Wanted: Economic Patriots to Save American Dream
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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka yesterday described the upcoming elections this way:
“This election is about economic patriots, and it’s also about corporate traitors.”
Economic patriotism resonates among working people and the millions of America’s jobless workers—and corporate traitors is an all-too apt description of many in Big Business, such as anti-patriotic corporations moving jobs out of this country. A paragraph buried in a New York Times article on Wall Street this week hit me hard:
Just last week, Paul S. Otellini, chief executive of Intel, said at a dinner at the Aspen Forum of the Technology Policy Institute that “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”
Mr. Otellini has overseen two big acquisitions in the last two weeks—the $7.7 billion takeover of the security software maker McAfee and the $1.4 billion deal for the wireless chip unit of Infineon Technologies. If he is true to his word, those deals will most likely lead to job cuts in the United States, not job creation.
Otellini is not an outlier.
The Past Decade the Worst for America’s Workers
Whoa. This from the Washington Post:
The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times…
WaPo is the kind of newspaper that leans heavily toward emphasizing happy economic news, even in the face of 10 percent unemployment. So its coverage of the decade of disaster means the stuation must really be bad. How bad?
There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.
How bad?
Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999–and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.
How bad?
It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers.
But not for the CEOs of the corporations who fueled the nation’s growing economic inequality. Take AIG, which taxpayers bailed out at a cost of $182.3 billion. When one of its execs balked at a salary cut required by the Obama administration because AIG was surviving on taxpayer funds, the corporation paid her $3.8 million in severance.
The cataclysmic widening of the income gap between the obscenely rich and the rest of us is the very definition of the decade of disaster.
Wall Street Won’t Do Right. Now They Have To
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So, Wall Street CEOs didn’t figure out on their own that when they take taxpayer money, they have a moral obligation to help the overall economy with their $700 billion public-funded bailout rather than single-mindedly line their own pockets with billions of dollars in salaries, bonuses and other ego-inflating perks.
Funny how “moral obligation” and “Wall Street” tend to be mutually exclusive terms.
Wall Street CEOs wouldn’t do it on their own. So now they have to.
David vs. Goliath: The Fight Begins for Reform of the Financial Industry
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Most Americans want strong regulation of our nation’s financial markets, according to a poll released today by Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of nearly 200 investors and civil rights and community organizations.
The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners, surveyed 900 likely voters in 77 “Blue Dog” or conservative Democratic districts and those in politically competitive Democratic districts.
More than two-thirds of voters in all the districts support creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) to “create and enforce a strong set of rules to require fair, affordable, understandable and transparent financial products like bank loans, mortgages and credit cards for families and small businesses.”
When asked if there was too much, too little or just the right amount of regulation of banks, the stock market and credit card companies, voters agreed, by a 23-point margin, there’s too little rather than too much regulation.
