John Stewart Mill
The world is a total mess. For the past thirty years we have been told -- and many of us believed -- that the problem with our world is big government, regulation and taxes...that if we trust in the free market and big business, all boats will float up with the tide. The evidence is now in. It worked exactly the opposite of what was promised. Big business exported our jobs, cut our pay and benefits, cut their own taxes by 50% while the rest of us saved pocket change on taxes, deregulated financial institutions and environmental safeguards, cut the safety net programs which we need even more than before their "reforms" which were supposed to benefit us all...
We face a drastically shrinking middle class and an apparently permanent underclass while the incomes for those at the top rose 2,184% [1] in the decade of the 1980s when it all began and have soared ever since. It's been the biggest "reverse Robin Hood" -- take from the poor and give it to the rich -- since the robber barons of the mid 1800s. How did they accomplish this? By substantially controlling our government giving mega-corporations subsidies at the same time we can't find the money to repair our roads and schools. By deregulating the banking insitutions, environmental and consumer protection safeguards. By selling tax reductions that gave most of us pocket change at best while their taxes went down by 50%. By writing legislation which prevents the genuine entrepreneur and small business from competing... That's the truth of the matter and it's time to set the record straight. And it's time to change it!
Most of us don’t want to believe that things are really bad. It’s not comfortable to see the world this way. We don’t like what it does to us emotionally and physically –what it does to our gut. It’s even worse for us socially. Nobody wants to be with anyone who is always pessimistic – just ask your "significant others." It’s a downer. “Get a life. Get over it. You can’t change it,” they tell us. We’d rather just go about our business believing that if everything is not exactly fine today, it will get better. The economy seems to be improving. Stocks are gaining value... Yes, but substantially because the ultra-wealthy are playing the exact game they did before -- creating a bubble of paper wealth, selling it to us taking their usurious commissions off the top and leaving us holding the empty bag again. Just wait and see.
What this ignores is the fact that things won’t get better unless we choose to create the changes. What messes up our gut is feeling like there's nothing we can do about it. The deck's stacked. The problem is we don't have anything creative to do with that negative energy,...the frustration,...sometimes anger. Deep down every one of us feels this even when our lives are going along generally well. Suppose we were able to find things we can do which plays a direct part in changing the way the world works.
Here's what we propose to do: We're going to talk about what's wrong only long enough to begin to see what we have to do to fundamentally change the way things work. We can work our tails off trying to fix a mess here or there, but the big picture doesn't change -- what makes it all happen. It's the process and how it works that we need to first concern ourselves with.
Our problems have causes – many causes. But there are root causes that underlie most of the things that plague us. Anyone who is half awake knows that big money interests own our economy and our government and that probably 90% of the problems we face are the direct result of that over-arching truth. They have the power and they use that power in ruthless and destructive ways.
The problem is not the government. The government doesn't have much power since deregulation began -- except when it serves the rich and the powerful. The problem is that big money interests own our government. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We need to call a spade a spade. The abuse of power by the very rich who continue to take untold millions of dollars while the world economy languishes, that’s evil. Or as Mill says, it’s “a great evil.” We are up against a great evil. If we start our thinking from any other point …if we make only a small effort, we will produce no result at all.
When the financial tycoons [end note 2] who created toxic mortgages based on fabricated information and misinformation about the meaning of an ARM mortgage,…when they knew that this would result in foreclosure as the expected rate increases hit,…when they took their commission off the top with no risk when the mortgages they wrote failed,… and when they backed toxic mortgages with derivatives that they knew were unstable [because they knew that the derivatives were based on toxic mortgages that they wrote],…when they paid the ratings companies we have always trusted like Standard and Poor to give AAA ratings to these investments both knew were junk,…when they gambled, not with their own money, but with ours,…when that lead to the collapse of the world economy,…when we lost our jobs, our insurance, our homes, our retirement funds,… when they took our tax dollars to bail themselves out and then gave themselves $20 billion in new bonuses, and when they get away with all of that, that’s evil. That's the truth. Does it make you mad?
When health insurers spend the first third of the inflated premiums we pay them to eliminate every high risk person and refuse payment of insured claims in order to increase their record high profits,…when we pay more for health care than any other nation on earth but only rank 37th in the quality of care we receive according to the World Health Organization, …when we are the only country in the western world that doesn’t have universal health care leaving millions of people unable to afford the care they need to save our children’s lives,…when even those who are employed and have the best health insurance are often forced into bankruptcy because of high co-payments, life-time caps, and disallowing even standard forms of treatment,… when health care costs are the number one reason for bankruptcy, when health care profits are running more than twice the Dow Jones average return on investment, when they have eight well-paid lobbyists per each of our Representatives, when the health care industry pours millions of dollars into campaign funds to block the health care reforms which would help us all, that’s evil. That's the truth. Does it make you furious?
When business tells us that the “free market” is the only way to prosperity,…that all government and regulation is bad,…that profit is the only measure of value and must be unchallenged,…that, therefore, all taxes are bad,…when companies know they are destroying our environment by pouring toxic chemicals proven to cause cancer into our water,... with the rapid depletion the world’s resources and then hide and deny these facts as people die of the cancer they caused,…when they produce shoddy and toxic products,…when they hire teams of lawyers to deny and delay as medical care bankrupts the people they poisoned,…when they pour money into campaign funds so that our representatives gut the environmental regulations which protect us all as excessive,...when they eliminate enforcement saying that the cost of compliance -- the compliance that protects us from them -- is excessive, that big government is excessive, when they call for tort reform so they can’t be forced to pay for the harm they have caused, that’s evil. That's also the truth. Does it make you mad?
Selfish big money interests are the forces that underlie most of our other problems including many of the psychological and addictive problems resulting from our inability to cope with the economic hardships they have created. As long as we allow them to continue their stranglehold on everything, we will not be able to make real change,...not on any of the other fronts which concern us. At some point we need to quit hiding our heads in the sand. At some point, we need to get angry. At some point we need to turn that anger into productive action. At some point, we have to take control of our own destiny. When we start taking actions that can change our world for the better, then we start feeling good about ourselves again. It's worth the journey.
Against a great evil… That sounds harsh. It is harsh, but not because we make it so. We are just honestly observing what is going on in our world. It's harsh because those self-serving interests make it harsh. Please, don't blame the messenger. If we are to succeed, and succeed we must,it's going to take the effort of many, many people who want their world to be better,...who believe the world can be better,...who are willing to work to make it better. Many of us are already working as best we know how to make it better. Many more want to take their lives in that direction. But most of us don't have a vision or a plan of action which can materially affect the way things are.
We have a vision and a plan. If our solutions don’t end the power of big money to corrupt our society, our economy and our government, nothing else will change. Do we have a nation "of the people, by the people and for the people…" or a nation of the extremely wealthy, by their corporations, for only themselves and against the rest of us? In our representative democracy, we have the power to change this. We only have to quit allowing big money to buy the process and to take the power back to ourselves. The key fact is: No one goes to Congress without our vote. Money can't buy our votes except if we allow ourselves to continue to be duped by their misinformation about what is really going on. If we decide to unite our actions, we can change this in one election.
How about we quit making excuses? How about we quit believing it's not possible? How about we start to find the ways of proving it is possible. That, Friends, is our common task. Please join with us. Together we can eliminate the power of big $$$$ over our government and economy through one act of Congress. All we have to do is convince all candidates that they will not be elected if they don't get on the winning team.
[1] Barlett & Steele, America: What Went Wrong?, p1.
[2] Under intense questioning by Senator Levin, the CEO of Washington Mutual, the largest of the banks that were saved from failing due to the toxic mortgages they wrote only by being bought out at the ninth hour, finally admitted that top management knew they were fabricating information on mortgage applications to insure approval. He stated that he was aware that their brokers were "cutting and pasting" information on income and assets from other people's applications. The FBI has found that over 80% of all toxic mortgages were caused by the mortgage companies, not by fraud on the part of applicants.
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