He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

Loss. That’s what I felt when I watched the space shuttle land at LAX, carried to our City of Angels on the back of a close relative, the mighty Boeing 747 – twelve years older than the shuttle and, though aging, nearly as inspiring when you happen to see one. I recalled where I was when Challenger exploded – studying in a library for the California bar exam – and when Columbia burned up on re-entry – at a cottage in Idyllwild with my family. But I’m talking about a different kind of loss.

When I was a kid, growing up in the Sixties, America seemed to be the land of limitless possibilities. President Kennedy launched the space program in 1961, promising we would reach the Moon by the end of the decade and though incredible, no one doubted the USA would do it. In the more distant future described by Gene Roddenberry, a “replicator” would eliminate want of food or material possessions and humans would be freed to explore any part of the universe they chose.

Sure, there were serious problems right here on Earth, and in this country, but the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement and a bipartisan roster of widely respected – even revered – public officials seemed determined to get these matters in hand. We were working on them, and nothing seemed intractable. The cynical snicker about the Sixties now. But such was the energy and enthusiasm of the economic prosperity of post World War II United States, an era that is already gauzy like our refracted impressions of ancient Rome.

Just after three in the afternoon on July 20, 1969, my friends and I gathered around the clunky RCA television in our den, understanding that the rest of the planet was doing the same. I was seventeen. Like all kids who grew up in the era before cable TV, video games and the Internet, we had spent many late nights outdoors contemplating the Moon, which seemed to us as distant as adulthood.  Now we could barely discern the astronauts in the grainy black and white images as they walked on the lunar surface, but there was no mistaking the achievement of that day. And though it was America’s achievement, the whole world celebrated.

A few days from now, shuttle Endeavor will be drawn through the streets of Los Angeles– like a funeral caisson for a fallen soldier – by a magnificent technological beast. That journey, at 2 mph, will end at a museum twenty-four hours later. There it will rest much like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China, monuments to human will and imagination left to puzzle future generations. No ambitious program to explore the universe will succeed the shuttle.

That’s because there's no money left to pay for our aspirations. The last decade began with a speculation-induced economic recession in 2001. In California, once the home of aerospace, the collapse of the tech-bubble was compounded by the disastrous results of the deregulation of electricity by local lawmakers, which included a bailout for over-priced nuclear power plants that cost consumer ratepayers $28 billion. Then Enron and other Wall Street firms that bought the power plants covertly manipulated the supply of electricity to jack up prices, bankrupting utility companies and forcing the state to buy long term contracts for electricity from the manipulators – at the grossly inflated prices – to keep the lights on and businesses going. The deregulation debacle cost California $71 billion – and the local economy has never been the same.

Many Americans had not recovered from the 2001 recession when the Wall Street derivatives frenzy collapsed in the Fall of 2008. Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their savings. With incomes disappearing, Americans stopped spending. That hurt businesses, especially small businesses that could not borrow. And tax revenues declined. To pay Social Security and jobless benefits, and restart the economy, the federal government spent more than it took in in recent years.

This ignited the raging political debate over the federal government’s stimulus and deficit spending, though few Americans can claim to have been bailed out the way Wall Street was. After taxpayer cash infusions, subsidies, tax breaks and other favors estimated at between $9.7 trillion and $29 trillion, the Money Industry has emerged not merely intact but more profitable than ever.

Add $1.3 trillion for the Afghan and Iraq wars, and you can see why there won’t be a manned mission to Mars anytime soon, much less hyperdrive tours of the galaxy.

Our country paid a heavy price to save Wall Street. Consider that the cost of the getting to the Moon in today’s dollars would be about $26 billion less than taxpayers spent bailing out the insurance giant AIG – about $182 billion. And the Moon program was a massive stimulus program for America in the Sixties, and not just the defense industry. Its benefits included the research and development of a raft of technologies that led to enormous advance in computer, medicine and other industries – not to mention Velcro. Steve Jobs and his colleagues in Silicon Valley didn’t build the modern personal computer industry by themselves: you, the American taxpayer, helped.

Measuring the cost of government assistance to Wall Street versus to business innovators versus to Americans in need compartmentalizes the debate. What does it say about the country – and its future – that the average life expectancy of white Americans who did not graduate high school has dropped by four years, to where it was in the 1950s to Sixties?

Yet a majority of Americans – 54% –believe that the government should do less to solve our country’s problems… though there is a sharp partisan divide on the question, with 82% of Republicans saying less and 67% of Democrats saying more, according to Gallup.

There will be Americans in space in the near future, however. Using the technology and facilities taxpayers built, a number of private companies are developing plans to commercialize orbital space flight, the New York Times reports. And every American who wants to hitch a ride can do so – for somewhere between $50 million and $150 million a ticket, depending on your destination.

As the 747 and the shuttle swung low over Los Angeles, one of my favorite oldies from the Sixties came to mind:

The road is long, with many a winding turn,
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.

So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear - we'll get there.

For I know: he would not encumber me.
He ain't heavy: he's my brother.

I thought back to that humid afternoon in July, 1969, when Kennedy’s charge was fulfilled by Apollo 11. JFK was gone; along with his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, struck down by hate, fear, madness.  At the time, they seemed to us pioneers in the still young and uncertain cause of Democracy, and had given their lives to better their fellow Americans and the Nation. The sense of  purpose, destiny, determination and sacrifice – shared by the nation – was inspiring. At least to a young guy from a Boston suburb.

 

Harvey Column - 10/01/2012

Geithner must go

Please, President Obama, fire Timothy Geithner today and hire a treasury secretary to fight for the U.S. economy as hard as Geithner fights to protect bankers’ profits.

I know you’re intensely loyal to Geithner and have resisted such calls in the past.

But Mr. President, times and circumstances have changed. For your own good and especially for the good of the country, you should reconsider. You’re in an especially close election and you need to cut yourself loose from the failed policies you’ve pursued for the past four years that have coddled the financial sector at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Your loyalties are with Geithner but his, Mr. President, are with the too big to fail banks, not with the public.

The most recent evidence comes from this Huffington Reports piece which details how Geithner, while president of the New York Fed responded when he heard about the big banks manipulating a key interest rate known as LIBOR when he was chair of the New York Federal Reserve in 2007.

Recently disclosed emails show that while Geithner expressed concerns over the integrity of the LIBOR, or London Interbank Offered Rate, he did little to investigate or stop the manipulation.

What he did to was cut and paste the bankers’ own proposals into his own proposal to the Bank of England about how to address the LIBOR concerns. It should have been an early warning sign of how Geithner and his big bank cronies spoke with one voice – theirs.

The public may not understand just how critical the integrity of LIBOR is, but you do, Mr. President. You know that it’s how it’s used as a benchmark for trillions worth of transactions every day, on everything from complex credit default swaps to credit cards.

You also shouldn’t underestimate the public’s ability to grasp what’s at the root of this LIBOR scandal, which is the same theme that’s underlying JP Morgan London Whale trading losses – that bankers have been manipulating the financial system for their own interests, with your administration either fully cooperating or looking the other way.

Don’t underestimate the ability of the ruthless and hypocritical Republican attack machine to clobber you with those policies even as the Republicans embrace more banker-friendly policies than you are.

They’ll get a good shot this week when Geithner testifies before the House Banking Committee over what he knew and what he did about banks.

The public may not be focused on the LIBOR in the middle of a hot summer, Mr. President, But the scandal is just beginning to wash up on the our shores after causing tremendous damage after it erupted in England, after Barclays Bank acknowledged its own LIBOR manipulation and cut a deal with regulators. Meanwhile the investigation into 16 U.S. banks and their LIBOR shenanigans is just getting cooking.  It could be heating up at the same time as the presidential race.

Mr. President, you have another opportunity to do something that is good politics and good for the country too, and will distinguish your policy on the banks from your opponent’s do-nothing approach.

Get rid of Geithner and begin to chart a new course toward a system not rigged in favor of big bankers and their fat bonuses. We need a treasury secretary who doesn’t measure prosperity solely by the size of bankers’ wealth.

LIBOR / Martin Column - 07/16/2012

Where have all the task forces gone?

President Obama announced a new task force today to investigate the disappearance of the mortgage fraud task force he appointed earlier this year as well as another one he appointed in 2009.

“When duly appointed task forces vanish into thin air without a trace, this administration will not accept it,” the president said. “We expect this new task force, which will be called the Task Force Task Force, to move forcefully to accomplish its task.”

The Task Force Task Force’s mission will be made easier, the president said, because he appointed as one of it’s co-chairs the New York state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. The New York state attorney general was also appointed co-chair of the mortgage fraud task force, which has not been seen or heard from since the president announced it during his State of the Union speech January 24.

Schneiderman said he would move “quickly” to interview himself as soon as he had a chance to familiarize himself with the circumstances of the disappearance of the mortgage fraud task force.

“We will get to the bottom of this,” Schneiderman pledged.

To show his seriousness, the president said he was reconvening the band of Navy SEALS who worked on the mission to find and kill Ban Laden in Pakistan, and putting them at the service of the Task Force Task Force. “When a group of American citizens go missing in the service of their country, we take it very seriously,” the president said. “One task force vanishing is bad enough, but two?”

Schneiderman refused to be pinned down to a timetable for the investigation. He also refused to comment on his previous insistence that he would “take action” if the mortgage fraud task force was stymied.

Schneiderman also refused to answer specific questions swirling around the mortgage fraud task force, such as why the entire mortgage fraud task force had a mere 50 lawyers when the Enron task force, convened to investigate a previous financial scandal involving a single company, had more than 100 lawyers working on it and why the mortgage fraud task force apparently still doesn’t have office space.

Schneiderman acknowledged that there are some mysteries that may be too deep for the new task force to unravel.

Was the mortgage fraud task force, aka the Residential Mortgage-Back Securities Working Group, actually a part of the earlier Financial Fraud Task Force, established November 17, 2009? Was the mortgage fraud task force actually something new, or just a PR offensive that amounted to nothing more than a repackaging of already existing efforts?

Though U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has touted the administration’s efforts in going after financial fraud as nothing less than “historic,” the administration has yet to bring a criminal prosecution against a single major executive of a too big to fail institution. Some have questioned whether the president, who received more money from Wall Street than his Republican opponent, John McCain, really has any desire to hold Wall Street executives accountable for their actions.

Schneiderman’s investigation into the vanishing task forces may lead him right into the Oval Office to the man who appointed them.

A month before President Obama announced his new mortgage fraud task force in the State of the Union speech, the president told 60 Minutes, “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street — in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street — wasn’t illegal. That’s exactly why we had to change the laws.”

 

 

Financial Crisis / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 04/24/2012

The Health Care Games

Like the Hunger Games, in which leaders of the 1% connive to rig a contest so that a charismatic representative of the 99% is defeated, there’s lots of intrigue behind the US Supreme Court hearings on the federal health care law that begin today.

The ostensible issue before the high court is whether the universal health care system established by Congress in 2010 is constitutional. Like the systems in most other developed nations, that law requires all Americans to be covered – whether through their employer or by purchasing it directly. Now this is just plain arithmetic: you can’t have a solvent universal care program if participation is voluntary, because the young and healthy won’t bother to pitch in until they get sick, leaving the older and less healthy to cover most of the cost. Universal means everyone has to be part of it – both getting the medical benefits and paying for its cost.  Today, taxpayers end up bailing out people who don’t buy insurance and then get sick or in an accident.

But the corporate funded US Chamber of Commerce and other right wing entities, plus anti-government foes (including most of the Republicans candidates who want to run the government), argue it was unconstitutional for Congress to order everyone to pay for health insurance. My problem with that part of the law – known as the "individual mandate" – is that you have to buy the insurance from private insurance companies, and there is no limit on what they can charge you. That’s gotta be fixed, and a campaign is underway to do that in California. As everyone knows, however, Obama lifted his health care proposal from the law that Mitt Romney, then Governor of Massachusetts, enacted there in 2006. So its obvious that a big part of why the corporate Republican establishment opposes the law is that it was backed by a Democrat – Obama – and they don’t want him or any other elected Democrat to be able to claim any political victories.

There’s much more to the Supreme Court case than crass party politics, in any case. Many on the corporate right are hoping the US Supreme Court will issue a sweeping decision like they did in Citizens United, this time ratcheting back Congress’s regulatory authority across the board and therefore bolstering the power of big corporations – just as Citizens United did, in the guise of granting corporations a new right to corrupt elections under the First Amendment.

A decision limiting Congress’s power to regulate pollution would be a huge win for chemical manufacturers; drug and tobacco companies want to escape the Food and Drug Administration’s safety requirements; Wall Street wants taxpayer bailouts with no strings attached.  As I wrote a few weeks ago, the powerful elites in this nation think that the health care case is the Supreme Court’s best opportunity in decades to roll back constitutional rights to the deregulated era of excess that led to the First Great Depression eighty years ago. This will be done in the name of protecting Americans against the intrusion of government in their lives.

In the Hunger Games, the hundred thousand wealthiest people in “Panem” gather in their Capitol to watch as twenty-four randomly selected citizens fight each other to death. This is a yearly penance, we are told, imposed by the wealthy in response to an earlier, unsuccessful revolt by the 99%. The Games provide an excuse for a non-stop party for the powerful – like Mardi Gras only with unimaginable excess.  The citizens – known as “Tributes” – come two each from all twelve “Districts” in the country. Those Districts looked a lot like many parts of the United States. People trudge to poor-paying jobs and live in flimsy structures one step up from homelessness. They shop at flea markets where barter is common. They catch their own food. They help each other out because the Capitol has long since abandoned them.

There are other eerie similarities and ironies. In the Hunger Games, the entire game area is wired with cameras and the contest is continuously broadcast to the nation on enormous screens. This quickly turns to the disadvantage of the 1% in the Capitol, because the 99% become inspired by watching the heroine’s courage and humanity and start to rebel anew.  This is a lesson our Supreme Court has already learned: you can forget about seeing any of its hearings on the health care law on a screen of any size. Watching the Justices and corporate lawyers rework the Constitution into a weapon of the mighty might anger some Americans. So the Supreme Court has banned any video… but says it will release audio at the end of each day’s hearing.

It’s clear from the movie that the elites have powerful medicines that can instantly eliminate infections and heal wounds, but residents of the Districts have never seen that kind of health care. I guess the Panem Chamber of Commerce would argue that these citizens are fortunate to be “free from government interference in their lives.”

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 03/25/2012

Fight Back Against Citizens United

On the second anniversary of Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, there’s bad news and good news.

The bad news: we’re seeing the full impact of the ruling, with the creation of PACs --- political action committees -- with innocuous Mom and apple pie-sounding names, like Make Us Great Again and Winning Our Future, funded by unlimited anonymous corporate contributions.

The good news is that the ruling has galvanized a grassroots backlash: if you’re mad as hell and want to join the fight to rid our democracy of toxic big money, there’s an explosion of grassroots opposition for you to plug into today, or whenever you’re ready.

First, a little history. Corporate political contributions have been stirring outrage for more than 100 years, since they helped elect Teddy Roosevelt in 1904. Once elected, the savvy Roosevelt got in front of a movement to outlaw those contributions, resulting in passage of the Tillman Act.

But the corporations didn’t just slink away in defeat; they developed ever more creative ways to skirt the law and influence elections.

In Citizens United, eight Supreme Court justices ruled in 2010 that while corporations couldn’t contribute to individual candidates they could give to political action committees that do not, supposedly, have formal ties to a particular candidate.

In their ruling, the justices took a flawed, too narrow view of the way in which money corrupts politics. First, they said that since the PACs aren’t linked to individual candidates, the contributions couldn’t be used to bribe the candidates, or extract a quid pro quo.

The court ignored the well-known fact that the monster PACs do establish informal but strong ties to individual candidates.

In addition, the court misstates the more insidious way massive corporate cash corrupts our government. As Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig points out, large corporate contributions ensure that only those candidates, regardless of party, who can collect those contributions, and espouse a corporate-friendly political agenda, stand any chance.

This creates a political system that thwarts goals of left and right.

If we don’t reverse Citizens United and confront corporate power, we can expect more corporate bailouts with no questions asked, and fewer consumer, environmental, employee and investor protections. We can expect more tax breaks for the 1 percent and more austerity for the 99 percent.

At WheresOurMoney, my colleague Harvey Rosenfield has proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United that is easily understood and will withstand any legal challenge. You can read more about it here. There’s a great video with background and ideas about fighting Citizens United here.

You can find groups taking a variety of actions against Citizens United across the country here and here.

 

 

 

 

Action / Citizens United / Martin Column - 01/21/2012

“If We Build It, He Will Come”

Washington has become Wall Street’s “field of dreams.” There, the money conglomerates engage in their beloved sport of financial speculation, cheered on by a small but powerful group of public officials who have sold out the rest of the country.

Deregulation was a home run for the financial industry. Wall Street’s friends in Washington sacked the rules of the game, unleashing the hedge funds, banks, investment firms, insurance companies and other speculators who made billions before the crash, then got billions more from the taxpayers after the crash.

Meanwhile, as today’s New York Times points out, almost nothing has been done about “derivatives,” the virtual technology for the speculation that drove our economy into the dugout three years ago. Federal agencies that were supposed to issue new regulations to prevent another debacle have been tied up in knots by Wall Street lawyers.

Jobless and fearful for their kids’ future, people are furious about what happened.  But it was always going to be a daunting task to mobilize the public behind the necessary reforms when they are so complex, and anything drafted to appeal to directly to Americans’ wallets – say, by providing a cap on credit card interest rates, or low-rate mortgages, or other forms of financial relief – would have inspired the financial industry to retaliate with nuclear weapons. Neither the President nor anyone in Congress were willing to start that fight, principled as it would have been.

So it has all come down to Elizabeth Warren, the brainiac Harvard law professor who suggested, in a law review article in 2005, that Congress create a new federal agency with the mission of protecting consumers against false advertising, misleading contracts and the general thievery of the financial industry.  Democrats proposed the agency as part of the Wall Street reform legislation in 2009, and after the industry thought they had whittled it down to something they could easily live with – or simply get around – Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the President signed it.

Warren was the obvious person for the job, and almost immediately Americans began calling on President Obama to nominate her for the post.

What Wall Street didn’t realize at first is that it is way, way easier for Americans to get behind a human being than a thousand-page piece of legislation that has been lawyered and lobbied into mush. America has become a celebrity-driven culture, and while Elizabeth Warren is no Lady Gaga, she is one of a small number of outsiders that have occasionally busted up the D.C. establishment – just as Ralph Nader did in the 1970s, and Jimmy Stewart fictionally did in the Frank Capra movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Whether President Obama will nominate Warren to the position has become the defining question of his Presidency for millions of Americans, especially those who voted for "change we can believe in" in 2008.

When confronted with demands by civil rights leaders to take action against racial discrimination in the late 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s legendary retort was “make me do it.” Whether he ever said that, the strategy he suggested is literally page one of the best manual for citizen empowerment and political organizing.

Let’s put it in more contemporary terms. President Obama has made it clear he doesn’t want to nominate Warren. It’s just another fight he’d rather not have. He embraces consensus, not controversy.

But the President has to know she’s the best person for the job. So the burden is on Americans to make it impossible for him not to nominate her. Part of that means punishing the people who are working against her – members of Congress, and those in the Administration – because they are doing Wall Street’s dirty work. These are the same people who let Wall Street plunder our nation and then bailed Wall Street out with our money.

My guess is, we can make Obama do it.

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Harvey Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 06/22/2011

Billion-Dollar Campaign Bus Leaves Unemployed Behind

Congress and the president threw the long-term unemployed under the bus last year in the deal to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

As the president and his fellow politicos revv up his re-election campaign bus, are they now poised to run over the 99ers, as the long-term unemployed are known?

The head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, appears ready to concede without a fight that the cost of extending unemployment benefits to the 99ers is “prohibitive.”

Two members of Cleaver’s caucus, Reps. Barbara Lee and Bobby Scott have proposed H.R. 589 to fund some benefits for the long-term unemployed.

Once again, Congress appears to be unwilling to find the $14 billion to extend unemployment compensation for the more than 1 million Americans out of work for at least 99 weeks.

President Obama seems more preoccupied with fighting for the $1 billion he says he will need for his reelection campaign.

How much could one of those 99ers contribute to the president, or anybody’s political campaign, for that matter?

That’s what occurred to me when I read who Obama – the man who at one time was supposed to transform American politics – had chosen to run his campaign to keep his job.

That would be Jim Messina, one of the undisputed experts at raising massive corporate campaign cash, a former staffer for Sen. Max Baucus, one-time head of the one Senate’s Finance Committee and one of the top vacuums of special interest contributions ever, according to Public Citizen.

So much for the grass roots that got the president where he is today. He’s dancing with Wall Street, big pharm and the insurance industry now. Messina apparently takes a dim view of the grass roots activists and their issues, which tend to clog up his vacuum cleaner.

For the corporate titans Obama will be relying on, it’s been a very, very good recovery.

For a lot of the grass roots folks who walked precincts and made phone calls in 2008, not so much. They’ve lost jobs, health insurance, homes, savings, pensions, and security.

Minorities have been especially hard hit, USA Today reports, by a “dual system” of finance. More than 20 percent of African-Americans and Hispanics will lose their homes in the present housing crisis, the Center for Responsible Lending contends.

Meanwhile the long-term unemployed, many of them older workers, face high hurdles reentering the workforce. Younger people face their own challenges, often taking lower paying jobs when they can find employment.

The politicians may be giving up on those of us who are unemployed but we shouldn’t. Call your congressperson and demand that they find the money for H.R 589.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Uncategorized - 04/05/2011

Remind AGs Who They Work For

The big banks are headed to Washington D.C. in an effort to weaken any potential settlement stemming from complaints about the banks’ misbehavior in the foreclosure crisis.

Those of us who favor holding the banks accountable are taking a different route Tuesday – through the country’s 50 state capitals.

A coalition of homeowner and consumer advocates are encouraging people to contact their state attorney generals today in an effort to encourage them to conduct real robust investigations into the big banks’ foreclosure fraud, not just go through the motions.

The official response to disclosures of the big banks’ sloppiness and downright fraud in the foreclosure process has been a mishmosh. President Obama refused to declare a moratorium while the mess was sorted out; the state attorney generals promised a tough investigation but don’t appear to have followed through, and then the various federal bank regulators got involved in an effort to negotiate a settlement.

One strategy for the big banks and their Republican allies has been to demonize Elizabeth Warren, a strong homeowners’ advocate who has been working to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created as part of the financial reform package passed last year. While the CFPB doesn’t exist yet, Warren has apparently been involved in the settlement process because that agency will have a hand in enforcing a settlement.

At the national level, it’s not just the Republicans that are covering for the bankers. The Obama administration in its present mood of bank coziness hasn’t been inclined to either prosecute bankers for violating the law or drive a hard bargain with them.

So that leaves it up to the attorneys general, several of whom, including Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, Iowa’s Tom Miller and California’s new attorney general have promised tough stances in protecting homeowners and holding banks accountable. Which means it’s up to us to call them – today – and remind them to hang tough.

 

 

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Foreclosure / Martin Column - 03/28/2011

King's Longest March

Everybody wants to claim a piece of the spirit of Martin Luther King in support of his or her cause. A Pentagon official even had the nerve to say King, who championed nonviolence, would have supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan.

That’s an especially dubious assertion given that the civil rights leader became an increasingly vocal opponent of the Vietnam war, in a move that cost him some support.

What would King make of the U.S. in 2011?

We don’t need to guess. We have the record of his words and deeds, especially in his final year.

As early as 1957, King was highlighting the disparities between rich and poor, In a speech celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Highlander Center, a grass-roots organizing center in Tennessee, he said: “I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

By 1963 King was moving his fight for strictly civil rights for minorities, like voting and equal access to public facilities, toward a broader struggle for economic rights for the disadvantaged and least powerful, recognizing that civil rights without economic rights couldn’t guarantee the opportunity and justice for all promised that was key to the great democratic experiment “What good is to it have the right to be able to sit at a lunch counter,” he asked, “if you can’t afford a hamburger.”

He gave the “I have a dream” speech that galvanized a nation at a march on Washington that demanded both jobs and freedom.

But it was in the last year of his life that his focus on economic injustice became most acute and profound.

He put in motion an effort to organize poor people, not just to focus on their plight, but also so they could fight for better jobs and decent housing for themselves.

King certainly would have celebrated the historic election of the nation’s first black president, and Obama began his presidency by evoking King’s spirit.

But the civil rights leader- he would have recognized that that election was not a resting place amid the economic suffering of so many.

He would not have abided the bailouts and tax cuts that allowed bankers and the wealthiest to prosper while those without access to the backrooms of power suffer. He would not have abided the widening gulf between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans, knowing the dire consequences of that division, not just for the poor and the middle class but also for the whole country.

He also would not have been surprised how tough it is to fight the entrenched power of corporations brought back from the dead by compliant politicians.

“It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job,” King said in April 1967 at Stanford University in a speech entitled `The Other America' that rings as sadly true today as it did more than 40 years ago, with its reference to "work-starved men searching for jobs that don't exist".

“It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions," King said at Stanford. "It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.”

Tomorrow: King in Memphis

Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 01/17/2011

Warming up to the Deficit Commission

Back in 1894, Nobel Prize-winning writer Anatole France made an astute observation:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

If he was around today, he might update his observation like this:

“In their wisdom, the co-chairs of the deficit reduction commission suggest that the rich and the poor wait until they’re 69 years old to collect their full Social Security pensions and to live with reduced cost-of-living adjustments.”

He might also note that the co-chairs, one a former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, and the other former Democratic presidential chief of staff and Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles, think it would be a good idea that both the rich and the poor learned to get with less help Medicare, give up their mortgage interest deduction and pay for admission to the Smithsonian Museum for the good of the country.

This is 21st century America’s contribution to the evolution of shared sacrifice. The rich will have to suffer cuts in their Social Security benefits right along with the poor in order to achieve the greater good of reducing the deficit.

Of course there’s good news: under the co-chairs’ proposal, neither rich nor poor will have tp pay additional taxes on the profits they make speculating on the economy.

Simpson and Bowles’ recommendations are being hailed in the upper reaches of the establishment. David Broder intones from his perch at the Washington Post that the proposals are like “a cold shower after a night of heavy drinking. It’s time to sober up.”

Meanwhile President Obama acknowledged he’s facing “tough choices.”

Translation: he would really, really like to help the middle-class and the less fortunate if only the other bad politicians (and the deficit commission he himself appointed, stacking it with members who have advocated cutting social security) would let him.

The deficit commission chair’s proposals are nothing more than a continuation of the bailout and the financial crisis policies started under the Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration, with the by now familiar cast of winners and losers. These proposals require the middle-class and less affluent to bear the burden of decades of disastrous policies, while those who benefited from those policies continue to avoid paying any costs for the consequences.

Simpson and Bowles are just the latest advocates waging a massive propaganda campaign in an attempt to convince people that Social Security is the main drag on the deficit. While the deficit is a serious problem, it’s not the fault of Social Security. And the deficit is not even the most serious problem facing our economy – it’s high unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. In their proposals, Simpson and Bowles don’t acknowledge that economic reality.

The full deficit commission issues its report in less than 2 weeks. Why not contact them here and let them know what you think? If they don’t want to stop peddling propaganda I know a couple of bridges where their reports could be put to good use, keeping away the cold.

Martin Column - 11/15/2010