Open Letter To Congress and the American People:
Current events have been so horrific, and while the President may be the foundation of blame, the edifice composed of seventy-four million voters, hundreds of legislators, and supporters in the police and military are signalling us through the flames that for many people, democracy is not working. Amidst the turmoil, it is easy to overlook systemic contributions that led millions Americans to vote, support and enable Donald Trump, culminating in the mob expressing murderous rage in the Nation’s Capital. A brief review of some historic highlights might clarify sources of this rage and much of the support in a useful way.
Since President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, commanded family farmers to “get big or get out, US farm policies have consistently privileged Agro-industry over needs of smaller family farms. Paul Volker, Democrat Jimmy Carter’s Fed chair, raised interest rates 5 points in a single day, to. Signal the banks that he was serious about fighting inflation. The unanticipated consequence of this gesture was bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small farmers who had followed Farm Bureau advice and assumed debt to buy big machinery. Between 1980 and ‘85 farm and bank failures were equal to those during the Great Depression. The leading cause of death on the Family farm was suicide. Depression and despair were endemic in the Midwest.
Combine the consequences of these policies with the repercussions of Trade Treaties (GATT, NAFTA, TPP etc.) good for the corporate sector but which shipped American jobs overseas in job lots. President Reagan’s declaration of war on labor unions firing 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, with the corporate sector following suit—weakening the National Labor Relations Board, making right-to-work states more available and union organizing more difficult. Together, they crippled the wealth building institutions of the middle class, driving American workers below water. The negative consequences were exacerbated by the minimal funds Congress allocated to retrain workers for their anticipated unemployment—the lowest amount per worker of any industrial country. The opioid and crystal meth epidemics ravaging the Midwest today are certainly related to the dislocation and depression shadowing these decisions.
Deregulation, a reflexive conservative endeavor led directly to weakened supervision of banking and Wall Street, gifted the Nationd with the Savings and Loan Scandal which stripped $250 billion in pensions and personal savings from Americans. As if that had never occurred, President Clinton’s disastrous repeal of Glass-Steagall—the Great Depression era law preventing banks from speculating with investor’s money—empowered exactly similar speculation by banks and investment houses selling fraudulent mortgages to the public based on Liar’s Loans, creating the 2007-9 recession we still have not recovered from. In combination, they amount to standing on the head of a man trying to keep his head above water.
Worker’s wages have remained flat (in buying power) since 1973, while executive compensation has risen 400-700%. These conditions have prevailed through both Republican and Democratic administrations, because our electoral system is organized around money. As a consequence, the interests of money are always privileged over the needs of the American people. We are reaping the bitter fruit of this prejudice and Supreme Court Decisions like Citizen’s United which have delivered political power to dark and invisible money. Is it not time to at least consider full Federal funding of elections and the prohibitions of money, gifts, and emoluments by lobbyists? How else might the interests of average Americans ever be served again? How else might they regain faith in our system?