The Disconnect Between The Beltway And America

I'm so old I remember when banks paid us interest instead of ripped us off with extraneous fees. Yesterday was Bank Transfer Day and credit unions pulled in some 650,000 new customers since September 29, when Bank of America announced it would add a $5-a-month debit card fee; that's $4.5 billion. The Big Bank industry is going right down the tubes... uncontrolled greed and avarice will do that to you every time. And although mental pygmies like Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan may see greed and avarice as perfectly natural... they're mental pygmies. On Friday the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), issued a statement in regard to the consensus among the ruling class that the crooked banksters should get a gentle slap on the wrist and that everybody-- in the 1%-- should kiss and make up. Basically Grijalva and Ellison said NO.

“Across the country, Americans are outraged and taking to the streets to demand accountability from the big Wall Street banks whose reckless actions cost millions of families their homes and wreaked havoc on the American middle class.
 
We applaud President Obama and the Justice Department for this effort to hold these banks accountable. However, a $25 billion settlement pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars in lost home equity, retirement savings and exploding public debt caused by these institutions. 
 
We stand in support of the numerous Attorneys General that have demanded a better deal for homeowners in their states, from New York to California. 
 
Instead of immunity for Wall Street banks, let’s stand with the American people and demand a fair deal for homeowners.”

The Occupy Wall Streeters were less deferential towards President Obama.

President Obama is on the brink of cutting a backroom deal that would give bankers broad immunity for illegally throwing tens of thousands of Americans out of their homes. The Administration is pressuring state attorneys general to abandon an ongoing investigation into the massive “robo-signing” fraud, in exchange for a relatively small payoff by the banks.

Numerous investigations by state and federal authorities have demonstrated that banks used illegal procedures to make tens of thousands of foreclosures over the past decade. Rushing to a settlement before the full extent of the fraud is known would be a grave injustice to those who were illegally foreclosed upon and those still struggling to stay in their homes.

“This is a clear, moral issue that cuts to the core of why we occupy,” said Max Berger, an Occupy Wall Street participant helping to plan the event. “Instead of throwing corrupt bankers in jail, the administration is pushing to give them a get-out-of jail-free card.”

“President Obama and the attorneys general have a choice: do they stand with Wall Street, or do they stand with the 99%?” he said... We won’t let Obama get away with being Wall Street’s puppet.

Americans want real accountability. On Thursday Robert Reich wrote that while the biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy... [t]he biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent."

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee”-- six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings-- will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich-- not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill”-- which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.
Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.  

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.
I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more-- and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy-- 1968 and 1989? [1848?]

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game-- an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.