SYNDICATED COLUMN: 7-7-7

Jobless? Face It: Obama’s Not That Into You

Forget Herman Cain’s 9-9-9. The battle cry for every American ought to be 7-7-7.

7-7-7: for the $7.7 trillion the Bush and Obama Administrations secretly funneled to the banksters.

Remember the $700 billion bailout that prompted rage from right to left? Which inspired millions to join the Tea Party and the Occupy movements? Turns out that that was a mere drop in the bucket, less than a tenth of what the Federal Reserve Bank doled out to the big banks.

Bloomberg Markets Magazine reports a shocking story that emerged from tens of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act: by March 2009, the Fed shelled out $7.77 trillion “to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”

The U.S. national debt is currently a record $14 trillion.

We knew that the Fed and the White House were pawns of Wall Street. What’s new is the scale of the conspiracy.

Even the most jaded financial reporters were stunned at the extent of collusion: “The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”

Citigroup earned an extra $1.8 billion by reinvesting the Fed’s below-market loans. Bank of America made $1.5 billion.

Bear in mind, that’s only through March 2009.

“Many Americans are struggling to understand why banks deserve such preferential treatment while millions of homeowners are being denied assistance and are at increasing risk of foreclosure,” wrote Representative Elijah Cummings, a ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who is demanding an investigation.

Indeed we are.

This stinks. It’s terrible economics. And it’s unbelievably cruel.

First the economics. The bank bailouts were supposed to loosen credit in order to encourage lending, investment, job creation and ultimately consumer spending. It didn’t work. Banks and corporations alike are hoarding cash. President Obama, who promised 4 million net new jobs by earlier this year, has been reduced to claiming that unemployment would have been even higher without the bailouts.

Ask any business executive why nobody is hiring and they’ll blame the lack of consumer demand. If the ultimate goal is to put more money into people’s pockets, why not just, you know, put more money into people’s pockets?

Bank executives used federal taxdollars to pay themselves tens of billions in bonuses and renovate their corporate headquarters. We the people got 0-0-0. What if we’d gotten 7-7-7 instead?

Every man, woman in child in the United States would have received $24,000.

A family of four would have gotten $96,000.

And that’s without an income test.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 100 million American citizens—one of out of three—subsists below or just above the official poverty line. Demographers, statisticians and economists were stunned. “These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician, told The New York Times. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

For four decades progressive economists have warned that the middle-class was being eroded, that the United States would become a Third World country if income inequality continued to expand. They can stop. We’re there.

These poor and “near poor” Americans comprise the vast majority of the uninsured, un- and underemployed, and foreclosure victims. If Bush-Obama’s 7-7-7 Plan had gone to each one of these 100 million misérables instead of Citigroup and Bank of America, the IRS would have mailed out 100 million checks for $77,700 each.

This would have paid off a lot of credit cards. Kept millions in their homes, protecting neighborhood property values. Allowed millions to see a doctor. Paid for food.

A lot of the money would have been “wasted” on new cars, Xboxes—maybe even a renovation or two. All of which would have created a buttload of consumer demand.

If you’re a “99er”—one of millions who have run out of unemployment benefits—Obama’s plan for you is 0-0-0.

If you’re one of the roughly 20 million homeowners who have lost or are about to lose your house to foreclosure—most likely to a bank using fraudulent loan documents—you get 0-0-0.

If you’re a teacher asking for a raise, or a parent caring for a sick child or parent, or just an ordinary worker hobbling to work on an old car that needs to be replaced, all you’ll get is 0-0-0.

There isn’t any money to help you.

We don’t have the budget.

We’re broke.

You can’t get the bank to call you back about refinancing, much less the attention of your Congressman.

But not if you’re a banker.

Bankers get their calls returned. They get anything they want.

There’s always a budget for them.

They get 7-7-7.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

Xmas Season Cartoon Auction

Have a friend who is a fan of editorial cartooning? Try your luck on this week’s new Ted Rall cartoon auction on eBay.

Last week’s auction ended at $142.

Starting bid is 99 cents. Buy It Now price is $300. A perfect gift for the holidays!

Winner gets to pick the topic of the cartoon. She or he also may reprint it or donate the reprint rights. They also get the original cartoon artwork. I also may syndicate the cartoons that result from this. So far all of them have been syndicated. Of course, this is also a great way to support my work. Thanks for bidding!

Your Dinner with Ted

We have a winner! My first-ever auction of dinner or drinks with me in Manhattan has been won by a person from Long Island, New York. Winning bid was $355.00 (plus the price of dinner/drinks).

If you missed out, you have another chance. I’ve reposted the auction. Starting bid is a mere 99 cents. Buy It Now price is $500 if you want a sure thing.

NB: this has to take place in Manhattan. Going to other places costs money.

Dinner with a downwardly mobile editorial cartoonist: the perfect gift for the holidays!

Jesus Was a Communist

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist.”
—Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Idiot’s Guide to Obama’s Reelection Campaign

From Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times today:

I voted for Barack Obama, and I don’t want my money back. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression. He’s fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way. He’s making health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions, and he saved the auto industry.

There it is: The Idiot’s Guide to the Obama Reelection Campaign.

But it’s SO weird.

For example:

“bringing the economy he inherited back from the brink of a depression”: Wot? This IS a depression.

and:

“fought the war on terrorism in a smart and effective way”: Again—wot? Drone attacks and assassinations that piss off the whole world is smart?

and finally:

“health care possible for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions”: Double wot here. The Republicans are going to win next year (if there’s an election), and they’ll repeal Obamacare.

If you know anyone from Detroit, they can tell you about the auto industry.

New Cartoon Auction Up

There’s a new Ted Rall cartoon auction on eBay.

Starting bid is 99 cents. Buy It Now price is $300. A perfect gift for the holidays!

Winner gets to pick the topic of the cartoon. She or he also may reprint it or donate the reprint rights. They also get the original cartoon artwork. I also may syndicate the cartoons that result from this. So far all of them have been syndicated. Of course, this is also a great way to support my work. Thanks for bidding!

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Revolution Versus Reform

The Rift Within Occupy

Editors and readers expect pundits to weigh in on the brutal eviction of Occupy Wall Street from New York’s Zuccotti Park. People will ask: Does this mean the beginning of the end for the Occupy movement?

No.

Now that we’ve dispensed with that, let’s discuss a major rift within the movement: Reformists versus revolutionaries.

Revolutionaries want to overthrow the government. They want to get rid of existing economic, political and social relations and create new ones. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are enemies.

Reformists want radical changes too. For example, Occupiers want to eliminate the corrupting influence of corporate money on politics. Unlike revolutionaries, however, they are OK with the basic structure of the system: the Constitution, Congress, 50 states, capitalism, and so on. They are willing to work with establishment liberals (MoveOn.org, Amy Goodman, The Nation, Mother Jones, etc.) and the Democratic Party.

You can see the reform-vs.-revolution split whenever Occupiers discuss actions and demands.

Reformists say: Let’s move our accounts from banks to credit unions. Encourage Black Friday shoppers to buy from locally-owned businesses. Demand that Congress pass a constitutional amendment abolishing corporate personhood. Restore the Glass-Steagall Act.

Those tactics leave revolutionaries cold. They don’t want to nibble around the edges of a system they despise. If revolutionaries get their way, there won’t be a Congress. Members of the House and Senate will go to jail. No one will need to boycott banks or choose which merchants are least malevolent.

Capitalism won’t exist.

Revolution frightens the reformists. They worry about chaos, violence and dislocation. They’re right to be concerned. Bad as things are now, these might look like the good old days after buildings begin burning.

Revolutionaries point to the history of previous reform movements. Sure, progressives win victories during times of social unrest: concessions to labor during the early 1900s, the New Deal of the 1930s, the civil rights, antiwar and social movements of the 1960s.

But they don’t stick.

As soon as the crowds of demonstrators go home—since the 1980s, right-wingers roll back the results of those hard-won battles while liberals stand aside. Democrats like Clinton and Obama even roll back welfare, worker rights, environmental regulations and privacy rights. If you want radical change to last, revolutionaries argue, you have to change everything when you have the chance.

Right now, we have the chance.

2012 is shaping up to be our Year of Revolution.

Reformers see the system as broken and in need of repair. For revolutionaries, whether or not the system can be fixed is beside the point. The system itself is the problem. Revolutionaries don’t believe that corporations, unfairness, inequality and violent monstrosities such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq have corrupted an otherwise laudable system. They think the system is inherently unfair, corrupt and violent; that unfairness, corruption and violence are the system.

If you have owned a car, you have considered revolution versus reform.

Motorists whose cars break down from time to time must weigh the same two questions as Occupiers are facing with the political system:

Is it reformable?

Is it redeemable?

For your car the question is: Is it reformable, i.e. worth fixing? Need a new fan belt? Sure. Need a new engine? It might be cheaper (or not cost much more) to buy another car.

The existential question—is it redeemable?—goes to the question of whether it was a crappy car in the first place. In other words, should it be fixed? No matter how much work you put into it, a Hummer is still a gas guzzler. Trade it in. Better yet, set it on fire.

I think the U.S. is both unreformable and irredeemable. Many members of Occupy agree with me. But at least as many seem to believe there are aspects of this dying country worth saving.

Occupation ideology centers around two loci: economic unfairness and corporate influence.

Economic injustice manifests itself in numerous forms. Occupiers focus on income inequality. The richest one percent collect 90 percent of national income, the most on record in the U.S. and one of the highest disparities between rich and poor in the First World.

We think of ourselves as living in a prosperous country—but few Americans get to live the good life. We like to think the U.S. has a vast middle class. If that was true in the past, it isn’t now. New Census data “places 100 million people—one in three Americans—either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it,” said a shocking report in the November 18th New York Times.

This is the culmination of a 40-year-old trend. The rich have gotten richer at our expense. The tipping point was reached when the federal government did absolutely nothing to help distressed homeowners. Instead, Bush and Obama doled out hundreds of billions of dollars to the same banks that were pushing fraudulent mortgages, illegally refusing to refinance, and forging fake legal documents to foreclose and evict people who lost their jobs because executives wanted to pay themselves huge raises.

As the Occupy chant goes: “Banks got bailed out; we got sold out!”

I can imagine reform coming out of the existing Democratic-Republican duopoly.

It’s not going to happen. But I can imagine it. Theoretically.

As happened in the 1930s and 1960s, enough political and business leaders might become scared enough of the increasingly angry and desperate American citizenry to force through some good things. Perhaps they could be persuaded to concede a moratorium on foreclosures, bigger no-time-limit unemployment benefits, a real healthcare plan, maybe a little income redistribution through the tax code.

The odds of meaningful change coming out of this system are so long that only a psycho would bet on it. The traditional rift among the ruling classes between liberals (be nice to the poor or they’ll kill us) and conservatives (kill the poor) has skewed too far to the right. Reform is impossible.

Beyond that, I can’t see how reform could last. After they won, the Occupiers would go home. With the pressure turned off, corporate media would renew their systematic campaign of pro-business propaganda coupled with vapid entertainment designed to lull us back into a Prozac-induced waking slumber.

Sooner rather than later, the corporate chieftains and their pet Republicans and phony Democrats would get back into power. They’d roll back the reforms.

At a recent OWS rally protesters carried signs that read: “I will never be able to buy a house.” “I will never get out of debt.” “I will never get a job in this economy.” Does anyone seriously think that this system—these Democrats—these Republicans—this media—will fix these problems?

Amending the Constitution won’t do the trick. Electing better officials isn’t enough.

Yes, the system is broken. But that’s not the main point. The system is irredeemable.

Nothing short of revolution will do.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

keyboard_arrow_up
css.php