Running out of Time
The mass rallies in Wisconsin and Ohio have been triggered by the assault of Republican Governors and Legislators on public sector unions. While the response in the streets and the Wisconsin Senate recall elections has caused them to wince a bit, they will continue to use their electoral strength to persevere and attempt to break the public unions. Despite the large crowds, this battle is still being fought on Republican turf. The very success of the public sector unions is being used against them. For decades state governments have made good faith agreements with their employees to pay for pensions and benefits while failing to allocate the funds to do so. Now with fiscal crises bearing down on them, they are making scapegoats of those same employees.
Every attempt to broaden this protest to include the private sector working class will be met with a cynical response gauged to stir resentment among workers who have had no unions to protect them. These private sector workers have seen own their benefits driven down for a generation by their own corporate employers who even in the face of the Great Recession and the worst economic turndown in three generations are experiencing record profits.
These same companies are telling their employees they still cannot afford to increase benefits. They are not hiring new workers either, but instead are rewarding top executives with obscene salaries and bonuses hundreds or even thousands of times larger than those of their average employee. One publicly held company actually provided its retiring chief executive with a golden parachute worth as much as a billion dollars. It’s no wonder that the American worker is fed up.
The gap in incomes between the top one or two per cent of Americans and the rest of has grown enormously in recent years and it is no accident. Yet everyone who has the temerity to point out the growing inequities is accused of promoting “class warfare”. What has happened over the last generation is nothing less than the takeover of our country by corporate interests who make massive contributions to political candidates and causes in order to manipulate government for their own benefit.
These selfish interests are emboldened as never before, and buttressed by the recent Supreme Court decision in the “Citizens United” case, are planning strategies and raising enormous amounts of money to affect the elections in 2012.
Since they can’t quite put their finger on the cause of their frustrations, many Americans have become subject to easy manipulation. Because the Obama Administration was not aggressive in punishing the Wall Street bankers who took down the economy and inexplicably delayed its legislative response to those excesses, it was seen as complicit. After more than two years, who has gone to jail? It is as if prosecuting John Edwards for who knows what is more important to the Justice Department than all the thieves who took down the economy. The auto bailout that likely spared the country another Great Depression was seen as just more of the same. That is why corporate money and influence were able to turn the frustrations of tea partiers in 2009 into massive protests directed at defeating Democrats in 2010.
The enormous deficits piled up in recent years to finance tax breaks for the wealthy during the Bush years and to fend off economic calamity over the last two and a half years clearly must be addressed and dealt with. But deficits also serve to divert attention from the corporate takeover of America. As long as deficits alone dominate the national debate, we will be unable to get at the causes of the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest Americans.
It’s clear that many Americans have an overwhelming sense of being constantly “ripped-off”, even though they are playing by the rules. They are not quite sure who is causing their pain, but they know that political system is doing nothing to help them. Though few can articulate all of its causes, the anger is growing nonetheless. People have a sense that they are on their own. They quite understandably feel that even though they are constantly treated unfairly and with a lack of respect, there is no person, or institution they can turn to for help. And they are correct in their assessment. The political class has by and large been bought out by massive contributions from the large corporations.
In every part of their lives average everyday Americans face more expense, stagnant income, and fewer benefits as their Middle Class lives are slipping away. The “American Dream” is disappearing for them and their children as the costs of education and healthcare become more and more out of reach. Many Americans purchased homes as a way to build family wealth, but now find that even if they made a significant down payment on their home, and faithfully made payments for years, they may be “underwater,” with a mortgage balance more than the house is now worth. For many, home equity constituted a large portion of their net worth, and much or all of that has been wiped out.
Others who were not ready for the responsibility were quickly hustled into buying a home with no down payment or even encouraged to purchase one in transactions with terms as absurd as “125% Mortgages”, with “flexible interest rate loans” with much higher payments kicking in a year or two later.
Brokers and Loan Officers who profited from these sales were anxious to make the deal and move on to the next one, never bothering to explain to the purchaser the risks they faced down the road. As they fell behind in their payments, there was no one at the local lending institution they could deal with to bargain for time to catch up on their payments, because the loan had been sold to an anonymous loan packager who sold it to someone else in New York or Chicago, or overseas.
Others with poor credit brought on by job loss are forced to rent. There everything is stacked against them. No tax deduction for their rent. Leases protect the landlord, not the renter, and deposits are rarely returned. No one looks out for them.
The Healthcare industry is a nightmare for consumers as well. We pay nearly twice as much for healthcare as any other country in the world yet tens of millions go uninsured. Even though a major portion of medical and drug research is financed by the American taxpayer, we are charged significantly more than citizens of any other nation for pharmaceutical products. Billions are wasted on unnecessary tests conducted in hospitals and clinics ostensibly to protect doctors and medical facilities from lawsuits, but also to pad the bottom line.
Insurance companies routinely reject claims when patients are most at risk financially. Many go without health insurance and delay treatment because they can’t afford the cost, only to lose their homes and perhaps be wiped out financially when they finally seek medical care. The Health Reform legislation has been widely criticized by some but any positive change proposed to improve our system is fought tooth-and-nail by some of the most powerful lobbyists and interest groups in Washington.
Still the consumer patients often feel that they are disrespected by a medical system doesn’t fully explain their options when their health, even their lives are at stake
Many giant corporations have “cash pipelines” into our homes, nibbling away at our paychecks, raising rates with no one to check them.
The utility companies are charging more for heat, electricity, water, sewer maintenance, and garbage pickup with little or no restraint on rate increases. Regulatory structures set up to protect the consumer from profiteering have been largely neutered or become dominated by politically appointed commissioners who are little more than shills for the industries. Giant utility conglomerates have emerged taking them beyond the scope of state or local regulators.
Cable and Satellite Television giants tailor the consumer’s options to fit their profit plan, caring little what the consumer might want. Consumers must subscribe to a hundred channels they neither want nor need to get the fifteen or twenty that are important to them. They can’t get the one sports or science channel they want but instead are offered “premium packages” with still more unwanted channels they must pay for.
A generation ago, local governments had the power to bargain for consumer friendly choices, but the party that hates “Big Government” saw to it that the power to help the consumer is now safely vested in Washington where lobbyists for the telecommunications giants hold sway, and disgracefully Democrats stood by and let it happen.
Cell phones have become our de facto emergency lifelines, but no state or local government can tell the industry giants to share their towers and place enough of them off the main roads to insure reception. Cell phone plans too are stacked against the consumer who is forced to buy more time or bandwidth than they need as a hedge against highly inflated overtime charges. The power to change any of it rests in Washington where the “telecoms” are firmly in control.
And it goes without saying that the Airlines have little respect for us either. Their “profit plan” forces us into the six-hour marathon through their hub in Atlanta for a flight that should have taken ninety minutes. Passengers are treated rudely by airline personnel who have seen their own salaries and benefits slashed repeatedly. “Baggage Fees” and “Rescheduling Fees” distort the real cost of flying. Passengers are stranded on the tarmac for hours and forbidden to leave the plane because of airline errors. Flights are cancelled at the last minute for “mechanical reasons” because too few tickets have been sold. Sorry about the chaos this causes in your business or personal life.
These examples are but a sample of the injustices that the consumer must face at every turn. “American Capitalism” is constantly praised as our economic salvation, but true capitalism depends on competition and in many industries competition is disappearing in America.
As corporate conglomerates grow larger and larger through mergers and acquisitions more and more industries have become dominated by monopolies and oligopolies. This of course leads to more and more manipulation of the political system for their benefit. Some of this has always taken place, public rail transportation was ripped up in most American cities after World War II so General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler could sell more buses, for example. But today, blatant manipulation of our government for the benefit of one or another giant corporation is on steroids.
Giant Oil Companies, for example are wallowing in record profits yet still receive billions in subsidies even as we fail to take the necessary steps to make clean energy technologies profitable. Solar and Wind technologies developed in this country are producing a million manufacturing jobs in China and other countries instead of here in America because our choices are manipulated by Big Oil’s influence on our government. Because of rising oil prices our addiction becomes more expensive every year. And even more offensive is the terrible price we pay in American lives sacrificed as we are drawn into unnecessary wars to defend a commodity produced in some of the most dangerous parts of the world.
Throughout the ever larger corporations that dominate nearly all industries, massive profits are channeled not to workers or even to stockholders but to ever-increasing compensation for the corporate managers whose salaries and bonuses are approved by interlocking boards composed of other executives and consultants they choose and compensate. Whenever and wherever this happens the consumer is sure to lose.
So it’s no wonder that the average Middle Class American, struggling to get by feels alienated by a system that treats them like sheep, expecting them to accept without question whatever commercial products or services are offered to them, in whatever form. The “customer is always right” philosophy that built American Capitalism died long ago and Americans feel it in their bones.
What progressives need to do now is to ignite a massive national movement to fight back against this brazen corporate takeover of our country. It will require us to pivot and broaden the protest beyond the discussion of benefits or the right to collective bargaining or any other issue and confront the unholy alliance between our politicians and the corporations who finance their elections. It is that alliance between the corporate class and the political class that drives the seething anger of so many Americans, even if they do not yet fully comprehend it.
Failing to understand the causes of that anger and respond to it is the principal reason for the electoral debacle we suffered in November. We Democrats have forgotten who we are and who we are fighting for. Our message fails to resonate because we seem to be more concerned with the battles of the last generation than with the collapse of our economy and the indifference of the corporate class to the millions who are out of work . When we figure that out and fully embrace the causes of the beleaguered and rapidly disappearing Middle Class, only then will we be able to build that mass political movement and take the country back from the corporations that would kill the American Dream for their own selfish interests. But we are running out of time.