Facts Can Sometimes Get In The Way

When I was a young girl I didn't always distinguish between fact and fiction. Facts made me unhappy while fiction allowed my imagination to go to the most beautiful places. For starters, I believed I would fall in love with the man of my dreams and live happily ever after.  I would go to the movies every Sunday and watch love stories that always ended with the man and woman getting together against all odds. No matter how difficult the circumstances, the story had a happy ending. When my first relationship ended poorly, I simply chalked it up to a bad choice. The man of my dreams was still out there looking for me. I never thought about what happened after the movie announced "The End." The movies never took me beyond that last kiss to the day of the divorce. I was living in a fiction where I remained for many years. That I would live happily ever after was one of my earliest fictions and the one I found hardest to stop believing. But once I did things were never the same again.

Second, I believed that every country should have a two party system and all people wanted to live in a democracy with our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Whenever I would hear about the citizens of the former Soviet Union only having one choice when they went to the polls to vote, I was grateful that things were not like that here in America. I never considered that we only had two choices and more importantly we had no choice in our choices. We were fortunate to be able to speak our minds without the fear of having our doors kicked in and being arrested because we had spoken out against some politician or political party.  I remained in this belief until the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers exposing the truth about the Vietnam War and Daniel Ellsberg's life became a living hell. Ellsberg threatened the status quo. I was starting to learn that sitting in a barroom yelling to kick the bums out is not the free speech the Founders had in mind. It was not the free speech that needed protecting. 

Third, I believed there was an American Dream. If you worked hard, kept your nose clean, you could succeed. It didn't matter that success was always measured in terms of material possessions. The proof that you had made it was whether you owned a car or a house. As years passed, whether you had graduated from high school or whether you had a degree or profession were added to the mix. But even higher education was not for the mind it was for the pocketbook. I remember the time when a family could sacrifice and save its money to send the kids to college. Today, the whole neighborhood could save the money and few if any kids would have enough money to go to college.  Today, the debt from student loans has exceeded the entire credit card debt.  And if one of these kids were to invent a light bulb that never blew out, the major manufacturers of light bulbs would lobby politicians to pass legislation putting a height requirement on light bulb inventors.

Fourth, I believed that unions helped create the middle class.  After laws were passed giving workers the right to organize and bargain collectively with management, wages did increase. Unfortunately as the workers saw this increase in their paychecks, employers saw an increase in their profits. Eventually, the disparity in earnings between management and labor grew so wide that much of the gains brought about by unions went by the wayside. In those industries where labor continued to enjoy these gains, management simply picked up its ball and outsourced. Of course as unions became more powerful and politically connected it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the friends and the enemies of the middle class.  Union leaders started having a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The disparity in income between the haves and the havenots has become so great that today 47% of households don't earn enough to pay federal income taxes. The number of people below the official poverty line is the highest in 52 years. Americans are going to bed hungry while farmers are still being paid not to grow food. We use enough corn each year in making ethanol to feed over 300 million people. Grass would make more ethanol but there is not enough profit in grass. Putting corn in our cars has caused the price of food to rise greater than the rate of inflation. We are in danger of becoming a third world country.

Fifth, I believed that the financial crisis of 2008 would open up everyone's eye to the fact that no matter how much money Wall Street was making, greed would insure it would not be enough. Yet we suspended our disbelieve thinking that a new president would solve the problem. I think President Obama had good intentions but consider what he has done in the face of this crisis. He brought Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geitner, and Jeffrey Inmelt into his administration. Summers was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton. It was during the Clinton Administration that the Glass Steagall Act was repealed and commercial banks were allowed to invest in mortgage-backed securities and take on collateralized debt obligations. Summers in his testimony before Congress in 1998 said the banks could be trusted. "The parties to these kinds of contract," he said, "are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities laws." Instead of relegating Summers and his policies into the back alley where they belonged, Obama made him the director of the National Economic Council. Obama is now considering nominating him to head the World Bank. Geitner was head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the financial crisis. He helped these "trusted banks" get the bailout. Once Obama got into office, Geitner was named Treasury Secretary. As for Inmelt, the Chairman and CEO of General Electric, it has been reported that he secured up to 182 billion dollars in bailout money at a time when GE was one of the most profitable companies in the world and was one of the leading outsourcer of jobs. Last year Obama named Inmelt to head up his Jobs Council. While serving in this capacity, GE has continued to move more of its infrastructure to China.   Cronyism is no new in America, but now it is out in the open because there is no attempt to hide it.  But when crony capitalism begins to destroy even a semblance of free market capitalism, we will not return from the brink of disaster.  We will down in history as just another great power that destroyed itself.  

So what can you and I do about this? We could start by giving up the fictions and start facing facts.  The answer is not to go from one of the political choices to the other.  A Republican President will not change things anymore than Obama is able to change things.  The only thing those in leadership understand, be they in Washington, Wall Street, or the corporate board rooms, is money and power.  We could stop allowing their opium to be our drug of choice.  We could follow the lead of that young woman who used the social media to take on Bank of America. We could stop doing business with the banks who received bailout money.  We should put our money into neighborhood banks and credit unions and demand they be accountable.   We should also demand that those individuals who caused the crisis be punished not through imprisonment but by billions of dollars in fines.   Today, Wall Street is laughing at us. It did not even bother to wait until the heat was off before giving out millions of dollars in bonuses.  Banks that were said to be too big to fail have grown even bigger. They have increased their fees, refused to give loans or grant credit to individuals and small businesses, and raised their interest rates on credit cards.   The Financial Services' percentage of  GPD keeps growing yet it makes nothing we can use.  And if they try to intoxicate us with handouts, we could resist.  After we do these things, I suppose we could pray.