As we approach the holidays I can’t help but think about the massive numbers of unemployed and homeless people in Detroit (and around the Country). In the past 9 years the rate of poverty, which had been decreasing since the mid-1960s, has been increasing. But statistics about poverty or hunger don’t begin to tell the story. Dr. Martin Luther King once observed that poverty is a form of violence. Not only because it damages the body, but also because poverty damages the soul and spirit.

I can’t begin to understand the effect it must have on a mother who has to choose between paying the heating bill or buying food for her children; between taking a part-time job at minimum wage or staying home to raise her children; waiting at a bus stop to take a sick child to the E.R., or waiting to see if they will get better without spending a dollar on bus fare instead of food.

Choices like these are being made every day by families not just in our own country but in our own city. I see it every day. Anyone who chooses to look with eyes open would too. The debilitating effect of poverty runs through generations, and the vast majority of people in poverty are single mothers and their children – mothers who are working as well as raising their children.

If poverty can injure a soul, then the generosity of others might be a healing salve. Your small sacrifice is a tremendous source of healing for others, so we should not hesitate to give a few dollars to the Salvation Army, The Goodfellows, The Capuchin Soup Kitchen or any of the charities that will be hitting the streets in the coming weeks.

I have a friend who was raised by a single mother on welfare for the first 12 years of his life. He is a successful professional now and earns a good income. Sometimes he tells stories of how his mother would take him and his brother and sister home to home in their neighborhood, asking if she could wash walls or iron clothes for money or food. To give you an idea of how little things mean so much to people in need, he now says that the very best meal he ever had was when his mother sat him and his sibs down for dinner and the only food in the house was a box of cake mix. So she mixed water and the cake mix and that was the meal they had that day. But it was so welcomed that it remains in his memory the best meal he ever had. Little things we give can mean a lot – even if it is some cake mix for a food bank.

Need I go on? This is discouraging…

Justice is a concept that applies to every aspect of human life, including economics. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke frequently about economic injustice, calling poverty the most insidious form of violence and observing that peace was not the absence of violence, but the presence of justice.

I’ve been worried for a long time about the suffering of working men and women. What kind of debilitating effects has the economy of the past 8 years had on hard working and poor people? In my home-town of Detroit, the suffering is as obvious as it is heart-breaking. Children in Detriot suffer from exposure to hunger, homelessness and violence. Our economic system is beyond sad, it is dangerous. An entire generation of Americans is being raised in an atmosphere of hopelessness – and that is dangerous. By now the economic disaster that Republicans have brought down upon us is obvious. What worries me most is that they are advocating the same policies to this day.

The mantra of the conservative, free-market capitalists is that the cure to unemployment and economic hardship is to lower taxes and “let working men and women keep more of what they earn”. Just this morning I heard Joe Scarborough advocate lowering taxes to create jobs, instead of increasing Government spending. He’s wrong. The “trickle-down” effect of Reagan Conservatism has been thoroughly disproven and the last thing we need to do is to repeat the mistake again. Reality sucks for Conservatives, so they choose to ignore it. For example, when the highest tax bracket was a rate of 39.6% from 1992 through 2000, the average unemployment rate was 5.0%. Since the Bush tax cut made the highest rate 35%, the average unemployment has risen to 6.0%. The facts show, lowering tax rates actually INCREASES unemployment!

As for “a rising tide floating all boats”, 1% of the population live in yachts while most Americans are sinking: 99% of the wealth in this country has become redistributed to 1% of Americans in the last 8 years, while the average income has not changed. More and more people are fighting each other for the economic crumbs – fighting without health insurance!

We face a moral choice. The policies of Conservatives have nearly destroyed our economy and the moral fabric of society. When more children live in poverty than ever before, when hunger and homelessness increase while fewer and fewer become richer and richer, then we have become an unjust society. Conservatives are Pied Pipers leading us to ruin. We can choose to cling to the myth of free-market capitalism, or find another economic system to heal the suffering… and to preserve our liberty. Or the change just might be forced upon us.

Every once in a while I watch the morning news shows during my workouts and this morning I happened to catch a sequence of “Morning Joe” that really irritated me. Joe Scarborough was debating some guests on the need for another Stimulus Package to counter the growing problem of unemployment. Scarborough has never been accused of being the brightest light in a dark room, although he is considered a leader among Conservatives.

While the panel advocated another “more focused economic stimulus” to increase employment, Scarborough kept repeating in mantra-like fashion “we have no money left… we have no money left…”

He’s wrong. We have plenty of money for a jobs program. We have enough money for a jobs program, universal health care – we just have to get it back from the people we gave it to, in exchange for the false promise of jobs. Reagan and Bush (W.) gave away massive amounts of tax money to the richest Americans – trillions of dollars – with the promise that tax cuts for the rich will stimulate jobs growth. It is a belief system that continues to this day, even though history has proven that tax cuts do not stimulate any significant job growth. For example, nearly 40% of Obama’s first “stimulus” consisted of tax cuts.

After WWII, the highest tax rate was 90% and later reduced to roughly 50%. The economy boomed and the middle-class thrived. Reaganism destroyed that prosperity and in the process he began the steady destruction of the middle-class. By now the damning statistic is well known: 95% of all wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. The rich have gotten unbelievably richer and many people are now recognizing that our Democratic Republic is threatened by a plutocracy. Is the real center of political power now on Wall St. and not Washington D.C.?

If the Democrats had any courage, they would raise the tax rate on the top 1% of the population 10% and tax bonuses over $1 million at 50%, private foreign bank account transfers at 90% then we would have more than enough money for universal health care and virtually eliminate the deficit.

What is unfair about taxing the top 1%? It’s not just sad, it’s immoral to allow millions of Americans to languish on unemployment benefits when they want to work.

There are a lot of positives in the President’s speech on health care but, in my mind, none was greater than the contrast that President Obama cast between the two political parties. Here was a Democrat and the President who was in control of the details, appealing for bipartisan cooperation for the good of the nation and citing historical precedents as well as future possibilities. He was intellectual yet passionate, principled and determined. There were the Republicans – rude and partisan and, ultimately, shamed not only by their record, but also by their own behavior. Barney Frank captured it for me when he responded to a question about the outrageous behavior of Rep. Wilson when he said that Wilson’s heckling was a sure sign that President Obama was so effective that Republicans were losing their minds.

President Obama has come to symbolize a Democratic Party that is smart, caring, polite and strong. Republicans have become a party of tea-baggers, “birthers”, and even some of their own leaders have voiced a concern that the conservative movement has lost its intellect. I know I’ve been critical of the President, especially with regard to his economic policy, but he won me back with that speech last night. Good for him and even more so – good for us.

I heard a statistic the other day that 48% of Republicans either are not sure or deny that President Obama was born in the USA. This pretty much confirms my suspicion that half of the Republican Party consists of closet bigots who refuse to see anyone of color as a true American. This is not to say that they are among the lunatic fringe called “birthers”, whose real agenda is to foment a violent right wing coup. They are tacitly creating hysteria designed to encourage some nut with a gun to save America. Sarah Palin was flirting with the same dynamic when she accused Obama of “paling-around” with terrorists and allowing her audience to shout out “traitor” and “kill him”.

Most Republicans are vulnerable to the idea that Obama was not born in the USA because he is an African-American, and to them, anything but a white face is suspect. Republicans are already an almost exclusively white political party – one starkly divided economically and educationally. One wing of the Republican Party is the country club elitists – the white guys who own about 90% of all wealth in the U.S. They are college-educated and most of them inherited or married into their wealth. The other Republican Party is white middle-class or poorer, not well educated, and bitter about having to compete with “foreigners” who they blame for their lack of economic success. They want to be like the country club Republicans, but the closest they will ever come is to be culturally alike. Republicans cling to a sort of moral and racial certainty that makes them vulnerable to xenophobic or racist movements like the birthers.

Even more revealing than the wink and a nod that the Republican leadership gives to birthers, is their rejection of Judge Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. While all Republican Senators thus far have said that she was qualified (the only Constitutional requirement), nearly all of them will vote against her because they just don’t like her. They may try to hide behind complaints about her “judicial activism”, but with a record of supporting judicial precedents far better than conservatives currently on the Supreme Court, they really have no rationale. The curious thing about the lack of Republican support for the Sotomayor nomination is that, not only is it the right thing to, do but it also makes political sense – if you don’t want to offend Hispanic-Americans. Republican Senators boxed themselves in early by portraying her as “anti-white male”. Clearly, the Republican Party encouragement of the “birthers” and their senseless objection to Judge Sotomayor means that the Republican Party is being reborn as the old Republican Party of “whites only”.

Could it be that the game is still the same and only the players have switched uniforms?
I’ve written a lot in the past about my concern that President Obama’s economic team was composed of the same people who helped build the corrupt system on Wall St. that collapsed last year, instead of progressive economists who were not part of the “trickle-down country club”. I am only becoming more and more suspicious as we learn more his economic policies.
There are three legs to the Obama “plan” as I understand it: tax money to stabilize the financial institutions, tax money to stimulate the economy to create jobs and increased regulation to safeguard the economy and consumers. Six months into the program, it seems clear that the warnings of progressive economists, such as Nobel Prize winners Krugman and Stiglitz have come true: Wall St. is more powerful and profitable than ever before, and blue collar families are worse off. In other words, the Administration has changed, but the results are the same.
The bailout money has resulted in more powerful and profitable Wall St. firms with less competition (the Goldman-Sachs alumni in the Obama Administration allowed competitors like Bear-Stearns and Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt while Sachs was bailed out). If these Wall St. firms were too big to fail before, then the situation has only gotten worse. Most of the tax payer monies were transferred between the remaining firms and are unaccounted for except for executive bonuses which have continued at the same rates as before the bailouts. For example, AIG used their bailout money to pay out large bonuses and to pay back loans from Goldman-Sachs (who had already been given money for those same loans with their bailout money – they got paid twice!).
Banks used our money to buy other banks instead of bailing out foreclosed homes or lending to small businesses. Tens of billions of dollars went to stabilize foreign banks. Once again, tax payer monies are unaccounted for. Homeowners in foreclosure who couldn’t get their bank to lower their mortgage 2%, were forced to lend the same banks their tax dollars. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is selling back the tax payer ownership stocks to the banks at a fraction of their true value. Banks got essentially free loans from the same people who they were denying loans and have to pay only a fraction of the money back.
Finally the “regulatory reforms” announced to protect American consumers are being weakened to the point of irrelevance. For example, the law designed to set up an agency to protect consumers from credit card company abuses is being designed as “advisory only” with no enforcement ability. In other words, they can tell a credit card company that raising interest rates or imposing new fees are wrong, but can’t do anything to stop them.

Progressive economists warn that the bailout program would only result in less competition and money disappearing; the stimulus package was too small and so poorly designed that most of the money would not go to create jobs and that the regulations need to be enforceable by an agency in the Fed (i.e. not having the same coworkers enforcing the regulations). They were right, but President Obama is ignoring his own mistakes.
5% of Americans control the 90% of the wealth in America and the same 5% control the government – Republican or Democrat. How do we change this equation?

The news that Goldman-Sachs is reporting “blow-out profits” is leaving some of the mainstream media pundits wondering how Goldman could rebound from “disaster” to record profits, while the rest of the country is queuing on unemployment lines and homeless shelters. Let’s revisit a blog I wrote in March , 2009. Also keep in mind the recent news that:

UBS and the Obama Administration are now “negotiating” on a UBS policy of hiding the bank accounts of billionaire tax-cheats.

Citibank is raising executive salaries 50% and giving bonuses larger than the pre-crash levels, while raising the interest rates charged to card users (i.e. tax-payers).

Organized Crime and Government   (edited from March 31^st, 2009)

It is certain that the present economic crisis is due primarily to the deregulation of Wall St. and the failure to regulate derivatives. It is just as certain that some people on Wall St. are making a lot of money with the tax-payer bailouts. So if we follow the old adage “follow the money”, what do we get?

Why did some Wall St. firms get bailed out and not others? Why was AIG allowed to keep bonuses and launder money to Goldman-Sachs, Citigroup and UBS? The map of key criminals reads like an old Mafia organization map, tracing connections between Wall St. and Government. This is the criminal organization that stole our savings and is stealing our tax dollars now:

Robert Rubin (AKA “The Accountant”): Former executive with Goldman-Sachs and 70^th Secretary of the Treasury. He now works for Citigroup. He spearheaded the Clinton Administration effort to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and exempt derivatives.

Larry Summers (AKA “The Apprentice”): Currently the Chief Economic Advisor to the President, former 71^st Secretary of the Treasury and former assistant to Robert Rubin. He assured that derivatives would be exempted from regulations and was a big proponent of allowing Wall St. to “self-regulate”. How did that work out, Larry?

Henry Paulson (AKA “The Don”): the power behind the organization. He was the former CEO of Goldman-Sachs and 74^th Secretary of Treasury.

He organized and coordinated the government response to the Wall St. bailouts with Goldman-Sachs. He made the decisions on who got money and who didn’t. For example, when Lehman Brothers and AIG requested bailouts, Paulson had a “sit down” with current Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein in late Sept. 2008 and decided to take out Sachs competitor Lehman Brothers but bail out AIG. Who was AIG’s biggest trading partner? Goldman-Sachs. Too bad you Lehman Brothers, Bear-Stearns investors backed the wrong horse. Maybe you should pay more attention to who is in government than your portfolio. Paulson runs the organization now through his positions on the Boards of TARP and FSOB.

Tim Geithner (AKA “Babyface”): Former assistant to Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and now the 75^th Secretary of Treasury. He helped Rubin and Summers destroy the regulation of Wall St. and exemption of derivatives. Recommended by “the Don” Paulson, he is now in charge of making sure the organization takes care of it’s own.

Mark Patterson (AKA “the Enforcer”), Geithner’s Chief of Staff and formerly of Goldman-Sachs (see Rubin, Paulson). Patterson strong armed Sen. Dodd into taking out the restrictions on bonuses to AIG and allowed AIG to pay-off lenders at full price such as Goldman-Sachs (see Rubin, Paulson), Citigroup (see Rubin) and UBS (see Gramm).

Ben Bernanke (AKA “The Banker”): Chair of the Federal Reserve. He withdrew the money and put it into TARP to pay off, sorry, “bail out” Wall St. firms such as Sachs and Citigroup at the recommendation of Paulson. He appointed Neel Kahkari, formerly V.P. of (you guessed it) Goldman-Sachs to head TARP. He negotiated the deal to save AIG and allowed all initial TARP money to be given to Wall St. without conditions.

Sen. Phil Gramm (AKA “The Assassin”): Along with Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, he spearheaded the Senate legislation to kill Glass-Steadman, regulations on trade and accounting and exempted derivatives. While Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee he exacted over 3 billion dollars of contributions to allies in the Government from Wall St. He was in a position to take over as “Don” but failed in the 2008 election. He has since become a lobbyist for… UBS, one of the firms AIG laundered TARP money to pay off.

So can we trust the same men in government who caused the economic crisis by enabling the Wall St. thefts of our future (Summers, Geithner, Paulson, Bernanke) to make sure our money now goes to solve the problem? Or can we expect that they will enrich the same people who stole our money with our tax dollars? Is it any wonder why Goldman-Sachs is now “whole” and less competitors? Is it any wonder why we can’t account for hundreds of billions of tax dollars already given to Goldman-Sachs, Citigroup and AIG?

Is it time to realize that we are being robbed by a criminal conspiracy that reaches from Goldman-Sachs to the Obama Administration to AIG and back again when the next round of pay-offs, I mean bail-outs occur.

That’s what I wrote in March and it is just a true today and it will stay that way until we, the people, take back our own money and take back our own government.

The economic suffering of working families is nationwide, but I hope that it is not nearly as severe as in my home state of Michigan. It breaks my heart to drive across the Detroit area and see foreclosure signs popping up like weeds in the summer heat.

In 3 of the 4 zip codes in the area, the foreclosure rate exceeds 25% according to government statistics! The City of Detroit is already an urban Prairie with whole neighborhoods of deserted homes and empty lots. Coyotes have been seen within the City limits, along with other wildlife. But coyotes are not the only predators Detroit has seen. The City Fire Department’s pension fund is nearly bankrupt after being duped into investments by a slick Wall Street firm. City business has been up for sale to the highest briber of City Council members and other utility department heads.

It’s not only desperate in Detroit. Near Detroit’s Wayne County is Oakland County, one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the Country. Even in Oakland County the foreclosure rate is skyrocketing and challenges to property tax assessments are creating huge backlogs. Michigan is in a depression and I have to wonder how long before civil unrest begins. Hundreds of thousands of people are jobless, homeless and getting desperate – and who could blame them for being angry about yet another jobless recovery where the same multibillion dollar banking and investment firms who have ripped us all off are now being underwritten by our own tax dollars?

Citibank, which charges the people of Wayne County more in interest rates than some loan sharks, is increasing the salaries of managers 50% and giving out bonuses greater than those given before the recent bust – AFTER receiving billions of dollars of tax money for a bailout! Meanwhile, Detroit is becoming the reincarnation of Batista Cuba where poverty and desperation surrounds a few oases of Casinos and yacht clubs.

I get angry just being a witness to this social injustice which is only tempered by compassion for the people who are jobless, homeless and hopeless.

Are bankers the new slave owners and is a new style of plantation emerging in the U.S.?