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Trumka Demands Real Reform on Wall Street, Across the Economy |
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On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making the U.S. economy work for working people.
Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO leadership team’s national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive vision for the economy—and to fight back against the corporate agenda that left workers behind.
We’ve let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have undermined the economy, Trumka said:
Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For the pain they’ve inflicted on families who face financial ruin—unemployment, wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.
We need a different model for our economy, where good jobs, not bad debts, drive our growth. Our real economy needs a financial system that will support it, not a high-risk system that only supports itself and the wiliest speculators.
Trumka supported President Barack Obama’s call for a new consumer protection agency that would have real power to crack down on unfair practices. He also called for tougher regulations on the hedge fund and derivative trading that contributed to our economic crisis.
The banks that have been propped up with billions in public funds can’t be allowed to go back to the way things were, Trumka said. We need to make sure they’re subjected to oversight, and that our investment is turning into jobs and broad-based economic growth, not executive bonuses. Trumka promised that the union movement would take the lead in educating and mobilizing the public to fight back against finance-industry abuses.
Speaking on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Trumka explained why we need to hold Obama and leaders in Congress to their promises and make sure they enforce real protections for consumers in the financial industry, because the current system has failed:
Today, Rachel, I talked to a woman in Atlanta, and she was making $1,162 a month on a fixed salary, and they gave her a $900 a month mortgage. That type of predatory lending should have been picked up by one of those agencies. It wasn’t.
Trumka said that union members across the country will watch carefully to make sure elected leaders are looking out for working people, not big banks and corporations:
What we’re going to do is make sure that they live by that. We’ll educate our members, we’ll mobilize our members. I think our members will hold them accountable on Election Day.
Trumka also spoke with Maddow about health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act.
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American Christianity Is At The Heart Of Our Worst Problems:
racism is at The heart of the great deal of the extreme animosity
Former president Jimmy Carter went on the record to point out that he believes that racism is at the heart of the great deal of the extreme animosity being leveled at President Obama (NBC News September 15). Carter identified himself as a Southerner with an insider’s understanding. There’s something he didn’t mention however: the special culpability of his own religion — Evangelical Christianity — for the anti-Obama hyperventilating and furious reaction to our first black president. And that reaction has less to do with race and more to do with the ugliest side of religion.
The fact is that if you’re going to blame one group above all others for the willful ignorance and continuing ugliness of the response to President Obama the best candidate would be the evangelical/fundamentalist community. The angry part of the South Carter spoke of is racist because it’s dominated by a certain type of “Christian” culture.
Since Carter is also an evangelical Christian (as well as a Southerner) he would have done well to use his evangelical insider status to point to not just racism but to scream bloody murder about a bigger problem today: the hijacking of Christianity as the source of the hate and anger directed against all things “other” by a vocal (and health care lobby-organized and funded) angry minority of voters who are poisoning the American body.
American Christianity Is At The Heart Of Our Worst Problems
Are the New Atheists leading us to enlightenment? The problem with the recent New Atheist attacks on Christianity is that they mirror the hostility of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture toward the secular society that it so disdains. The real answer to the question; “Can Christianity be saved from the Christians?” is not going to be found coming from people like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris et al. Instead that answer may be found in the life and work of Christians such as former president Jimmy Carter, President Obama, the late writer John Updike, and other public figures from Desmond Tutu to Nelson Mandela who’s faith can be taken seriously because of the moral authority given them by their achievements outside the realm of theology.
The people running around calling Obama is “Hitler”, the so-called “birthers” and all the rest can’t be understood outside of the context of the hermetically sealed world-hating gated community known as Evangelical Christianity. As a former Evangelical and son of an Evangelical Religious Right leader, let me share a little of the insider perspective that I wish Carter had brought to the subject.
What Defines American Evangelicals These Days?
The key to understanding the Evangelicals is to understand the popularity of the Left Behind series of books about the “return of Christ” (and the whole host of other End Times “ministries” from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine). This isn’t some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but evidence of the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.
Left Behind
The words “left behind” are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have indeed been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.”
This has led to a profound fear of the “other.” Jenkins and LaHaye (the Left Behind authors) provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the “elite.” The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last soon everyone will know “we” were right and “they” were wrong. They’ll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk “us” away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and join our side while there was still time!
The bestselling status of the Left Behind novels proves that, not unlike Islamist terrorists who behead their enemies, many evangelical/ fundamentalist readers relish the prospect of God doing lots of messy killing for them as they watch in comfort from on high. They want revenge on all people not like them–forever.
Generations Of Indoctrination
We are several generations into the progeny of leaders such as James Dobson and his radio show Focus On The Family. These offspring extol the virtues of corporal punishment, patriarchy, applying biblical law to public governance and so forth. Millions of evangelicals have been raised in homes where they’ve been isolated from the wider culture, home schooled and/or sent to “Christian schools” where they have been indoctrinated to believe that the Federal Government is the enemy of all true believers, that the “End” is near, that secular society is their enemy as is art, learning and culture.
They now form a Fifth Column of the deliberately intellectually disenfranchised. They know they are out of the loop and hate the rest of us for their own self-imposed isolation. I’m afraid they will soon turn to violence.
Here Are The Alternatives To Change the Theologically-Induced Hate Landscape:
A) all sane Americans must become atheists or agnostics,
or…
B) those of us who are Christians must rescue Christianity from the willfully ignorant evangelicals and fundamentalists.
I favor the second alternative. First, having been raised in an evangelical/fundamentalist home I’ve long since moved beyond my background when it comes to my politics and my theology. That proves something; people can change their minds! I did.
But I believe more strongly than ever that we human beings are spiritual beings with or without the permission of those who take a purely rationalist approach to human existence. The better — and I think only realistic option — is to regard religion as an evolving process of human consciousness and work to reform rather than eliminate it
In my soon-to-be published book Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don’t Like Religion (Or Atheism) I have very deliberately started a radical conversation through which I hope many of us can carve out a position that embraces religion while absolutely rejecting the type of insanity that has become synonymous with the word “Christian” in contemporary America.
” THE REPUBLICAN-ZIONIST PARTY IS A HATE GROUP”——Go To: highfive4u.com or highfive4all.com .
DEMAND SEPARATION OF CHURCH & STATE.
Our government should be for all people, of all faith or none.It is our constitution.
Wall Street is a good place to start, but let not forget Freight Brokers. I highly reccomend unions read the book Industry of Thieves.
Most have never head of a freight broker, but they are stealing up to 60% of all monies for loads they book in a 650 billion dollar industry. That 60% they over inflate is costing jobs and unions can use it as a barganing chip when asked for concessions. Again, read the book and be floored.
Trumka follows the same tired and failed program of asking the thieves to reform themselves. This system, capitalism, has only one morale precept - PROFIT. It’s only reason for existing is PROFIT and it secures that PROFIT at the expense of the working class and poor. To expect it to reform itself when the the world financial system is in disaray is not only absurd but coming from the leadership of the AFL-CIO amounts to surrender.
Until we have a leadership that knows that capitalism can not be reformed and that the U.S. and world need a planned, socialist economy nothing positive will happen. Capitalism is in decay and in it’s decay it will do anything and everything to maintain it’s PROFIT and if that means throwing millions of people out of work, killing millions so as to capture new markets or aquire resources then it will proceed to do those things. Until we have a leadership that if they go to Wall Street they go their prepared to pull it down then we remain nothing but pawns in the political games of bureuacrats and thieves.
I love Richard Trumka,
God bless him, his father and his grandfather.
EFCA NOW!!!!