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Let's 'Make Them' End the Great Recession
We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy.
Did you breathe a sigh of relief when President Barack Obama signed the debt deal into law earlier this month? If not, you weren't the only one.
Raising the national debt ceiling may have forestalled an immediate U.S. default and credit collapse, but the deal will do absolutely nothing to address the real problems of our time: stubbornly high unemployment and a suffocating economy. Recovering from this Great Recession and achieving longer-term stability require a broad, informed, and unified movement to battle the corporate-backed powers that are waging economic war on working Americans. 
We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy. (photo: Peace Education Center)
While blame for this sad state of affairs falls mainly on Republican free-marketeers and the tea partiers who have incessantly pushed a cuts-only economic agenda, those players only occupy one end of a money-poisoned political spectrum that also includes most members of the Democratic Party. Obama, for his susceptibility to corporate influence and unwillingness to lead, is also responsible for American's economic doldrums.
When progressive leaders approached President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 about what would become the New Deal, his response was, "Make me do it." And so it goes for today's progressive movement, whether you bought into Obama's bold campaign promises or not.
Our job as concerned citizens is hard. These days, commonsense policies, rooted in sound economic analysis, are subject to ideological criticisms that often preempt their passage. We also know that popular opinion by itself won't necessarily affect our governing course.
Take tax policy, for example. A Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken before the debt deal passed, showed that 72 percent of voters support raising taxes on high-income households to reduce the deficit. The final package, the product of a political game dominated by radical conservatives, called for nearly $2.5 trillion in spending cuts and no tax measures that would raise new revenue. One Las Vegas Sun headline for a letter to the editor aptly summed up the outcome: "GOP controls half of government, but ignores the public."
Federal revenue is at its lowest level since the 1950s. The income share of the top-earning 1 percent of Americans has reached heights unseen since 1928, just before the Great Depression. Despite these phenomenal gains, this elite group continues to enjoy historically low federal taxes. Between rates, deductions, and loopholes, they often pay lower effective rates than many middle-class families. As such, it should come as no surprise that the richest 1 percent of Americans now controls nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent of the country combined.
Our circumstances are the result of decades of reforms that shifted taxes off the wealthy onto the middle-class under the pretense of "trickle-down" economics. That strategy has proven ineffective and needs to be reversed. Yet, conservative officials gnash their teeth and threaten the global economy at the mere mention of correcting those policy mistakes.
We can no longer allow a hopelessly unreasonable minority in a severely corrupted system to dictate the terms of our economy. MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan has asserted that Obama should abandon our "bought Congress" and begin a dialogue with voters to restore democracy and repair the economy.
Clearly, we can't sit and wait for Obama to knock on our doors to chat. Our elected leadership will do what it will for as long as we allow it. Indeed, we can't "make them" fix the economy by asking them to do it. We can only get it to happen by organizing, educating, and mobilizing people from all walks of life to fight for justice in all places where it does not exist, from our nation's capital to our own neighborhoods.
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58 Comments so far
Show AllObamabots please give us some objective measurable criteria that can give us HOPE to think this prez is going to represent the People of the US instead or the Corporations. Go ahead and post!
There's a reason Nurses, Teachers, and Unions aren't backing Obama anymore.
Yeah, except incredibly-- or maybe not so incredibly-- last month the National Education Association (NEA) endorsed President Obama for re-election in 2012.
Perhaps, as in the "Legionnaire's Disease" episode, the gathering suffered a sudden mass attack of cranio-rectal inversion.
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"As such, it should come as no surprise that the richest 1 percent of Americans now controls nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent of the country combined."
Yeah, I guess he's right. That's an amazing stat.
http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/
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"Clearly, we can't sit and wait for Obama to knock on our doors to chat. Our elected leadership will do what it will for as long as we allow it. Indeed, we can't "make them" fix the economy by asking them to do it. We can only get it to happen by organizing, educating, and mobilizing people from all walks of life to fight for justice in all places where it does not exist, from our nation's capital to our own neighborhoods."
That's pretty much the story in a nutshell. Waiting for Obama is like waiting for hell to freeze over. But the Republican bashing and scapegoating is an unhelpful distraction. For all intents & purposes the Democratic Party is just as bad as the Republican Party on this issue. To focus on useful organizing we need to firmly reject both parties (i.e., do not vote for either party in Presidential & Congressional elections) and develop a "long-term" strategy of resistance.
Admittedly, I live in Lim, Lim, Limbaugh land south of Disney World, but my wife and I went to Representative Mack's town hall meeting in Ft. Myers last night. We CD readers overuse the words "unreasonable minority" to describe the spiked tea drinkers, probably to ameliorate the pain. But last night exposed me to a vast right wing _majority_ of ignorant and misinformed citizens. It is utterly appalling to listen to Mr. Mack speak of across the board budget cuts (his shameless adaptation of the CIW "penny-per-pound" for tomatoes plan), his false analogies between household-individual "budgets" and the national budget, his false analogy between small local businesses (and their difficulty getting permits) and large multi-national businesses who have few regulations and no restraint. Most appalling of all was the "well-behaved" audience of clapping, hrumphing, silver-haired supporters.
Mr. Mack played the crowd's prejudices and misunderstandings like a psy-ops pro. He is promoting no cuts in defense, no taxes, but lots of discipline and austerity. He is sorely disgusted with Hugo Chavez and our imports of Venezuelan oil (from this "friend" of Ahmadinejad and Castro) and wants to remove all obstacles to drilling up to 3 miles from Florida's coasts and from constructing the Canadian pipeline to Texas, because Canada, unlike Venezuela, is "our friend"--conveniently ignoring the difference between tar sand "oil" and Venezuelan premium crude.
Mr. Mack made the small business owners present feel put out by Mr. Obama's talk of taxing the rich (they think the small business owners are the oppressed). He used projected charts to show the "phantom cuts" of the Democrats as opposed to his "one penny across the board cuts after freezing all spending"--always excluding cuts to "our troops".
He said the only problem with wars in Afghanistan, Lybia, and Iraq were Obama's failure to ask Congress's permission and his failure to articulate a clear goal for each war--playing on the crowd's prejudice against the vacillating president's surge while announcing a pull-out date.
We need to stop calling these folks the "lunatic fringe" and the "extremist minority". Sure enough they're lunatics, mis-informed, illogical nut cases. But they are central to our malformed and defective political system and they are a majority. To counter such a force will take not only rejecting the spineless Mr. O'Compromise, but also as much expertise in brainwashing as the Koch brothers and Murdoch minions use. Seems to me that the American public is, in the majority, benighted if not stupid.
Statements like Mazher Ali's, "We cannot allow. . ." and "Let's make them. . ." are the chest thumpings of cowards all set to turn and run when we see the approach of the enormous crowd of vast right-wing conspiracy armed with their pitchforks.
We, the consumers, workers (both private and government), and small business owners need to work together to develop a NEW ECONOMY. WE need to ignore and bypass the large-scale retailers and banks. Bank at your credit union. Buy groceries at a union- friendly store, or a natural foods store, or a farmer's market. Buy local. Look at the label before you look at the product -- if it doesn't say "Made in USA" put it down and tell the clerk. Buy an American-made car, or get your old car fixed by a local mechanic. Ask EVERY business you deal with what they are doing to promote the American economy, and if the answer is not a good one, find somebody else. Congress and the President and big business will not solve this recession for us. We have to change OUR behavior.
PuffinThrush -- Catagory Scale Power Voting is a great idea. Had not heard of it before. Have long supported Instant Runoff Voting, but this seems even better.