsberg is reported to have said, “You can’t win, can’t break even, and can’t even quit the game.”
But I can sure feel the spray in my face.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Winds of No Change
The winds are blowing but these winds maintain the status quo rather than change it.
Most Republicans wring their hands and wail about the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, budget deficits, and the burden of high taxes. If you want to see grown men and women frothing at the mouth, get the Republicans (and some Democrats, to be frank) started on the potential costs of “socialized” medicine.
These same Republicans, on the other hand, have no problem at all with corporate socialism, bloated defense budgets or open-ended military campaigns in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Republicans believe, I guess, that spending money on corporate bailouts and wars of choice enhance freedom, while social spending on Medicare or unemployment insurance or regulation enhances the role of the government at the expense of freedom.
The winds blow, but not much changes. President Obama talks a great game, an inspiring game, but appears to lack the staying power to see anything through, not to mention that he has surrounded himself with a posse of recycled champions of the established order.
Lost in the noise of talk radio hyperbole is the need to strike an appropriate balance of power between the government and business, between Capital and Labor, and between the wealthy and the poor. Excessive government interference is no better than excessive corporate socialism. Government can become too large, bloated and stifling, just as unchecked corporate power can, and usually does, lead to the reckless behavior that brought the global financial system to the brink of disaster and made life so difficult and uncertain for so many.
Republicans are suspicious of enlarging the role and power of government while Democrats, generally speaking, view government as a leveling force. But both parties are beholden to moneyed elites and when push comes to shove, big campaign contributors win, average citizens lose.
According to a recent column by Frank Rich in the New York Times, job seekers outnumber openings by a tidy 6-1 margin. The stock market shows signs of bounce – prompting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to declare that the “recession” is over. Sure, maybe on Bernanke’s street. In the real America, where people work for wages, struggle to make the mortgage and decipher the one-sided terms of their credit card accounts, afford college tuition, health insurance, gasoline, heating oil, food, electricity and transportation, the night is still dark, foreboding and full of peril.
Working Americans should be mad as hell and dead set on kicking the shit out of the first fat cat they run across. But try to disrupt the status quo and stand prepared to be attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, as protestors at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh were recently. Americans have the Constitutional right to assemble for the purpose of airing our grievances with the powers that be, but permits are hard to come by in some cities and the authorities prefer to disperse first and answer questions from the ACLU later.
The winds blow, but nothing changes.
Most Republicans wring their hands and wail about the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, budget deficits, and the burden of high taxes. If you want to see grown men and women frothing at the mouth, get the Republicans (and some Democrats, to be frank) started on the potential costs of “socialized” medicine.
These same Republicans, on the other hand, have no problem at all with corporate socialism, bloated defense budgets or open-ended military campaigns in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Republicans believe, I guess, that spending money on corporate bailouts and wars of choice enhance freedom, while social spending on Medicare or unemployment insurance or regulation enhances the role of the government at the expense of freedom.
The winds blow, but not much changes. President Obama talks a great game, an inspiring game, but appears to lack the staying power to see anything through, not to mention that he has surrounded himself with a posse of recycled champions of the established order.
Lost in the noise of talk radio hyperbole is the need to strike an appropriate balance of power between the government and business, between Capital and Labor, and between the wealthy and the poor. Excessive government interference is no better than excessive corporate socialism. Government can become too large, bloated and stifling, just as unchecked corporate power can, and usually does, lead to the reckless behavior that brought the global financial system to the brink of disaster and made life so difficult and uncertain for so many.
Republicans are suspicious of enlarging the role and power of government while Democrats, generally speaking, view government as a leveling force. But both parties are beholden to moneyed elites and when push comes to shove, big campaign contributors win, average citizens lose.
According to a recent column by Frank Rich in the New York Times, job seekers outnumber openings by a tidy 6-1 margin. The stock market shows signs of bounce – prompting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to declare that the “recession” is over. Sure, maybe on Bernanke’s street. In the real America, where people work for wages, struggle to make the mortgage and decipher the one-sided terms of their credit card accounts, afford college tuition, health insurance, gasoline, heating oil, food, electricity and transportation, the night is still dark, foreboding and full of peril.
Working Americans should be mad as hell and dead set on kicking the shit out of the first fat cat they run across. But try to disrupt the status quo and stand prepared to be attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets, as protestors at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh were recently. Americans have the Constitutional right to assemble for the purpose of airing our grievances with the powers that be, but permits are hard to come by in some cities and the authorities prefer to disperse first and answer questions from the ACLU later.
The winds blow, but nothing changes.
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