Trumka Demands Real Reform on Wall Street, Across the Economy
By Seth Michaels
Campaign for America's Future: September 22, 2009
On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO's new President Richard Trumka is calling for
tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making
the U.S. economy work for working people.
Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO
leadership team's national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive
vision for the economy-and to fight back against the corporate agenda that
left workers behind.
We've let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has
shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works
for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able
to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card
companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have
undermined the economy, Trumka said:
Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making
this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For
the pain they've inflicted on families who face financial ruin-unemployment,
wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.
We need a different model for our economy, where good jobs, not bad debts,
drive our growth. Our real economy needs a financial system that will
support it, not a high-risk system that only supports itself and the wiliest
speculators.
Trumka supported President Barack Obama's call for a new consumer protection
agency that would have real power to crack down on unfair practices. He also
called for tougher regulations on the hedge fund and derivative trading that
contributed to our economic crisis.
The banks that have been propped up with billions in public funds can't be
allowed to go back to the way things were, Trumka said. We need to make sure
they're subjected to oversight, and that our investment is turning into jobs
and broad-based economic growth, not executive bonuses. Trumka promised that
the union movement would take the lead in educating and mobilizing the
public to fight back against finance-industry abuses.
Speaking on the Rachel Maddow Show last night, Trumka explained why we need
to hold Obama and leaders in Congress to their promises and make sure they
enforce real protections for consumers in the financial industry, because
the current system has failed:
Today, Rachel, I talked to a woman in Atlanta, and she was making $1,162 a
month on a fixed salary, and they gave her a $900 a month mortgage. That
type of predatory lending should have been picked up by one of those
agencies. It wasn't.
Trumka said that union members across the country will watch carefully to
make sure elected leaders are looking out for working people, not big banks
and corporations:
What we're going to do is make sure that they live by that. We'll educate
our members, we'll mobilize our members. I think our members will hold them
accountable on Election Day.
Trumka also spoke with Maddow about health care reform and the Employee Free
Choice Act.
***
From: zhelp@zcommunications.org
The Mystique of "Free-Market Guy" Obama
By Jeff Cohen
ZNet: Sep 24, 2009
Friends helping friends: please forward this to your closest
relatives/friends still enthralled by the Obama mystique.
No matter what the facts are, some liberal activists and leaders persist in
seeing President Obama as a principled progressive reformer who lives and
breathes the campaign rhetoric about "change you can believe in."
When he compromises, it's not Obama's fault - it's the opposition. Retreat
is never a sell-out but a shrewd tactic, part of some secret long-range
strategy for triumphant reform.
He's been in the White House eight months. It's time for activists take a
harder look at Obama. And a more assertive posture toward him.
Because if Obama believes it's okay to pass healthcare "reform" that
subsidizes insurance firms without a robust public option and he dispatches
still more troops to Afghanistan, it could demobilize progressive activists
while emboldening the Teabag & Beck crowd to bring the GOP back from the
dead in low-turnout congressional elections next year. That would be a rerun
of the 1994 rightwing triumph brought on by President Clinton's weakness
(e.g. healthcare reform) and corporatism (e.g. the business-friendly NAFTA).
Some activists still see Obama as a brilliant political superhero who -
although maddeningly slow to fight back against his opponents - always
manages to win in the end . . . like Muhammad Ali defeating George Foreman.
But watching Obama last weekend on the news shows gave little reason for
confidence. It's hard to win the public toward reform if you accept - as
Obama often does - the rightwing terms of debate. The right frames
healthcare as a debate over a dangerously over-intrusive government taking
away individual freedom. The left says it's about greedy insurance and drug
companies - with CEOs getting paid $10 million or $20 million per year -
putting profits above public good.
Last weekend, when he was repeatedly asked to comment on Jimmy Carter's view
about anti-Obama animosity being racially motivated, Obama kept wielding the
rightwing frame about big "intrusive" government.
On ABC, Obama talked about people being "more passionate about the idea of
whether government can do anything right. I think that that's probably the
biggest driver of some of the vitriol."
On NBC, Obama said: "This debate that's taking place is not about race, it's
about people being worried about how our government should operate." He
asked: "What's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with
our need to look out for one another?"
The president has a huge bully pulpit, which he's largely squandered. I've
heard him discuss healthcare close to ten times in recent weeks without once
hearing him rally the public against the corporate greed that leaves our
country No. 1 in healthcare spending and 37th in health outcomes, on par
with Serbia. Without a populist challenge to corporate profiteering, what's
left is either a bloodless debate about "cost containment" or a rightwing
debate about "big government." Neither mobilizes the public toward
progressive change.
Recent U.S. history shows that you can't serve corporate interests at the
same time you're seeking reform - of healthcare or Wall Street or any other
sector. Not when big corporations are the problem . . . and the major
obstacles to change.
Placating big business en route to social reform is like downing a flask of
whiskey en route to kicking alcoholism.
Yet there was the Obama White House this summer entering into secret deals
with the pharmaceutical lobby protecting that industry's outsized profits.
If Obama is radical about anything, it's about NOT rocking corporate boats.
That's why he received more Wall Street funding than any candidate in
history and why - before he was a front-runner in early 2007 - he was
raising more money from the biggest Wall Street banks than even Hillary
Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, presidential candidates from New York.
That's why - as soon as Hillary left the race - he went on CNBC and assured
big business: "Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."
That's why he declared to the New York Times last March that his economic
policies were absolutely not socialist, but rather "entirely consistent with
free market principles."
That's why during his 2008 "I love the market" interview on CNBC, he shunned
the "populist" label.
President Franklin Roosevelt showed in the 1930s that major reform is
possible if a populist upsurge of ordinary people is mobilized to overcome
the entrenched opposition of business interests - derided by FDR as the
"economic royalists."
The problem today is that Obama doesn't seem to have a populist bone in his
body. A smart guy, he should know that it's absurd - in an era when a
shrinking number of ever-larger corporations dominate Congress and
regulators as they deform markets in industries like banking and
healthcare - to keep believing we have a "free market." Yet he waxes on
about being a "free-market guy."
I guess he's smart enough NOT to call himself "a corporate guy."
Liberal activists need to be smart enough to see Obama for the status quo
politician he is - and to act accordingly.
--
Jeff Cohen www.jeffcohen.org is an associate professor of journalism at
Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board
member of Progressive Democrats of America.
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3993
Commentaries: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/
Comment: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3993#AddComment
No comments:
Post a Comment