Sunday, June 05, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

I’m no economist and I don’t pretend to understand a lot about the financial crisis but I do know it’s not good news for a lot of folks. I read this morning that between 2007 and 2009 there was a net loss of 6.9 million jobs. Those jobs got sent offshore or automated and won’t come back and when people don’t have a paycheck they can’t pay bills or put gas in the car or food on the table. For years corporate tax rates have been cut to create job growth; that hasn’t worked but the tax cuts, offshoring and automation has permitted corporations to become more profitable than ever. The Reagan tax cuts began a historic transfer of wealth from the middle class to the richest Americans and that transfer of wealth accelerated in 2001 and 2003 with the Bush tax cuts. The old trickle-down theory that this would stimulate investment and create jobs didn’t work either. Instead, all that wealth is piling up in private hoards of the rich and the corporations, sort of like Scrooge McDucks in the old Donald Duck cartoons–capitalism run amok–and that’s unfair and undemocratic. All this plus deregulation coupled with old-fashioned greed and a more-for-me attitude has led to the recent financial collapse and now the chickens have come home to roost, Mr. President, and if I were you, I’d be concerned because I think this does not augur well for re-election in 2012. It doesn’t matter that the financial collapse wasn’t your fault–that the Republicans drove us into the financial ditch–but you haven’t done much to get us out. People see how you extended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, bailed out Wall Street and big corporations and let the rest of us twist in the wind, and we see how nobody is held accountable for this disaster except a 28-year-old trader at Goldman Sachs who the Injustice Department blames for the entire mortgage scandal. A $700 billion bailout funded CEO and CFO fat cats’ million dollar bonuses and kept their multimillion dollar paychecks flowing while average Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their hopes and their dreams for a better future. A million people have lost their homes to foreclosure and 3 million more are on the verge and there’s no bailout for them. Our infrastructure is crumbling, states and counties are cutting services, schools are laying off teachers and cities are going bankrupt and Washington is paralyzed. That’s what it looks like from out here on the hustings, Mr. President. Pretty grim. More on this tomorrow.