Democracy Taxed

Nobody prefers paying taxes...with the possible exception of IRS employees who realize that their tax returns along with those of others keep them employed.

Hardly anyone enjoys coughing up hard-earned money to “the government.”

Everyone likes to rail about taxes especially today, “Tax Day,” April 15.

But taxes are the necessary price for a civil society.

Fire and police protection. Food inspectors. Air traffic controllers. Libraries. Unemployment insurance. Water and sewer systems. Border protection. Medical care for senior citizens. Courts. Public parks and open spaces. Educational, nutritional, and medical programs for pre-school age children. Boards of elections. Enforcement of clean air and water laws.

These and hundreds of other social, economic and political functions are the glue that bond people and their/our institutions together to forge community. Humans are social beings. We need social networks — both informal and formal.

Governments are one type of formal network that at their best reflect the will of their inhabitants through their constitutions, rules, laws, policies and programs. Taxes provide the funds that allow governments to create and maintain these functions.

Are all taxes fair? No. Are tax dollars wasted? Absolutely. Can other formal networks besides governments sometimes perform the same social function without tax dollars. Sure.

This doesn’t mean we don’t need taxes.

At their best, governments are us. We need public structures and institutions that create, maintain, protect, and defend the commons and collective goals. We also need governments to control and define the other major organized structure and institution in our societies that threaten self-governance — the major one being business corporations.

As problematic as governments may be in representing its citizens, they are bastions of self-governance compared to business corporations. Business corporations are not democratic. Employees have no Bill of Rights protections. Business corporations are not loyal to any people or place. Business corporations, in fact, seek to supplant the role of government not just economically but politically. That’s what drives privatization of public assets and institutions.  

Several dozen “Tax Day Tea Parties” are taking place today across Ohio — as part of a nationwide revolt against  taxes. They’re billed as nonpartisan. Many I’ve read about are focused on opposing President Obama’s stimulus programs. Whether deliberate or not, the tenor of these brewing tax revolt actions, however, seems to be much more — to reduce the power, authority, and wherewithal of government to:

1. Define and control corporate actions
2. Ensure that governments can’t assume new authorities that may be better in the public rather than the corporate domain — i.e. controlling the issuance of national currency, and/or
3. Decrease the ability of government to meet basic public functions, thereby, opening the door to selling or leasing them to for-profit business corporations.
   

There’s no question we need a tax revolt. The proposed fiscal year federal budget calls for over $700 billion for military spending (to maintain a military empire with bases and troops in more than 100 nations, including current wars and occupations in several) and $750 billion more to bailout banks that lost trillions in risky and bizarre financial gambles. An increasing amount of our tax dollars are in the form of corporate welfare. None of this increases housing security, health care security, environmental security, job security (expect for bankers and military contractors), or education security. It’s not taxes that are revolting but how and where they’re spent.

Reducing taxes for any of the three reasons above simply taxes democracy by decreasing the ability of governments to set and enforce laws, rules, priorities and programs that reflect the wishes and interests of the vast majority of the public --- and against those running national and transnational business corporations.

In a time when the “free market” and Wall Street has demonstrated beyond doubt its lack of service to the public interest and lack of public accountability, government provides the best institutional path to authentic public accountability and responsibility.

Tax Day Tea Parties only brews blanket hostility at the government and represents an effort to divert popular anger away from where it most needs to be — against the growing power and rights of business corporations and toward creating a government ruled by people.

A New Way Forward

Protests Scheduled Across the Country Calling on Banks to Nationalize, Reorganize, Decentralize

National demonstrations are scheduled in more than fifty cities across the country tomorrow to protest the government’s handling of the economic crisis. The demonstrations are organized by the recently launched group A New Way Forward. They are calling on the government to take three main actions on the country’s banks: nationalize, reorganize and decentralize. [includes rush transcript.

Guest:

Greg Coleridge, Director of the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program at the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. They are sponsoring one of the rallies taking place across the country on April 11th that is being coordinated “The Way Forward.”

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Related Links

• A New Way Forward

AMY GOODMAN: National demonstrations are scheduled in more than fifty cities around the country Saturday to protest the government’s handling of the economic crisis. In Phoenix, a demonstration is being held outside the headquarters of AIG. In Chicago, protesters will march in front of Bank of America. In Atlanta, people are demonstrating outside the Federal Reserve Bank. In New York, a rally is being held at Union Square. And many more actions are taking place across the country.

The demonstrations are organized by the recently launched group A New Way Forward. The group was formed to support alternative bailout than the ones already in place. They’re calling on the government to take three main actions on the country’s banks: nationalize, reorganize and decentralize.

Greg Coleridge is director of the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program at the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. They are sponsoring the protest being held in Cleveland on Saturday. He joins me here in Athens, Ohio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Greg. And thanks so much for taking the, what, four-hour drive from Cleveland to Athens.

GREG COLERIDGE: Just about. Good to be here with you. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about A New Way Forward. What is this decentralized action that’s happening around the country?

GREG COLERIDGE: Well, A New Way Forward is a relatively new organization, a grassroots citizen initiative, bottom-up, not affiliated with any existing formal, long-established organization, which gives it, I think, flexibility and mobility to respond to the needs and interests of people at the grassroots, who are increasingly concerned, angry, outraged at what has been going on since last fall, the blank check bailout of financial institutions from coast to coast, particularly the largest banks in this country that many people feel should not be helped in the way they have been but should be at least temporarily taken over, nationalized or democratized, depending on how people want to call it.

A New Way Forward, put together by a number of young activists who were very involved in the Howard Dean presidential campaign, decided they needed to organize this grassroots initiatives and serve as—I think it’s an arena where people from across the country can go and find information, inspiration and dedication of other people to organize grassroots, bottom-up protests that will be beginning this Saturday across the country at 2:00 in most cases, some communities elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain your demands.

GREG COLERIDGE: Well, it’s as you pointed out in your introduction. It largely is based on the premise that we need profound structural reform and that that should include at least temporarily a takeover of some of the largest, most egregious and what many believe are fundamentally insolvent financial institutions. And some believe it’s like the big five or six—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo-Wachovia—that those five financial institutions alone house or are responsible for something like over 90 percent of the—what are considered to be the most toxic derivatives. And we should not be bailing out—people connected to A New Way Forward—those financial institutions. We need something else.

And what many people have called, including many Nobel Prize winners, is at least a temporary nationalization to take over these banks, get rid of their toxic assets, and put them back out on the market. And by doing so, it will save taxpayers billions, if not trillions, of dollars and move control back where I think it should be and was meant to be from day one in this country, under the realm of we the people, the public, that financial institutions, that the issuance of money and credit, are too important to be left exclusively to the hands of private business corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s happening in Cleveland. For a time, wasn’t it ground zero for foreclosures? Whole neighborhoods closed?

GREG COLERIDGE: It sure was. To a certain extent, it still is, has been eclipsed to a certain extent by many of the Southern states now and Florida and Nevada and Arizona, California. But city of Cleveland and many inner cities in Ohio and elsewhere. Maybe Cleveland was the poster child, if you will, for the foreclosure crisis. In some communities in Cleveland alone, Slavic Village, in particular, was considered to be maybe among the worst and was seen coast-to-coast, if not around the world, people losing their homes, hard-working people, people who are solid salt of the earth who followed the rules, but who got caught up in the whole effort to—the lure, the temptation, that many banks put out there to get in over their heads to get a second mortgage, to become involved in these teaser early loan rates that may have been affordable in the first year or two, but then completely went out of control in years, you know, four, five and six, and so on.

And so, it’s communities like that that had been devastated, what some people have called an economic aftereffect of 9/11 or Katrina or the like, that we in the Cleveland area and across the country are trying respond to and feel that one of the principal causes for those conditions, economic conditions, were not the inappropriate actions or behaviors of those hard-working, follow-the-rules, salt-of-the-earth residents of Cleveland, Ohio, but the big banks.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how you’re linking in Cleveland the issue of corporate personhood, this whole movement that has been growing around this country, not just this year, but for years?

GREG COLERIDGE: Well, we think they’re inextricably connected, that giving business corporations not just economic powers but, if you will, political powers to define and shape public policies, which they have done for a very long time and largely because they have hidden behind or shielded themselves underneath the Bill of Rights, where over literally decades—well, actually maybe more than a century now, business corporations have, like a salami, gradually won personhood rights of First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh Amendment rights, to be involved and engaged in the public policy arena. And certainly, the First Amendment rights to be involved, say, in being able to be involved in political campaigns has been part of the problem. By these financial corporations—well, all corporations, but most particularly, most recently, financial corporations contributing or investing in public policy and in campaigns and in candidates has resulted in the distortion of public policy and the mass shifting of regulations away from themselves to permit them to engage in these dangerous, bizarre and incredibly risky financial investments that have caused now this global—what’s called this global financial crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, how are you trying to make this real, in practice? How do you deal with this issue?

GREG COLERIDGE: Yeah. Well, we’re trying, number one, to make people aware that these realities exist, that these financial corporations have been party to contributing or investing $5 billion to public officials over the last number of years, that have resulted then in the deregulation through the reversal of Glass-Steagall and the Commodity Modification Act and the like. That’s an important first step, to make people aware of the distortion of public policy through campaign contributions, but also to call attention, that—right now, what should we do? Who really should have more rights to decide issues of credit or issues of the circulation of money in our communities? Should it be people, or should it be financial corporations and banks?

So what we’re trying to do is empower and energize, and thanks to A New Way Forward, it’s providing the forum or the arena where people can come together and try to offset financial power, money power, corporate power, that has been won over through the Constitution and laws and the like, and create a groundswell of people power, similar to what our forbearers a generation ago, several generations ago, did in the Populist Era, the 1870s and 1890s, where individuals came and realized that it was the banks and the railroad companies then that were controlling and ruling. And we’re trying to help people understand that the same kind of controlling and ruling by banking corporations are going on today, and that needs to be challenged fundamentally and profoundly.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, this Rasmussen poll that just came out that finds Americans are losing faith in capitalism?

GREG COLERIDGE: Well, I think if—unless you’ve been living under a rock or a tree for the last period of time, just putting all of our faith and eggs, if you will, financial and political, in the hands of these banking corporations to bring prosperity and tremendous global living standards to everyone and prosperity to people in this country has proven to be an enormous fraud. So people are, I think, responding appropriately. They’re saying that we need to have more of a role in the shaping of public policy, and that’s what these demonstrations—and actually, more than sixty communities, rather than fifty, are going to be doing this, A New Way Forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Greg Coleridge, I want thank you very much for being with us. Greg Coleridge is director of the Economic Justice and Empowerment Program of the American Friends Service Committee of Northeast Ohio. We’re broadcasting here from Ohio University in Athens.

Pillow Fighting Wall Street / April 11 Protests

I was pleasantly surprised when I opened the Cleveland Plain Dealer today (Sunday) and saw a picture of a large crowd of people gathered on Wall Street on Saturday. Several organizations, led by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), sponsored a march calling for, among other demands, cuts in military spending and funding for bank bailouts.

The picture was opposite an article about how billionaire Warren Buffett has benefited from the bank bailout, with just 28 companies receiving more than 90 percent of the funds so far going to financial firms under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/1755868.html

Turns out the opposite picture wasn’t of the UFPJ march...but of a pillow fight. Literally. It was “Pillow Fight Day in the Financial District” with more than 1000 people taking part in this 4th annual event in New York and 108 other cities sponsored by “newmindspace,” a group devoted to free public gatherings.

Maybe the media decided to cover the pillow fight rather than the march since they’re more familiar with political pillow fights than mass marches as responses to the global economic crisis.

Political pillow fighting is probably a good way to describe the response in Washington to the economic meltdown, outright theft, and further consolidation of financial power caused by the taxpayer bailout of insurance giant AIG, banking zombies JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sacks, Bank of America, Citibank, and Well Fargo-Wachovia, and other financial institutions.

Despite all the tough talking, there’s still been:
- no Administration or Congressional demands to account for where public tax dollars have gone,
- no demands that the leaders of the zombie banks be fired (if not jailed),
- no calls for a return of public dollars misused/misspent,
- no action to explore legal challenges to how bailout money was used by some banks to acquire other banks,
- no demand that the Administration follow the Prompt Corrective Action Law, passed after the savings and loan crisis, stipulating that severely undercapitalized banks be promptly put into receivership (i.e., nationalized/democratized). This federal law says insolvent banks must be promptly nationalized/democratized. Former senior Savings & Loan Regulator William Black spelled this out Friday night on Bill Moyers’ Journal http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html.
Black charges the Administration with covering up the full extent of the financial calamity http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/04/senior-s-regulator-says-government.html

This is unacceptable.

It’s time to end the Wall Street pillow fighting. Let “newmindspace” organize those.

It’s time to open up space in our minds to the urgent need to express outrage at what is happening...and to take it to the streets.

April 11 Protests in Cleveland and Columbus — Break Up the Banks

Rallies being planned all over the country at 2:00 PM
Decentralize – Nationalize - Reorganize
Sign up at www.anewwayforward.org

Cleveland, OH USA Willard Park
at corner of Lakeside and E. 9th
62 people plan to attend

Columbus, OH USA Ohio Statehouse
77 S High St
60 people plan to attend

If not near either of these two places, sign up to organize your own action. If April 11 is too soon, do it about Tax Day (April 15) or May Day (May 1).

Democratize the 5 Biggest Banks / April 11 Protests

The article below is a clear, short, and sobering assessment of the origins of the global financial crisis and what specifically in the short-term should be done — to democratize the 5 largest banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank) which collectively “hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.” It’s all too easy to feel paralyzed that the problems and solutions are so large, complex and interwoven that nothing can be done to bring any real justice. This piece suggests otherwise — that a government take-over of just 5 banks and wiping out the nearly 200 TRILLION dollars of speculative derivatives will go a very long way to save citizen taxpayers and bank depositors.

As the article graphically asserts, “[c]ontinuing to pour taxpayer money into these five banks without changing their operating system, is tantamount to treating an alcoholic with unlimited free booze.”

Call or write your US Representative and Senators Sherrod Brown and George Voinovich. Tell them to democratize the 5 largest banks.

NOTE: National protests calling for Breaking Up the Banks are planned for Saturday, April 11 at 2 pm. Go to A New Way Forward www.anewwayforward.org to sign up. Protests are already planned for Cleveland and Columbus. There’s a way to sign up to organize a protest in your community. Please consider doing so.

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12953
Geithner’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: The Entire Global Financial System is at Risk
When the Solution to the Financial Crisis becomes the Cause
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, March 30, 2009

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction.

The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health?

Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system.

The ‘dirty little secret’ which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps.

In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.

One significant law was the repeal of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited mergers of commercial banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs. A second law backed by Treasury Secretary Summers in 2000 was an obscure but deadly important Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That law prevented the responsible US Government regulatory agency, Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from having any oversight over the trading of financial derivatives. The new CFMA law stipulated that so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, such as those involved in the AIG insurance disaster, (which investor Warren Buffett once called ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’), be free from Government regulation.

At the time Summers was busy opening the floodgates of financial abuse for the Wall Street Money Trust, his assistant was none other than Tim Geithner, the man who today is US Treasury Secretary. Today, Geithner’s old boss, Larry Summers, is President Obama’s chief economic adviser, as head of the White House Economic Council. To have Geithner and Summers responsible for cleaning up the financial mess is tantamount to putting the proverbial fox in to guard the henhouse.

The ‘Dirty Little Secret’

What Geithner does not want the public to understand, his ‘dirty little secret’ is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000 allowed the creation of a tiny handful of banks that would virtually monopolize key parts of the global ‘off-balance sheet’ or Over-The-Counter derivatives issuance.

Today five US banks according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.

The five are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives (€66 trillion!). Morgan Chase is followed by Bank of America with $38 trillion in derivatives, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs with a ‘mere’ $30 trillion in derivatives. Number five, the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain’s HSBC Bank USA has $3.7 trillion.

After that the size of US bank exposure to these explosive off-balance-sheet unregulated derivative obligations falls off dramatically. Just to underscore the magnitude, trillion is written 1,000,000,000,000. Continuing to pour taxpayer money into these five banks without changing their operating system, is tantamount to treating an alcoholic with unlimited free booze.

The Government bailouts of AIG to over $180 billion to date has primarily gone to pay off AIG’s Credit Default Swap obligations to counterparty gamblers Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, the banks who believe they are ‘too big to fail.’ In effect, these five institutions today believe they are so large that they can dictate the policy of the Federal Government. Some have called it a bankers’ coup d’etat. It definitely is not healthy.

This is Geithner’s and Wall Street’s Dirty Little Secret that they desperately try to hide because it would focus voter attention on real solutions. The Federal Government has long had laws in place to deal with insolvent banks. The FDIC places the bank into receivership, its assets and liabilities are sorted out by independent audit. The irresponsible management is purged, stockholders lose and the purged bank is eventually split into smaller units and when healthy, sold to the public. The power of the five mega banks to blackmail the entire nation would thereby be cut down to size. Ooohh. Uh Huh?

This is what Wall Street and Geithner are frantically trying to prevent. The problem is concentrated in these five large banks. The financial cancer must be isolated and contained by Federal agency in order for the host, the real economy, to return to healthy function.

This is what must be put into bankruptcy receivership, or nationalization. Every hour the Obama Administration delays that, and refuses to demand full independent government audit of the true solvency or insolvency of these five or so banks, inevitably costs to the US and to the world economy will snowball as derivatives losses explode. That is pre-programmed as worsening economic recession mean corporate bankruptcies are rising, home mortgage defaults are exploding, unemployment is shooting up. This is a situation that is deliberately being allowed to run out of (responsible Government) control by Treasury Secretary Geithner, Summers and ultimately the President, whether or not he has taken the time to grasp what is at stake.

Once the five problem banks have been put into isolation by the FDIC and the Treasury, the Administration must introduce legislation to immediately repeal the Larry Summers bank deregulation including restore Glass-Steagall and repeal the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that allowed the present criminal abuse of the banking trust. Then serious financial reform can begin to be discussed, starting with steps to ‘federalize’ the Federal Reserve and take the power of money out of the hands of private bankers such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank or Goldman Sachs.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order; and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). His newest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out at end of April. He may be reached through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Restoring Human Balance: The Employee Free Choice Act

The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker related justice, peace and humanitarian organization. Quakers believe in the dignity and worth of every person regardless of religion, race, class, gender, nationality, physical ability, or sexual orientation.

The AFSC works to see that no person is discriminated – none. This includes those in a workplace who are in an unequal power relationship with their employer. That is, a worker who feels he or she is not being paid fairly, not receiving adequate benefits and/or not working in a safe environment. To be treated with respect and dignity, a worker needs to join in union with others who face common grievances to collectively approach their employer. To advocate for justice. To demand fairness. To work for their common health, safety and welfare.

The Employee Free Choice Act restores some balance to what is a grossly unbalanced relationship between employee and employer. It’s about the right to decide. The right to choose. The right to be heard. The right to possess the ability and power to have a real role in shaping a part of their lives – where they work. It’s a right we should all have. When we do, we feel authentic, empowered, and human. We are more open to being creative, dedicated, compassionate, serving.

Consider two groups of people in our community, state and nation.

One group is workers who want to form a union within a corporation. The barriers and hurdles are enormous. Corporate intimidation, harassment, and coercion are common. Corporations fire workers who try to form unions and bargain for economic well-being. They deny workers the ability to exercise their First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly and association since the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply on corporate private property. Yet they exercise their own Constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights to prevent workers from signing cards and holding an election. And those are just some of the corporate hurdles. Never mind government hurdles at recognition and certification. No wonder only 12% of workers in this nation are members of unions.

The second group is a few people who want to form a business corporation. What do they have to do? Four things. Obtain a form from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. Fill it out. Write out a check. Send it in. That’s it. Voila. Just like that, this group of people have become a business corporation with Constitutionally protected “personhood” rights and with liability protections that human persons couldn’t dream of. For those who place the game of chess, it’s the equivalent of a pawn making it to the opposite end of the board and being transformed into a Queen with powers and rights that we human pawns simply don’t have. Oh, and by the way, powers and rights that were never intended… but that’s another story.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a necessary step in the direction of justice and dignity. The bill’s sponsors and endorsers should be thanked and encouraged to support this bill with no watered down amendments.

But it is only a step. There is still a very long way to go to create democracy and self-governance in our society.

In evaluating this bill and others that come thereafter, here’s one simple measuring stick: Does it increase the ability of people to make fundamental decisions affecting their lives, communities and environment? In other words, does a bill or proposal increase the power of people to decide for themselves? If it does, it should be supported. If not, it should be opposed.

The right to decide is enhanced by the Employee Free Choice Act.

Thanks to its supporters. Thanks to those at the grassroots who have brought it to Congress and have and will apply pressure for its passage -- . the sort of pressure that in the past has taken the form of social movements for dignity and rights.

May the Employee Free Choice Act pass. May it be just the beginning.

Banking on Fear

The financial forces responsible for the pillage of what’s left of our national economy and personal assets have learned that playing...or preying... on people’s fear is a better bet than investing in more credit-default swaps or collateralized debt obligations.

Fear is money in the bank.

Big banks, insurance companies, and their friends and supporters in the Obama Administration and Congress are using fear to paralyze critically conscious people, including way too many activists, into mental and mobilizing submission. At stake is at least another $750 billion contained in the fiscal year 2010 federal budget proposed by the Obama Administration.

Throwing hundreds of billions of more tax dollars at American Insurance Group (AIG), Goldman Sacks, Citibank, Bank of America, J.P Morgan Chase and other financial behemoths (aka Zombie Banks) is portrayed as inevitable. Why? Not bailing out these institutions and their CEOs for the global financial crisis would cause, according to these financial geniuses, a worse global financial crisis. It would be chaos. Economic collapse. Massive poverty. More homelessness. Widespread unemployment. Starvation.

The FIRES (finance, insurance, real estate) corporations are simply “too big to fail.”

According to whom?

- The same financial paragons who advocated for massive financial de-regulation over the last decade?
- The same money men (and women) who claimed investing trillions in speculative “products” like derivatives rather than in companies that actually produce goods and services, was the path to perpetual growth and profit?
- The same financial wizards (some of whom occupy important roles in the Obama administration) who built their economic health and claim the health of the larger economy is built on more and more and more debt?
- The same “experts” who never saw coming the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression...if not worse?

These are the people we’re supposed to trust.

The banks are banking on fear to bank more billions. They are counting on us not to think, ask questions, demand answers, and place the burden of proof on those making these claims. Just go along, shut up, and believe.

US taxpayers have already poured or committed to pour $8.5 trillion in capital injections, guaranteed debt, and loans into the financial system — a system that is not designed to invest money in productive ventures, helping people face home foreclosures, assisting people who’ve amassed huge credit card debt, or help communities function as communities. Rather, the mega banks and AIGs of the world are set up to rake in profits from the unreal world of financial bets, speculations, hedges and other gimmicks that are parasitic yet legal. More tax dollars will go simply to pay off these bets, speculations, hedges and gimmicks that have gone bad. They enrich the CEOs and shareholders. It’s legalized theft.

And who are these shareholders? Overall, the richest 1% of the nation’s population in 2004 held $1.9 trillion in stocks, almost equal to the other 99%.

Bailing out Wall Street is bailing out the super rich. Bailing out banks and insurance companies further widens the already considerable gap between rich and poor...and increases their political power.

The Obama approach to financial institutions has been to socialize the losses and privatize the gains...just like the Bush approach. Losses are paid by taxpayers. Gains are banked by the banks and their mega investors.

The latest Obama/Geithner plan to create a US “bad bank” to buy up toxic assets from banks is merely a recycled idea from former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The latest “cash for trash” scam involves the US government lending private investors money to buy virtually worthless pieces of paper (misnamed “assets”) from banks. If the values of the pieces of paper eventually increase, the investors profit. If they plummet even more than they already have, the investors can walk.

Where can the rest of us get such a one-way deal?

Government takeover of the Zombie “too big too fail but too insolvent to be saved” financial institutions is the best of what are all bad choices. Democratization of financial institutions should be the one and only message to Congress. Once democratized, the public though the government should (for starters):

- Fire and bring to justice all the leadership responsible for triggering what has become the Global Financial Crisis.
- Audit where previous bailout funds went and recover those funds mis-spent on CEO bonuses and acquisition of other financial institutions.
- Wipe out all the financial “bad assets” -- the richest 1% investors who own virtually all of these will have to suffer the consequences of their risky past decisions.
- Use funds the government was going to give the financial corporations to directly help those facing foreclosures and offer low- or no-interest loans to help get the economy moving.

The super-rich investors and corporations who own the trillions of “bad assets” are terrified. Public outrage against the legalized heist of our financial present and future, currently personified by massive AIG bonuses, is real. It’s not a long intellectual bridge from public outrage to calls for real public control.

The big banks and insurance conglomerates have responded by trying to shift their terror onto us — that public control of money and credit is a bridge to political and economic devastation.

Consider the sources.

Form your own opinions based on studying the issue.

Read articles linked below, in previous posts, and from other sources.

Don’t be fooled.

Don’t be afraid.

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http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2009/03/lawmakers_soften_opposition_to.html#more
Lawmakers soften opposition to bonuses at bailout companies
Posted by Associated Press March 25, 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1
The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
MATT TAIBBI

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12517
America's Fiscal Collapse
by Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, March 2, 2009

http://www.truthout.org/031909J
Financial Reports Show Five Biggest Banks Face Huge Loss Risk
Monday 09 March 2009
by: Greg Gordon and Kevin G. Hall

Beware the Madoff Diversion

Richard Grossman is one of two people who came to Ohio more than a decade ago and offered a “Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy” weekend workshop that sparked our subsequent Ohio-based education, advocacy, and organizing on corporate constitutional rights. A brilliant guy and a fine piece!

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http://www.truthout.org/031809B
Beware the Madoff Diversion!
Wednesday 18 March 2009
by: Richard Grossman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sure, there are crooks out there. But the overwhelming majority of actions by corporate directors and managers that have created today's messes have been legal.

Not only legal, but also widely regarded as necessary and essential to sustain the American Way of Life. To put food on our tables. To heat our homes. To provide jobs. To defend liberty and freedom ...

Simply put: Giant business and financial corporations govern. The few who run them make the governing decisions that dictate people's work, living conditions, health and the nature of our communities.

Business and financial corporations are not simply "market players." Although, in legal terms, corporations are mere "fictions of the law," they function as political forces. They concentrate wealth and power so their directors and managers can impose their values upon communities, the nation, the earth.

Corporate directors and managers have long defined how people live, what people do. Sometimes, they take their paychecks from their corporations, sometimes, from our governments. For generations, they've been writing our laws, propagandizing our children, dictating policy, plundering the planet. To gain such power, they long ago got Congress, federal judges and state legislatures to wrap their corporate bodies in the Constitution of the United States. To bestow upon their corporate "fictions" the authority to govern.

Armed with "freedom of speech," "due process," "equal protection of the law," the "commerce clause," "the contracts clause," and other constitutional powers, corporate directors and managers have been wielding the law to deny people's most fundamental human rights.

Corporate directors and managers have been making "private" decisions, which in an authentic democracy must be made by people in community via democratic processes.

Their real bottom line is not that their corporations are "just too big to fail." It's that without giant corporations, we helpless human earthlings could do nothing to meet our needs. That we would languish freezing, starving, unemployed, unentertained, vulnerable, in the dark.

After the great savings and loan thefts, after the great WorldCom and Enron Corporation thefts - after every financial cataclysm of the past century - people have been assured that the problem was "greed and excess."

There were always pundits and politicians galore to declare "greed and excess," just as there were always Madoffs galore to personify such evils. So, as night followed day, legislatures passed laws to regulate "greed and excess." And then they told us to go home and relax ... everything would be O.K.

Sure, Madoff and his ilk are major crooks. They've caused great harm to many people. There are laws aplenty to deal with such obvious crooks - so they'll end up in jail and good riddance.

But after the Madoffs of every generation are all locked up, most of the corporate directors and managers who "legally" plunged the nation into these messes continue governing over the nation. They keep instructing people that the source of the nation's problems is "greed and excesses," and "crooks." They keep spending the people's money to set things right. And they keep writing We the People's laws.

Isn't that what's happening today?

Corporate directors and managers count on our being desperate to return to the way things were, on our not changing who's calling the shots or the laws of the land, which have long enabled a corporate class to rule.

So, let's not let ourselves be distracted by a few high-profile crooks on perp walks. Let's beware "greed and excess." Instead, we can scrutinize constitutional law and statute law and judge made law that have long empowered a relative handful of corporate directors and managers to deny We the People's most fundamental rights ... to prevent us from governing ourselves.

To stop corporate cataclysms from crashing down upon us and the earth over and over and over again, and to drive human-friendly, planet-loving values into law and policy, We the People can rewrite basic constitutional doctrines regarding corporate "fictions," flesh and blood human beings and earth rights.

To do this, we'll have to assume the authority to govern ourselves.

Isn't that a revolutionary idea?

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Grossman is the author of articles and books about corporations, the economy, labor, environment and legal history. He is also co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) (1994); co-founder of Stop the Poisoning Schools (1986) and Democracy Schools (2003). He lives in New York's Catskill Mountains and is reachable at rgrossman@riseup.net.