In 2010, Lloyd Blankfein earned $53,965,418. Just two years earlier, as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he had petitioned the U.S. Government to give his company $12.9 billion dollars in bailout money, despite having taken out an insurance policy to cover any losses the company might have sustained. In other words, Goldman Sachs didn’t need the money: they just found a way to make the U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for some very bad decisions they had made.
After receiving the money, Blankfein in turn distributed it to 32 business entities, a large chunk of it going to overseas companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland and DZ AG Deutsche Zantrake Genossenschaftz, a German cooperative banking group.
If you average out Blankfein’s income for that period, on any given day, he earned almost $150,000. That means he would have earned over $500 in the time it would have taken him to read this diary.
In that same amount of time, nearly seventeen million children in America went hungry. We’re talking about a segment of our population that is roughly equivalent in numbers to the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, and New Mexico.
Over the past couple of weeks, many conservatives have asked voters, “Is your life better off than it was four years ago?” They hoped to draw attention to the lackluster performance of the economy, believing their constituents would place the blame on President Obama. Unfortunately for them, most American’s are smart enough to realize that it was just a gimmick, and their thinly veiled effort has inadvertently cast a glaring spotlight on their obstructionism. If Republicans were really interested in assessing the quality of life for the average American, and if they sincerely wanted to know the underlying causes of our suffering, then perhaps they should ask: “Which political party’s policies have had the most adverse affect on the lives of our children, the most vulnerable people in our nation?”
November 17, 2009
The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.
Washington Post - Amy Goldstein.
August 24, 2011
Every day, children in every county in the United States wake up hungry. They go to school hungry. They turn out the lights at night hungry.
That is one of the stunning key findings of a new study to be released Thursday by Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks and the largest hunger charity in the country.
As many as 17 million children nationwide are struggling with what is known as food insecurity. To put it another way, one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life, according to the study, "Map the Meal Child Food Insecurity 2011."
ABC - Kimberly Brown
May 7, 2012 - The Huffington Post:
Around one in four parents know of a child in their area who may be going hungry, a survey has found.
The poll suggests that the problem may be getting worse, with many parents saying they have seen an increase in the numbers of youngsters they are worried about.
Sep 12, 2012
New numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau report a steady decline in median household income for Americans, a yawning inequality gap and more than one in five children under age 18 living in poverty.
The Guardian (bold emphasis mine)
There is no way for either political party to spin the results: the quality of life for the children who are going hungry in our country hasn’t improved much during the last four years. But while the Democratic Party's efforts have been ineffective at times, the Republican's obstructionism has been unbelievably cruel in its intent.
From the same article by the Guardian:
The figures released by the census also show that little dent has been made on America’s high levels of poverty, with some 15% of the nation – representing around 46.2 million people – living in poverty in 2011. The figures are worse for the very young, where the poverty rate for those under the age of 18 is 21.9% – or some 16.1 million children. These latter figures are roughly unchanged in 2011 from 2010.
However, income inequality in the US has grown. The Gini Index, which measures income inequality, increased by 1.6% to a score of 0.477 in 2011. Though few other countries have yet produced figures for 2011, that number for the US shows a more unequal economy for America than the 2010 figures for countries like Uruguay, Argentina and Bangladesh. Within the figures there was also an increase in the share of aggregate income for the top 20% of Americans of 1.6% and – within that group – the top 5% saw a jump of 4.9%.
If you examine the records closely, it is obvious that no political group has been more responsible for the suffering in America than the leaders of the GOP. They have consistently introduced legislation that favors only the wealthiest 1% and they have thwarted every effort this administration has made to solve the growing crisis of hunger in our nation.
One caveat: it would be inaccurate to say that some Democratic leaders haven’t been a large part of the problem. In fact, many Blue Dog Democrats have colluded with conservatives to kill programs that would have benefited the poor, and too many of our Democratic leaders have filled their coffers with corporate cash, which in turn has influenced their votes on crucial pieces of legislation.
I am a Democrat, so my view of the travesty that is occurring in our nation’s capitol is slightly biased: but above anything else, I am a humanitarian. And I cannot sit idly by and say nothing while so many of our children are going hungry. I’ve worked in big city ghettos and I’ve seen poverty up close and personal, and the experience has left a lasting impression on me. I’ve talked to many children – nine years and under – who told me they often climbed onto kitchen counters and crawled through cabinets, hoping to find a single scrap of food. Some of them were so hungry and malnourished they looked like skeletons. That type of poverty leaves long lasting scars on the people who have experienced it and on the people who have observed it.
Millions of innocent people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their life savings because a group of sociopaths were willing to risk the world’s economy by making fraudulent deals that benefited no one but themselves. To make things worse, the innocent victims of this fraudulent behavior were unable to protect themselves as they watched the nest eggs they had worked years to build disintegrate in front of their eyes. But at the same time, the elitist bankers and brokers who caused this financial disaster were rewarded for their criminal behavior. The “bailout” charade was a textbook example of injustice in its purist and simplest form.
On every level, our political leaders have failed their constituents, and if there was an ounce of decency left among them, they would prosecute the corporate criminals who caused this disaster and force them to make restitution to the people they have defrauded. But our duly elected leaders have used their power to inoculate themselves from the wrath of their constituents, and in so doing, they have become unfit to govern.
No country can absorb injustice on such a grand scale and not suffer adverse consequences. At some date, in the near future, our nation will surpass a point of no return, a place where the majority of our citizens will no longer be able to protect themselves from the corruption that is destroying our nation from within.
Poll after poll shows the vast majority of Americans disapprove of the decisions our leaders are making -- but buoyed by corporate cash, this elitist group of abettors continues to ignore the average voter’s concerns. In fact, a recent Pew Poll shows that socialism is three times more popular than the members of Congress.
Government agencies, corporate criminals, and foreign business entities are assaulting -- with impunity -- our personal privacies and our constitutional rights daily. The people that we have elected to protect our families are using their powers instead to dismantle social safety net programs and to use heavily armed police forces to prevent us from rebelling. Now, many people are as afraid of their local police force as they are of the criminals in their midst.
Prosecutors inside the justice department know the names of the corporate criminals who caused the collapse of our financial system; they know where they live and work, and they know how much damage they have caused, but instead of using their vast resources to build airtight cases, they have used a very twisted form of logic to justify their unwillingness to hand down indictments.
From the Justice Department:
“A deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement can help restore the integrity of a company’s operations and preserve the financial viability of a corporation that has engaged in criminal conduct.”
Short version: if the perps go unpunished, then the company’s investors won’t lose money. That form of justice (or injustice) is inflicting an incredible amount of damage to our judicial system. I know of no one who believes our legal system represents the interests of the average citizen anymore. Most people realize the game is rigged in favor of a wealthy few.
And they are angry.
As William Greider pointed out:
The favored argument for the more conciliatory approach was that criminal indictment [sic] may amount to a death sentence for a corporation. The fallout will destroy it, and the economy will lose valuable productive capacity. The collateral consequences are unfair to employees who lose jobs and stockholders who lose wealth. Corporate defenders cited Arthur Andersen, the giant accounting firm that imploded after it was convicted in 2002 of multiple offenses in Enron’s collapse. But was it the firm’s indictment or its criminal behavior that caused clients, accountants and investors to abandon it?
A simpler question might be: “Why is our government placing so much value on people who have committed crimes against the American people? Why are they coddling people who have created so much inequality and suffering?” Shouldn’t we be ridding our society of criminals and upholding our laws? Isn’t that the reason our founders created a legal and judicial system?
The answer is easy: money: specifically, corporate money.
There is enough money floating around our country to solve the problems we are facing, but our democratically elected leaders have decided that the vast majority of Americans don’t deserve access to it.
From Digby’s site:
Daily stock indices, monthly employment reports, and even quarterly data on the gross domestic product are insufficient indicators for answering this vital question: How well is the American economy providing acceptable growth in living standards for most households? EPI’s The State of Working America, 12th Edition looks broadly at available data and concludes that the answer is simply “not well at all.”
This is not because the economy has failed to grow, on average. National income has grown enough to substantially improve the fortunes for all. As the data reveal, however, it is the top 5, the top 1, and fractions of the top 1 percent that have received almost all the benefits of the economy’s growth.
http://www.aljazeera.com/...
The party that deserves to win in November is the party that rejects corporate bribes and begins to focus on repairing the damage that has been done to the members of the middle class. Unfortunately for the Republicans, that criteria automatically eliminates them. They have made it explicitly clear that they only represent the interests of the top 5% of our population.
The only question left is: will Democrats step up to the plate and do the right thing?
11:49 PM PT:
If you haven’t read Stephen L. Goldstein’s article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel today, it’s worth the time it takes to follow the link below. The piece is entitled: Republicans Are Finished. It is short and succinct. Here are a few excerpts that echo a thought I posited in my diary, that the Republican Party represents only the interests of a very small percentage of our country’s voters; their obstructionism has become so toxic they are pushing our political system to the edge of a very steep drop-off.
The Elephant Party has become the Ostrich Party — burying its head in the sand, refusing to face reality and build bridges to millions of potential supporters. This year's convention was an apotheosis of all the mean-spirited attacks the tea party/Republicans have been waging against women, gays and lesbians, healthcare reform, China, Russia, undocumented immigrants, Iran, Iraq, Social Security, Medicare — without so much as a single, realistic, workable, compassionate solution to attract undecided voters. The GOP today is largely a party of rabid, old, white men in the unhappy dusk of their lives, railing against a nation in which they are no longer the dominant players.
The undeniable truth is that the Republican Party is on the wrong side of demographics, which means it's on the wrong side of history. Tragically for our political system, which depends on a vigorous, healthy two-party system, it has chosen to assume the role of permanent obstructionist, ignoring the inevitable changes in population diversity that will eventually bury it.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/...