Friday, February 17, 2012
A Real Political Party?
Serving Wall Street and the 1 percent
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
In an agonizingly disingenuous oped, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently made the case that America urgently needs a “second” political party.
His argument is that the GOP has become so “captive to conflicting ideological bases” that there can be no agreement on basic policy issues within the party that is sufficient to form a majority with which the Democrats — a “real” political party — can do the nation’s business.
Here “we” are, Friedman worried, six months from the GOP nominating convention, and still no agreement on its candidate for president. A real political party, Friedman suggests, would be like the Democrats and have these things settled by now.
Rubbish.
How did the Democrats achieve the unity and cohesion that Friedman implies? Beginning with Bill Clinton, by subordinating every constituency in the party to a policy of abject servitude to what once was one of many voices in the party, and now is the only voice the administration and Democrats in Congress represent: the profits of Wall Street and the welfare of the 1 percent.
The Democrats are themselves no longer a political party, but merely a unit in Wall Street’s business model, fitting into the organizational chart somewhere below the Federal Reserve and above the Congress, like an accounts payable department, dispersing a share of the profits to the politicians and pundits on the payroll.
Now, there is no denying that the GOP has become a sorry excuse for a political party, its candidates lost in a bidding war for its 1 percent: the increasingly few, anxious and older voters who dominate the early primaries and caucuses.
But today most Americans have little interest in a dog fight over abortion, gay marriage, candidates’ marital infidelities or where the capitol of Israel should be, and so take no part in that process.
Making a living and keeping their families out of the poor house now takes up most of the time of the middle class that is the former majority of the GOP. (Actually, for millions of Americans, the streets and not the poor house are increasingly the only option to hanging on.)
And the GOP primary process is of no interest to them. But what Friedman avoids is that large numbers of Democrats have no interest in “their” party’s nominating process.
There is huge unhappiness with Mr. Obama’s policies throughout the Democratic Party. And his nomination is assured only because his Wall Street and special interest patrons — energy, defense, the national security industry, health care and the rest — are rewarding his service with massive campaign contributions and the promise of more.
So like the former middle class majority of the GOP, the former middle class majority of the Democrats figure — why bother?
And this produces apologists like Friedman who pretend that what is wrong with our politics is well funded pitchmen in the GOP, fawning over a handful of voters, as opposed to the bought bag men in both parties doing the bidding of the crowd that can pony up individual contributions of the tens of millions of dollars, to serve those Americans who can pony up tens of millions of dollars.
And it allows Friedman to get away with an utterly unimportant litany of what is wrong with America. And here is his list.
No. 1: a failure to prepare America for the competition between “high imagination enabling” and “low imagination enabling” countries (“HIEs” and “LIEs”).
Yeah, that keeps me up at night.
No. 2: debt and entitlements.
The debt is the price tag of unending war and an obsession with projecting American power — as opposed to American beliefs — and the entitlements are corporate subsidies.
No. 3: The need to find energy in a way that does not destroy the environment.
OK, we can agree on that. Of course, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
But are any of these more important at this time than jobs, homes, a decent diet, health care and education, and a measure of economic security for the many millions of Americans who lack some or all of these?
Are Friedman’s priorities more urgent than reviving a belief that justice still matters in this nation?
Only if you are a very well-to-do, expense-account-supported columnist for the New York Times whose world view is bounded by the East and Hudson rivers.
So Friedman disingenuously points to the failure of the GOP to find a partner with whom the Democrats can do business, to address his list of pressing long-term challenges, while ignoring completely the present dire circumstance of tens of millions of struggling Americans in every class but the 1 percent.
There is a long shot developing in the GOP primary circus, but not so long as it was six months ago, and it is possible that the GOP may get to its convention with no candidate having the nomination locked up.
If that happens, there is a chance for a “brokered” convention, meaning the delegates will do what they used to, and in a democratic process these elected representatives of the GOP rank and file will nominate someone who can represent the broad majority of those needed to both win the presidency and lead the nation in an attack on the urgent problems of the people.
Then the American people might see a real political party once again.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Democracy Under Assault
The Austerity Gulag
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Almost 70 years after the victory of democracy in Western Europe, and two decades after Eastern Europe loosed itself from the grip of Soviet totalitarianism, the people of the continent are threatened by another assault on self-government.
But no foreign army threatens their hard won rights or prosperity. The threat instead is the far smaller but equally menacing army of the global banking cartel — the parasites in pinstripes.
The prime ministers of both Italy and Greece are bankers, appointed not elected, and put in power by the threat of the cartel: that it will withhold credit and plunge those nations into social chaos unless they pay off existing credit — and plunge themselves into social chaos. These are debts the cartel encouraged and facilitated.
Understandably, Europeans are resisting because they know that if the debt — mostly the debt service (interest) — is paid in the manner being demanded by the cartel, their economies will be destroyed. There will simply be no tax revenue or asset income for the productive purposes that grow economies and sustain vital public services.
“Austerity” is the seemingly virtuous sounding word preferred by the cartel, technocrats, compliant politicians and much of the media to describe a policy that is in fact the impoverishment of the people and their subjugation by the cartel — the global less than 1 percent.
A general strike in Belgium, the first in 20 years and timed for a meeting of European finance ministers — a who’s who of Goldman Sachs alumni — tied up the capitol and major port earlier this week. It is just the beginning.
In one of history’s ironies, the conflict is coming to a head in Greece; the nation where school children are taught (or were taught) democracy was born.
To be sure, in ancient Greece democracy was more of a concept than the practice. Then as now political power flowed from wealth, and wealth in ancient Greece was expressed primarily in land, so the actual practice of democracy was limited to landowners who had the means to arm their families and workers to defend their city.
But the ancient commodity-based economies of land, and the gold, silver or precious jewels it produced — the foundation of the inherited wealth still enjoyed by European aristocracy — were inadequate to provide the expanding economic opportunity that the people of emerging democratic nations demanded as their right.
Short of the murder of the aristocracy and confiscation of their property and wealth — the French and Soviet model — the emerging democracies of the West found another way to let the common people in on the wealth.
Credit. In modern economies, credit replaced land and commodity-based currency as the key to creating prosperity and wealth, to satisfy the growing awareness of the common people of their “inalienable” rights.
With affordable and available credit, the common person has the opportunity to invest in his or her life and that of the family to create some prosperity and build some wealth.
But now credit and the wealth it generates is controlled in the United States and European democracies by the few, the Wall Street-led global banking cartel. Control of credit has become so absolute that a private banking monopoly — the issuers of credit — can topple governments it can’t otherwise buy or bully, and demand the extraction of what wealth remains among the common people — homes, savings, pensions, health care, police services, adequate diet, education and jobs.
The Guardian newspaper calls the impact on European youth “devastating.” In Greece, 43 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 24 are jobless; in Italy more than a quarter (28 percent). In Spain the figure is a shocking 51.4 percent.
And young Americans, who unlike their European counterparts are in many cases saddled with huge debt for their education, are not faring much better.
A truly lost generation, or as one reader of this column put it, the “Austerity Gulag,” consigned to an economic detention center from which they may never emerge.
Such is the control of credit today in the Western democracies that the U.S. Federal Reserve can dole our many trillions of dollars of almost no-cost credit to a handful of U.S. and foreign banks, and stand by shedding crocodile tears as Main Street — your street — disintegrates.
Is there a way to take back democracy short of the looming civil strife on both sides of the Atlantic? Yes. Take control of credit.
But don’t look for a bought Washington to lead that charge in the U.S. Look to the states, counties and cities for the restoration of credit as a public utility, and not a private monopoly, and an end to the serial abuses of Wall Street and Washington.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Almost 70 years after the victory of democracy in Western Europe, and two decades after Eastern Europe loosed itself from the grip of Soviet totalitarianism, the people of the continent are threatened by another assault on self-government.
But no foreign army threatens their hard won rights or prosperity. The threat instead is the far smaller but equally menacing army of the global banking cartel — the parasites in pinstripes.
The prime ministers of both Italy and Greece are bankers, appointed not elected, and put in power by the threat of the cartel: that it will withhold credit and plunge those nations into social chaos unless they pay off existing credit — and plunge themselves into social chaos. These are debts the cartel encouraged and facilitated.
Understandably, Europeans are resisting because they know that if the debt — mostly the debt service (interest) — is paid in the manner being demanded by the cartel, their economies will be destroyed. There will simply be no tax revenue or asset income for the productive purposes that grow economies and sustain vital public services.
“Austerity” is the seemingly virtuous sounding word preferred by the cartel, technocrats, compliant politicians and much of the media to describe a policy that is in fact the impoverishment of the people and their subjugation by the cartel — the global less than 1 percent.
A general strike in Belgium, the first in 20 years and timed for a meeting of European finance ministers — a who’s who of Goldman Sachs alumni — tied up the capitol and major port earlier this week. It is just the beginning.
In one of history’s ironies, the conflict is coming to a head in Greece; the nation where school children are taught (or were taught) democracy was born.
To be sure, in ancient Greece democracy was more of a concept than the practice. Then as now political power flowed from wealth, and wealth in ancient Greece was expressed primarily in land, so the actual practice of democracy was limited to landowners who had the means to arm their families and workers to defend their city.
But the ancient commodity-based economies of land, and the gold, silver or precious jewels it produced — the foundation of the inherited wealth still enjoyed by European aristocracy — were inadequate to provide the expanding economic opportunity that the people of emerging democratic nations demanded as their right.
Short of the murder of the aristocracy and confiscation of their property and wealth — the French and Soviet model — the emerging democracies of the West found another way to let the common people in on the wealth.
Credit. In modern economies, credit replaced land and commodity-based currency as the key to creating prosperity and wealth, to satisfy the growing awareness of the common people of their “inalienable” rights.
With affordable and available credit, the common person has the opportunity to invest in his or her life and that of the family to create some prosperity and build some wealth.
But now credit and the wealth it generates is controlled in the United States and European democracies by the few, the Wall Street-led global banking cartel. Control of credit has become so absolute that a private banking monopoly — the issuers of credit — can topple governments it can’t otherwise buy or bully, and demand the extraction of what wealth remains among the common people — homes, savings, pensions, health care, police services, adequate diet, education and jobs.
The Guardian newspaper calls the impact on European youth “devastating.” In Greece, 43 percent of those between the ages of 16 and 24 are jobless; in Italy more than a quarter (28 percent). In Spain the figure is a shocking 51.4 percent.
And young Americans, who unlike their European counterparts are in many cases saddled with huge debt for their education, are not faring much better.
A truly lost generation, or as one reader of this column put it, the “Austerity Gulag,” consigned to an economic detention center from which they may never emerge.
Such is the control of credit today in the Western democracies that the U.S. Federal Reserve can dole our many trillions of dollars of almost no-cost credit to a handful of U.S. and foreign banks, and stand by shedding crocodile tears as Main Street — your street — disintegrates.
Is there a way to take back democracy short of the looming civil strife on both sides of the Atlantic? Yes. Take control of credit.
But don’t look for a bought Washington to lead that charge in the U.S. Look to the states, counties and cities for the restoration of credit as a public utility, and not a private monopoly, and an end to the serial abuses of Wall Street and Washington.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
The Obama nation
Taking from the rich and giving to ... the rich
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
The tidal wave of home foreclosures is still rolling across the United States, devastating families and entire communities. By most reports, there are over a half-million homes sitting vacant, and more on the way.
A blog site that could only have been written by an Obama administration flack laments this “bleak” situation, but gives America the “good news” of the future.
“The Obama administration and independent federal regulators are formulating plans to sell government-controlled foreclosed properties to investors who would bring them onto the rental market. The aim is to reduce the number of vacant homes which depress housing prices and burden the economy while meeting an increasing demand for rental homes.”
In other words, having dispossessed millions of Americans of their homes and futures, and having purchased these homes at above market values from the fraudulent banks that held the mortgages — in order to rescue the 1 percent — the Obama administration, Congress and “independent” regulators will now sell these same homes back to the 1 percent at below market rates, so that the 1 percent can in turn rent them back to the 99 percent who lost them.
Welcome to the Obama nation: government of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, and the continued redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy.
For 60 years home ownership has been the hallmark of the American middle class, and has set America apart from almost every other nation in the world. That’s over. Now, America will be ever more like the feudal Europe our forefathers kissed off — a nation of renters, their paychecks devoured in rents paid to the 1 percent.
It wasn’t enough that African Americans and other minorities were reduced to handouts on the federal plantation. Now, in the Obama nation, the entire middle class can be reduced to the status of serfs on the Wall Street manor.
It gets better.
As I reported months ago in this column, the administration is preparing legislation to provide rental assistance to those who need housing.
In other words, those who still have jobs and a home will be taxed to support “home rentership,” to make sure that the 1 percent get paid for the homes they effectively stole and will now rent back to the 99 percent.
Who will, of course, have little left in their paychecks or unemployment checks to maintain those homes rented from suburban slumlords.
Kiss your neighborhood goodbye, Morrisville and Lower Makefield. The Ozarks are moving in. Is there an alternative. Yes.
Cities and counties from California to Michigan, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and even nearby Reading, are moving to use public funds — the common wealth — to form partnership banks that can not only get critically needed affordable credit flowing in local economies, but can also take vacant homes by eminent domain, and work with community banks, homebuilders, skilled trade workers, realtors and housing authorities to maintain these properties and put people back in them on affordable terms as owners, and rescue their communities from the pending Obama nation.
Every county in the Philadelphia metropolitan region has more than sufficient resources to capitalize a partnership bank capable of doing what the president and Congress will not. Now is the time to begin.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
The tidal wave of home foreclosures is still rolling across the United States, devastating families and entire communities. By most reports, there are over a half-million homes sitting vacant, and more on the way.
A blog site that could only have been written by an Obama administration flack laments this “bleak” situation, but gives America the “good news” of the future.
“The Obama administration and independent federal regulators are formulating plans to sell government-controlled foreclosed properties to investors who would bring them onto the rental market. The aim is to reduce the number of vacant homes which depress housing prices and burden the economy while meeting an increasing demand for rental homes.”
In other words, having dispossessed millions of Americans of their homes and futures, and having purchased these homes at above market values from the fraudulent banks that held the mortgages — in order to rescue the 1 percent — the Obama administration, Congress and “independent” regulators will now sell these same homes back to the 1 percent at below market rates, so that the 1 percent can in turn rent them back to the 99 percent who lost them.
Welcome to the Obama nation: government of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent, and the continued redistribution of wealth to the already wealthy.
For 60 years home ownership has been the hallmark of the American middle class, and has set America apart from almost every other nation in the world. That’s over. Now, America will be ever more like the feudal Europe our forefathers kissed off — a nation of renters, their paychecks devoured in rents paid to the 1 percent.
It wasn’t enough that African Americans and other minorities were reduced to handouts on the federal plantation. Now, in the Obama nation, the entire middle class can be reduced to the status of serfs on the Wall Street manor.
It gets better.
As I reported months ago in this column, the administration is preparing legislation to provide rental assistance to those who need housing.
In other words, those who still have jobs and a home will be taxed to support “home rentership,” to make sure that the 1 percent get paid for the homes they effectively stole and will now rent back to the 99 percent.
Who will, of course, have little left in their paychecks or unemployment checks to maintain those homes rented from suburban slumlords.
Kiss your neighborhood goodbye, Morrisville and Lower Makefield. The Ozarks are moving in. Is there an alternative. Yes.
Cities and counties from California to Michigan, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and even nearby Reading, are moving to use public funds — the common wealth — to form partnership banks that can not only get critically needed affordable credit flowing in local economies, but can also take vacant homes by eminent domain, and work with community banks, homebuilders, skilled trade workers, realtors and housing authorities to maintain these properties and put people back in them on affordable terms as owners, and rescue their communities from the pending Obama nation.
Every county in the Philadelphia metropolitan region has more than sufficient resources to capitalize a partnership bank capable of doing what the president and Congress will not. Now is the time to begin.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
The Third World right next door
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
You expect it in the Third World — the poor and undeveloped nations of Africa or South America.
As you walk the city streets, dressed for business, beggars will approach and, well, beg. But there is a limit to what you can do, and there are defenses you can employ.
Defense No. 1 is to avoid eye contact, keep moving and look purposeful. You can pretend you don’t see — them. Sunglasses are helpful, for avoiding eye contact.
But I didn’t have sunglasses last week, and I wasn’t in a strange country. I was in my country, Harrisburg, walking between appointments on the streets around the Capitol. But I might as well have been in Haiti. In the space of an hour, my colleague and I were approached five times and asked for alms.
Being well brought up Christians, we did what we could, and wondered that now, as we travel on business in America, we must budget for beggars.
Four of those who approached us — all polite and easy — looked as if they had been on the streets for a while. Perhaps you know the look, may have seen it somewhere; maybe a trip into any of the small cities of Pennsylvania, or many parts of Philly, away from the remaining islands of middle class prosperity in our suburban and ex-urban communities.
But one of those who approached us was a middle aged woman whose clothing had not yet been reduced to a collection of what can be acquired for free. She had not been on the streets long.
She gave us an improbable tale of woe, trying to cover her embarrassment and suppress her shame, thinking perhaps that it was her fault. Another well brought up Christian.
But it wasn’t her fault. It is ours, and the shame.
The German theologian who was martyred by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonheoffer once observed, “You can see the sin of respectable people in their flight from responsibility.”
We responded generously.
“There but for the grace of God...”
But, just in case there are any social Darwinist, survival of the fittest, Ayn Rand Republicans reading this, I want it on the record that no sense of guilt or a “bleeding heart” motivated my small act of generosity. It was anger.
White hot, tear-the-place-apart anger. Because I know this is American now. I know the greatest and most broadly shared prosperity the world has ever known, built on the faith, work and sacrifice of generations is being destroyed.
Three days later, I was standing at the train station in Bristol, headed into Philly. Bitter cold. A kid (Well, maybe 22, but as I am now 62...) came up to the platform, bundled in the attire of an athlete, and we talked sports.
Tyler — let’s call him — is mad for soccer. I played lacrosse and love rugby. We got along. Then a middle aged guy came up, biker type. He overheard the conversation and jumped in. Turns out he has a job in “Guest Services” at the games of Philly’s soccer team.
Tyler came alive. Like I said, mad for soccer.
The biker/guest services professional had Tyler’s full attention. Nice guy, and he proved it. He mentioned that “they” (The club, the stadium? I wasn’t clear) were hiring.
Why did the biker bring that up? I think because these days, if you know about a job, you tell someone.
Tyler jumped at the offer. “Oh, man. I’ll do anything. I’m out of college, and there’s nothing.”
“Anything.”
It went through my mind: in the Third World, “anything” means just that. I shuddered. The cold, no doubt.
The biker told Tyler he could apply on line, and advised him to get his name (“Tex”) on the application somewhere. I got out pen and paper so Tyler could write it all down.
The train arrived and we went our separate ways.
I hope Tyler gets that job. Because if he doesn’t, things will not be getting better in America any time soon. The future — America’s future — begins with jobs, or it doesn’t begin.
Jobs. So all the Tylers of the nation can have a future — settle down, raise a family, build a life of their own with some measure of economic security and independence.
Otherwise, I won’t need to travel far to experience the Third World.
And if you are reading this “Tex” — good man. Bless you.
Mike Krauss, formerly of Levittown, is an international logistics executive and chairman of the Pennsylvania Project. www.papublicbankproject.org Email: mike@mikekrausscomments.com
Bucks County Courier Times
You expect it in the Third World — the poor and undeveloped nations of Africa or South America.
As you walk the city streets, dressed for business, beggars will approach and, well, beg. But there is a limit to what you can do, and there are defenses you can employ.
Defense No. 1 is to avoid eye contact, keep moving and look purposeful. You can pretend you don’t see — them. Sunglasses are helpful, for avoiding eye contact.
But I didn’t have sunglasses last week, and I wasn’t in a strange country. I was in my country, Harrisburg, walking between appointments on the streets around the Capitol. But I might as well have been in Haiti. In the space of an hour, my colleague and I were approached five times and asked for alms.
Being well brought up Christians, we did what we could, and wondered that now, as we travel on business in America, we must budget for beggars.
Four of those who approached us — all polite and easy — looked as if they had been on the streets for a while. Perhaps you know the look, may have seen it somewhere; maybe a trip into any of the small cities of Pennsylvania, or many parts of Philly, away from the remaining islands of middle class prosperity in our suburban and ex-urban communities.
But one of those who approached us was a middle aged woman whose clothing had not yet been reduced to a collection of what can be acquired for free. She had not been on the streets long.
She gave us an improbable tale of woe, trying to cover her embarrassment and suppress her shame, thinking perhaps that it was her fault. Another well brought up Christian.
But it wasn’t her fault. It is ours, and the shame.
The German theologian who was martyred by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonheoffer once observed, “You can see the sin of respectable people in their flight from responsibility.”
We responded generously.
“There but for the grace of God...”
But, just in case there are any social Darwinist, survival of the fittest, Ayn Rand Republicans reading this, I want it on the record that no sense of guilt or a “bleeding heart” motivated my small act of generosity. It was anger.
White hot, tear-the-place-apart anger. Because I know this is American now. I know the greatest and most broadly shared prosperity the world has ever known, built on the faith, work and sacrifice of generations is being destroyed.
Three days later, I was standing at the train station in Bristol, headed into Philly. Bitter cold. A kid (Well, maybe 22, but as I am now 62...) came up to the platform, bundled in the attire of an athlete, and we talked sports.
Tyler — let’s call him — is mad for soccer. I played lacrosse and love rugby. We got along. Then a middle aged guy came up, biker type. He overheard the conversation and jumped in. Turns out he has a job in “Guest Services” at the games of Philly’s soccer team.
Tyler came alive. Like I said, mad for soccer.
The biker/guest services professional had Tyler’s full attention. Nice guy, and he proved it. He mentioned that “they” (The club, the stadium? I wasn’t clear) were hiring.
Why did the biker bring that up? I think because these days, if you know about a job, you tell someone.
Tyler jumped at the offer. “Oh, man. I’ll do anything. I’m out of college, and there’s nothing.”
“Anything.”
It went through my mind: in the Third World, “anything” means just that. I shuddered. The cold, no doubt.
The biker told Tyler he could apply on line, and advised him to get his name (“Tex”) on the application somewhere. I got out pen and paper so Tyler could write it all down.
The train arrived and we went our separate ways.
I hope Tyler gets that job. Because if he doesn’t, things will not be getting better in America any time soon. The future — America’s future — begins with jobs, or it doesn’t begin.
Jobs. So all the Tylers of the nation can have a future — settle down, raise a family, build a life of their own with some measure of economic security and independence.
Otherwise, I won’t need to travel far to experience the Third World.
And if you are reading this “Tex” — good man. Bless you.
Mike Krauss, formerly of Levittown, is an international logistics executive and chairman of the Pennsylvania Project. www.papublicbankproject.org Email: mike@mikekrausscomments.com
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Public Banks
This time, everybody wins -- except Wall Street
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
With every day there comes another revelation of the extent to which the American democracy has been subverted, and the degree to which the rights, welfare and prosperity of the people have been subordinated to the wealth of the Wall Street cartel and the 1 percent.
Last week Americans learned that without the knowledge or consent of Congress or the American people, Wall Street’s acolytes at the Federal Reserve gave the cartel not billions, but trillions of no-strings-attached and virtually no cost credit, while the real economy, businesses and families were starved of that credit.
Bloomberg News put the give-away at $7.7 trillion, but other estimates are far higher. The information has been ferreted out of more than 25,000 pages of documents the Fed kept secret until forced by a law suit and one lone U.S. senator to open up.
The $7.7 trillion estimate alone is an amount equal to one half the value of EVERYTHING produced in the U.S. economy for the year — and you knew nothing about it. But you know what happened next.
Wall Street’s profits skyrocketed — at least another $16 billion on the deal — as the economy collapsed. Millions of American families and thousands of communities are broken and battered. I wish that were hyperbole, but you know it is not.
The American people need urgently to dismantle the Federal Reserve and break the power of the Wall Street cartel. Creation of public banking institutions throughout the nation is the first step.
The nation needs an adequate source of affordable credit to grow the economy and support individuals and families as they struggle to achieve some measure of prosperity and economic security. The nation and the economy need an honest and well regulated banking industry, and not the failed, arrogant, fraud-ridden, private Wall Street cartel that now steals at will from the American people.
That is the promise of a national network of independent pubic banks, and counties like Bucks and cities like Philadelphia can lead the way.
A county or city uses the public funds — tax revenue, investments, rainy day and other funds and public assets — to capitalize a bank. As with any bank, these funds and assets are leveraged to create a pool of affordable credit.
Working in partnership with community banks and credit unions which originate and service loans, that credit flows into the community for new businesses, small business expansion, economic development, home buyers and homeowners, students and job creation.
A public bank can also partner with existing municipal authorities to expand their activity and jobs creation with large scale infrastructure and redevelopment projects.
Profits of the public bank are both retained to increase the bank’s lending activity, and returned to the county’s general fund — revenue without taxes, even as increased economic activity generates more county and municipal revenue.
The common wealth is put to work for the common good.
At year end 2010, Bucks County reported $624 million in assets, annual revenue of $205 million and $132 million cash on hand — resources sufficient to generate several billion in credit for the county’s economy. The City of Philadelphia has larger assets.
The possibilities are extraordinary.
Home foreclosures are tearing apart families and communities. An industry trade group, Realty Track reports that in October, the last month for which data is available, 1 in 826 housing units in Bucks County received a foreclosure notice, adding to the thousands already foreclosed. The tidal wave rolls on.
Using the power of eminent domain, the county can seize vacant and foreclosed homes and commercial properties, which further depress property values and are becoming bases of operation for vandals, gangs and drug dealers. These properties become one more asset of the public bank.
Working with existing housing authorities, home builders and others, the acquired foreclosed properties can be maintained or improved as necessary, and programs developed to put dispossessed homeowners back in their homes with affordable mortgages where possible, or as renters on the path to home ownership.
With affordable credit, start-up and expanding small and micro-businesses can occupy now vacant commercial property. Home builders can get the credit they need to hire and buy necessary goods and services from local banks, supported by the public bank.
Only state charted banks and credit unions would be eligible for participation with the public bank. The Wall Street banks need not apply.
America urgently needs an alternative to the Wall Street — Federal Reserve monopoly on our money and credit. Public banks are that alternative, and can be an engine of locally directed economic development and jobs creation across America — no federal authority or bureaucrats involved.
Creation of a state public bank modeled on the hugely successful Bank of North Dakota is many months away. But county commissioners, city councils and county and city treasurers can act now.
In the formation of any public bank, issues of governance, mission, management, transparency, accountability and risk management must be addressed. But effective models of “best practices” exist and these are hardly insurmountable tasks.
Bucks County can harness the know-how and experience of our local governments, community bankers, business and civic leaders and lead other counties and municipalities on the way to recovering opportunity, prosperity and economic security for all the people.
With public banks, everybody wins — except Wall Street.
And that is what must finally happen.
Mike Krauss, formerly of Levittown, is a director of the Public Banking Institute and chair of The Pennsylvania Project www.papublicbankproject.org. E-mail: mike@mikekrausscomments.com
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
With every day there comes another revelation of the extent to which the American democracy has been subverted, and the degree to which the rights, welfare and prosperity of the people have been subordinated to the wealth of the Wall Street cartel and the 1 percent.
Last week Americans learned that without the knowledge or consent of Congress or the American people, Wall Street’s acolytes at the Federal Reserve gave the cartel not billions, but trillions of no-strings-attached and virtually no cost credit, while the real economy, businesses and families were starved of that credit.
Bloomberg News put the give-away at $7.7 trillion, but other estimates are far higher. The information has been ferreted out of more than 25,000 pages of documents the Fed kept secret until forced by a law suit and one lone U.S. senator to open up.
The $7.7 trillion estimate alone is an amount equal to one half the value of EVERYTHING produced in the U.S. economy for the year — and you knew nothing about it. But you know what happened next.
Wall Street’s profits skyrocketed — at least another $16 billion on the deal — as the economy collapsed. Millions of American families and thousands of communities are broken and battered. I wish that were hyperbole, but you know it is not.
The American people need urgently to dismantle the Federal Reserve and break the power of the Wall Street cartel. Creation of public banking institutions throughout the nation is the first step.
The nation needs an adequate source of affordable credit to grow the economy and support individuals and families as they struggle to achieve some measure of prosperity and economic security. The nation and the economy need an honest and well regulated banking industry, and not the failed, arrogant, fraud-ridden, private Wall Street cartel that now steals at will from the American people.
That is the promise of a national network of independent pubic banks, and counties like Bucks and cities like Philadelphia can lead the way.
A county or city uses the public funds — tax revenue, investments, rainy day and other funds and public assets — to capitalize a bank. As with any bank, these funds and assets are leveraged to create a pool of affordable credit.
Working in partnership with community banks and credit unions which originate and service loans, that credit flows into the community for new businesses, small business expansion, economic development, home buyers and homeowners, students and job creation.
A public bank can also partner with existing municipal authorities to expand their activity and jobs creation with large scale infrastructure and redevelopment projects.
Profits of the public bank are both retained to increase the bank’s lending activity, and returned to the county’s general fund — revenue without taxes, even as increased economic activity generates more county and municipal revenue.
The common wealth is put to work for the common good.
At year end 2010, Bucks County reported $624 million in assets, annual revenue of $205 million and $132 million cash on hand — resources sufficient to generate several billion in credit for the county’s economy. The City of Philadelphia has larger assets.
The possibilities are extraordinary.
Home foreclosures are tearing apart families and communities. An industry trade group, Realty Track reports that in October, the last month for which data is available, 1 in 826 housing units in Bucks County received a foreclosure notice, adding to the thousands already foreclosed. The tidal wave rolls on.
Using the power of eminent domain, the county can seize vacant and foreclosed homes and commercial properties, which further depress property values and are becoming bases of operation for vandals, gangs and drug dealers. These properties become one more asset of the public bank.
Working with existing housing authorities, home builders and others, the acquired foreclosed properties can be maintained or improved as necessary, and programs developed to put dispossessed homeowners back in their homes with affordable mortgages where possible, or as renters on the path to home ownership.
With affordable credit, start-up and expanding small and micro-businesses can occupy now vacant commercial property. Home builders can get the credit they need to hire and buy necessary goods and services from local banks, supported by the public bank.
Only state charted banks and credit unions would be eligible for participation with the public bank. The Wall Street banks need not apply.
America urgently needs an alternative to the Wall Street — Federal Reserve monopoly on our money and credit. Public banks are that alternative, and can be an engine of locally directed economic development and jobs creation across America — no federal authority or bureaucrats involved.
Creation of a state public bank modeled on the hugely successful Bank of North Dakota is many months away. But county commissioners, city councils and county and city treasurers can act now.
In the formation of any public bank, issues of governance, mission, management, transparency, accountability and risk management must be addressed. But effective models of “best practices” exist and these are hardly insurmountable tasks.
Bucks County can harness the know-how and experience of our local governments, community bankers, business and civic leaders and lead other counties and municipalities on the way to recovering opportunity, prosperity and economic security for all the people.
With public banks, everybody wins — except Wall Street.
And that is what must finally happen.
Mike Krauss, formerly of Levittown, is a director of the Public Banking Institute and chair of The Pennsylvania Project www.papublicbankproject.org. E-mail: mike@mikekrausscomments.com
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Something's gonna give
About to blow...
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
The American people have been asleep. That’s over.
The people are wakening and engaging in an expanding discussion about the present circumstances and future prospects of our nation.
The discussion began with the tea party patriots. But their protest at the injustice of the Wall Street bail out was turned to a focus on health care and taxes, as the money of the Republican right moved in to occupy the tea party.
The same way the money of the Democratic left hopes to occupy Occupy.
It’s all about money and power.
Americans are wakening to the reality that as wealth in America has been concentrated in the hands of the few, so too has political power.
Led by the Wall Street cartel, that power is used to preserve, protect, defend and — above all — increase the wealth of the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent of the American people.
Something’s gonna give.
As it does, it is essential to understand the actions of government that brought the nation to this moment, so that the barricades to equality of opportunity and upward economic mobility can be torn down and the path forward cleared of the debris.
Creation of the so called “Federal” Reserve gave control of the nation’s public money and credit to a private banking cartel, which conferred on itself what it wanted — immense wealth and power.
The birth of the banksters.
While wages for most Americans were kept flat, taxes on the rising income of the wealthiest and their capital gains have been steadily reduced, further concentrating wealth and power.
Wages were attacked by a combination of “free” trade, which opened American markets to the goods produced in low wage paying countries, and no taxes on the profits of American companies abroad, which made it even more profitable to export American jobs. Unchecked immigration of the unskilled swelled the supply of labor far above demand to further depress wages.
Private credit, which Wall Street controls and sells, was substituted for rising wages and Congress over-rode state laws and allowed banks and finance companies to gouge Americans with unconscionable interest rates.
The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
Congress allowed America’s banks to combine and the hard assets of the American people were concentrated in the “too-big-to-fail banks,” and then Congress allowed the combination of the investment and retail operations of the banks, providing speculators access to those assets, which they gambled away.
The middle class was devastated.
Congress allowed the regulatory agencies tasked to police the financial markets to be gutted and staffed with Wall Street and corporate front men. No cops on the beat. Fraud and abuse ran rampant.
Nobody did anything about it. Justice was subverted.
Congress turned the lobbying and campaign finance laws into a system of legalized bribes. The political parties became brand names to be bought and sold, stripped of any real power to shape public policy or advance candidates accountable to their members, and the Congress was put up for sale.
Not satisfied to enrich only corporate America and miss out on the good times, members of Congress now enrich themselves by trading on private information acquired in the course of their public duties.
Finally, in a breathtaking example of intellectual sophistry, the Supreme Court “piled on” the already downed American people, turned common sense on its head and decided that corporations which exist only in the law that the people create, are no longer subordinate to the people, but in fact have the same rights as people.
This is a crisis of justice and democracy.
Wall Street career men and acolytes of the central banking bureaucracy now dominate governments in Europe as they dominated the Clinton, Bush and now Obama administrations.
They are there to enforce “austerity measures” which subsidize and protect the banks that constructed the current crisis — in which they made hundreds of billions — and continue the transfer of wealth to the wealthy.
It is the same fate to which many present leaders of both political parties want to deliver the American people, targeting Social Security and Medicare as the drivers of the national debt, while sidestepping completely the drain of war, a grotesquely over fed and under-taxed oligarchy, corporate welfare — and the cost of the Wall Street monopoly on credit.
The Federal Reserve’s website lists interest paid on the U.S. federal debt for the last 24 years — $8.2 trillion, much of that “earned” by Wall Street by borrowing from the Fed at almost no interest, and lending back to the Treasury at higher interest.
And now we’re learning the full extent of Wall Street’s colossal failure and the Fed’s bail out, kept secret even from the Congress.
But the American people are stirring, beginning to sort out how we got where we are, and how we get back to what we want our nation to be. Occupy and others have emerged to deliver the message the governing elite do not want delivered to the American people: it’s all about money and power, and the Wall Street led 1 percent now have a despotic monopoly on both.
How do we recover a just society with opportunity for all? While the candidates for president debate anything else, that is the question the American people are forming.
Monday, November 14, 2011
America has unfinished business
Tea partiers and Occupiers sharing a common cause?
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Within the space of three years, two powerful popular protests have risen up in the United States — first the Tea Party and now Occupy. They are in one regard similar, but in another quite different.
Like Occupy, the Tea Party was also a spontaneous and democratic protest against the injustice of the Wall Street bailout, which the American people overwhelmingly opposed.
Yet, both political parties, their presidential candidates and Congress supported it.
At that point, the Tea Party should have been expected to redouble its attack on that injustice. It did not.
The Tea Party was in effect diverted, some might say hijacked, and its energy and anger were instead focused on the proposed health care legislation, and the members of Congress and the president who supported it.
Occupy has not lost focus. Despite the inability of fatuous talking heads to discover its “message” and an orchestrated defamation of its activities, polls indicate that Occupy remains broadly supported, while the tea party has lost support.
The American people well understand the larger issue from which the tea party was turned: the government of the people, by the people and for the people has been subverted, and become a government of, by and for the corporate establishment, led from Wall Street.
The other place at which the tea party and Occupy diverge is how each relates to the first American Revolution. The Tea Party adopted the symbols, while Occupy has taken the form.
The first tea partiers were, and some still are fond of donning the attire of 18th century American patriots and brandishing muskets and colonial flags. None of that is to be seen among the Occupiers.
And while the Tea Party quickly gained a central organization, staff and command, the Occupiers remain a loose confederation of independent communities, with one binding message.
“We’ve had it.”
The parallel to the first American Revolution is striking.
Occupy organizes and communicates through local and autonomous “General Assemblies,” a term which harkens back to the days of the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, and their embrace of the concept of the common wealth.
And these General Assemblies function as did the Committees of Correspondence that spread throughout America before the Revolution, and led to a Continental Congress that eventually declared its independence from an oppressive and unrepresentative central government, then in London, but which like the central government in Washington today represents the overbearing and oppressive commercial interests of the age.
Now as then, there is as much or more communication among these independent local organizations within Occupy than there is with the external and increasingly anxious central authority of the established interests.
Now as then, those established interests, mostly corporate and led from Wall Street treat the American people as little more than servants to their wealth and power, deserving no voice in their government or future.
This is what Occupy seeks to replace, and the Tea Party initially challenged.
Now the pundits are waiting for some kind of “declaration” from Occupy. But Mr. Jefferson’s original will be hard to improve upon. It has rightly been called “American Scripture.”
In it we declared the rights of the people (“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”), declared that the purpose of government is “to secure” those rights, and further declared “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
What Occupy is getting at is a need to update the U.S. Constitution, which in fact was suggested by President Roosevelt in an address to Congress at the close of World War II. FDR called it the “Second Bill of Rights.”
“It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans ... of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people-whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth-is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights... They were our rights to life and liberty.
“As our nation has grown in size and stature, however-as our industrial economy expanded — these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
The American people are now in the early stages of the Second American Revolution.
At some point, perhaps tea partiers and Occupiers will understand they all started out from the same place, will come together, and together end up at the same place: one nation, indivisible, with liberty, justice and economic security and independence for all.
The American people will need each other to prevail against the rank economic oppression and tyranny of the present age.
America has unfinished business.
By Mike Krauss
Bucks County Courier Times
Within the space of three years, two powerful popular protests have risen up in the United States — first the Tea Party and now Occupy. They are in one regard similar, but in another quite different.
Like Occupy, the Tea Party was also a spontaneous and democratic protest against the injustice of the Wall Street bailout, which the American people overwhelmingly opposed.
Yet, both political parties, their presidential candidates and Congress supported it.
At that point, the Tea Party should have been expected to redouble its attack on that injustice. It did not.
The Tea Party was in effect diverted, some might say hijacked, and its energy and anger were instead focused on the proposed health care legislation, and the members of Congress and the president who supported it.
Occupy has not lost focus. Despite the inability of fatuous talking heads to discover its “message” and an orchestrated defamation of its activities, polls indicate that Occupy remains broadly supported, while the tea party has lost support.
The American people well understand the larger issue from which the tea party was turned: the government of the people, by the people and for the people has been subverted, and become a government of, by and for the corporate establishment, led from Wall Street.
The other place at which the tea party and Occupy diverge is how each relates to the first American Revolution. The Tea Party adopted the symbols, while Occupy has taken the form.
The first tea partiers were, and some still are fond of donning the attire of 18th century American patriots and brandishing muskets and colonial flags. None of that is to be seen among the Occupiers.
And while the Tea Party quickly gained a central organization, staff and command, the Occupiers remain a loose confederation of independent communities, with one binding message.
“We’ve had it.”
The parallel to the first American Revolution is striking.
Occupy organizes and communicates through local and autonomous “General Assemblies,” a term which harkens back to the days of the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, and their embrace of the concept of the common wealth.
And these General Assemblies function as did the Committees of Correspondence that spread throughout America before the Revolution, and led to a Continental Congress that eventually declared its independence from an oppressive and unrepresentative central government, then in London, but which like the central government in Washington today represents the overbearing and oppressive commercial interests of the age.
Now as then, there is as much or more communication among these independent local organizations within Occupy than there is with the external and increasingly anxious central authority of the established interests.
Now as then, those established interests, mostly corporate and led from Wall Street treat the American people as little more than servants to their wealth and power, deserving no voice in their government or future.
This is what Occupy seeks to replace, and the Tea Party initially challenged.
Now the pundits are waiting for some kind of “declaration” from Occupy. But Mr. Jefferson’s original will be hard to improve upon. It has rightly been called “American Scripture.”
In it we declared the rights of the people (“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”), declared that the purpose of government is “to secure” those rights, and further declared “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
What Occupy is getting at is a need to update the U.S. Constitution, which in fact was suggested by President Roosevelt in an address to Congress at the close of World War II. FDR called it the “Second Bill of Rights.”
“It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans ... of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people-whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth-is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights... They were our rights to life and liberty.
“As our nation has grown in size and stature, however-as our industrial economy expanded — these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
The American people are now in the early stages of the Second American Revolution.
At some point, perhaps tea partiers and Occupiers will understand they all started out from the same place, will come together, and together end up at the same place: one nation, indivisible, with liberty, justice and economic security and independence for all.
The American people will need each other to prevail against the rank economic oppression and tyranny of the present age.
America has unfinished business.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)