Charlie Rangel Must Die (Politically) To Purge The Sins of Congress
July 31st, 2010 - by: danny
CHARLIE RANGEL MUST DIE TO PURGE CONGRESS OF SIN
The Upcoming Trial of the Harlem Congressman Will Be A Farce
Friday Night, CBS NEWS: President Obama Urges Rangel To Step Down
Late News Saturday from the NY Times:
Advice by Panel Is to Reprimand, Not Oust, Rangel
The panel that oversaw a two-year ethics inquiry into Representative Charles B. Rangel’s conduct recommended that the Harlem congressman be punished with a reprimand, rather than a more serious censure or expulsion from office, the chairman of the panel said Friday.
(DS: So much for the seriousness of the charges being trumpeted in the media.)
The recommendation appears to be carrying significant weight with the full 10-member House ethics committee, which will decide Mr. Rangel’s fate. On Friday, the full committee spent hours behind closed doors debating whether to agree to a settlement that would require the congressman, a Democrat, to admit to wrongdoing in exchange for receiving a reprimand and avoiding a public trial on his conduct.
A reprimand is considered a moderate punishment, more serious than the minor sanction of admonishment but not especially severe: members including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Barney Frank have received reprimands.
Word of the panel’s recommendation came on the same day that Congressional officials said that Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, would face ethics charges that are expected to be announced next week.
Charles Rangel must die, politically that is. He has become an embarrassment to a House Speaker who vowed to “clean the swamp” of Congressional corruption. It took him 80 years but Harlem’s war-hero turned Congressional elder, Charles Rangel, is this week’s media poster boy for all the ills of an institutionally corrupt system.
He must be purged so that honesty can be seen to prevail in an institution that only enjoys a 22% approval rating. Oh, the damage he’s done to the “reputation” of the House. How dare him lie on his rental application—a crime, which if enforced widely – would indict half of his fellow New Yorkers. And never mind, no one is talking of indicting his landlord who winked at the transgression. Remember, wherever there are takers, there are also givers.
So, Charlie must die. He had stuffed his Merc in the wrong parking lot. He has violated every sense of propriety as Michael Wolf noted so earnestly:
“Charlie Rangel, one of the most successful political figures of his generation in New York, is now, in the Washington Post’s estimation, a “pariah.” He’s a pariah partly because – quite unable to believe he is no longer a man of far-reaching influence, a fixer of legendary power – he has down to the wire refused to get out of the way of Democratic efforts to get him out of the way.”
This pariah must die politically to cleanse Washington of its sins. He must be tried although no one imagines an acquittal in that Star tribunal of distinction. It’s another Alice in Wonderland moment: “first the sentence, then the trial.”
There are many on the Republican side of the aisle who would be happy to see him go, the sooner the better. As one of his constituents explained to me, “When he proposed a draft in 2004 shortly after the Iraq invasion, no one backed him and it was ignored. However, when he said of Dubya Bush that “he sure exposes the myth of white supremacy” and it was quoted all over the Internet, Rangel should have realized he’d get in trouble one day over any peccadillo the Republicans would unearth.” (On Friday night, MSNBC indicted a lack of media coverage of a grand jury and ethics investigation into activiites of Nevada Senator John Ensign who faces far more serious charges than Rangel, but is a Republican.)
This is not to blame it all on partisanship. Rangel has to take responsibility for his own failures and should have been more careful. In many ways he blew it — but it was not him who is blowing it up.
Rangel’s guilt is a foregone conclusion. You can incept it. He is to meet the fate of the man he replaced, the indomitable Adam Clayton Powell who, like many of those able to make it in Harlem, sneered at the white man’s pretensions, and the way they had for years the means to control his ways. He went down in his audacious style after decades of flouting their hypocritical standards. Harlem stood with him then as they stand with Charlie today. Lose him and they loose what power he had accumulated over decades of maneuvering,
Today, the media waxes indignant, sneering at the prospects of the fall of a prominent Democratic poobah, loving the conflict of it all, the rhetorical showdown at the OK corral on the Hill, the hoped for blood in the halls… (Charlie, didn’t you know that you dissed the son of media avatar Tim Russert. For that uppity sin alone, you must go!) What nerve: you declined to voluntarily fall on the knife!
Meanwhile, most of America yawns. This is a movie we have seen before, and will again, as the Center for Responsive Politics explains in report after report about the pernicious power of money in politics – and not just to fund a legacy center at a public university in Harlem.
Television had its shark week this summer and now TV News has its Charlie Rangel implosion week. Last week the center reported on the real corruption which has little to do with late taxes on a Dominican villa or a few airline rides.
“Federal campaign contributions from lobbyists are slightly down this election cycle compared to the same time period before the last midterm election. But Democrats are pulling in more lobbyist cash — just as Republicans did when they held the majority in both houses of Congress.
Twenty-eight members of Congress and congressional candidates have received at least $100,000 from lobbyists during the first five quarters of the 2010 election cycle, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.”
That was July 13th. Here are the stories topping their open secrets blog as I write:
Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud
Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars…. (Continue)
Republicans Thwart New Campaign Finance Disclosure Rules As DISCLOSE Act Fails Procedural Vote in Senate
Etc. Etc.
These disclosures don’t have one snarky over the hill GQ-styled old-line politician to “expose” and sneer at with endless pictures of him wandering forlornly in an institution he has served for a lifetime. They are about institutional patterns of corruption, bipartisan corruption, the way business is done every day and in every way. Unfortunately, that’s considered a ho-hummer, boring, especially without the larger than life personality pathologies we love to hate.
Moreover, that is not yet a scandal, with no trials slated to hear the substantial evidence of collusion, conflicts of interest and vote-selling. Sadly, Wikileaks has yet to dump a treasure trove of cancelled Congressional checks and IOUs. There must be at least 92,000 of them buried somewhere.
So, by all means, let’s pillory Charles Rangel and symbolically hang him to the Congressional dome but don’t call it a lynching. That’s passé. Meanwhile, let’s also not call for trials for those who wrecked the economy, who pedaled the sleazy subprime loans, and who laughed all the way to the bank before they plundered them too. Hands off Wall Street; prosecute the pols instead.
Last week, in this post-racial paradise of ours we had Shirley Sherrod to demonize. This week, it’s Charlie Rangel. Next week: Maxine Waters.
The heat of summer is addling our brains. So it’s time to kick a Congressman and give Charlie his comeuppance. We have to believe that when and if he is made an example of, all will be right with the world.
News Dissector Danny Schechter created the dvd Plunder The Crime of Our Time and a companion book to expose the crimes of Wall Street. See plunderthecrimeorourtime.com. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
More:
The Hill: Democratic leaders and major party donors plan to hold a lavish 80th birthday gala for Charles Rangel at The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan next month, despite 13 ethics charges pending against the veteran lawmaker.
Lobbyists and other party donors received invitations this week to join Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and New York Gov. David Paterson at one of New York’s finest hotels to celebrate Rangel’s birthday.
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FROM THE MANTLE: LETTER TO A YOUNG JOURNALIST, New Radio Show
July 29th, 2010 - by: danny
LISTEN TO THIS WEEK’S NEWS DISSECTOR RADIO HOUR ON PROGRESSIVE RADIO NETWORK.COM
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LISTEN TO THIS WEEK’S SHOW
Some interesting commentary to share. Here’s a blog from Mandeleman who writes on Ml-impode.com about the housing crisis and on his experience on my weekly radio show.
LETTER TO A YOUNG JOURNALIST
I was asked by the editor of The Mantle, a political forum/online magazine based at the New School University what I would write to a young journalist today. Here’s how I responded> Check out the Mantle site for some groovy pictures.
A News Dissector Writes to a Young Journalist
By Danny Schechter
I was you once, once I was you
Across decades that now reside inside
Starting a journey with no destination
In times when we were sure we could prevail
Yes, we couldn’t fail, an armor of righteousness
Insured failure was not an option
We saw our words as our weapons, our idea as prophecies
Those were the days of our dominion
But, alas, those days are gone
We are still guardians of our truths
Having tasted a few victories alongside
So many disappointments
At least we hope we have
Lessons to share
and to learn anew…
A few weeks back, I was at a memorial service at a New York City church for one of the firebrands of the cultural resistance of the l960′s. His name: Tuli Kupferberg, a poet who went beyond poetry, praised as “the Voltaire of the Lower East Side,” a musician best known for his work with that one of a kind band, The Fugs, famous long ago for celebrating the anarchism of the Hippie/Yippie era, while speaking out against war and racism.
He was called the “iconic bohemian,” and co-founder of the 1960′s proto-punk counterculture. Alan Ginsberg cited him in one of America’s most defining poems, HOWL, for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and surviving. He never lost his sense of humor and never even looked back. His personal slogan was “FAST FORWARD.”
When it was my time to say a few words, I compared him to the BP oil spill because his still surging and beneath the surface influence is still polluting the waters of conventional culture and could never be contained by any vessel.
I reminded the mourners that he was also a profound critic of journalism. One of his specialties was producing flyers called “Great Moments in the History of Journalism” (and another similarly titled series about Capitalism) in which he paid tribute to historic examples of Media’s endless complicity and collusion with the powers that be.
One of his funniest satires (and this was well before the Daily Show and The Onion) was a note written in the form of a formal correction in The New York Times in which the Times Company apologizes for one hundred years of distorting the news in the service of imperialism.
If Tuli’s outsider attitude doesn’t do it for you, pick up some of the memoirs and reflections by top anchormen and leading columnists who have gone into retirement; all tend to lament the failures of journalism and the media system to tell the truth and inform the public. Edward R.Murrow was among angriest. (My own memoir was titled The More You Watch The Less You Know [Seven Stories, 1997] and was just befor I moved out of network television into independent production.)
Despite my own extensive exposure to “big media” and the critique I brought into it that only deepened, I stuck with journalism because it is valuable work OFTEN dubbed “the oxygen of democracy,” even if many us are left choking when the air gets too thin.
Anyone with a pulse and a smidgeon of awareness knows how our media system merged newsbiz and showbiz, how it dumbs down important information and fails to offer context and background on important stories.
Still, and even perhaps because of a situation that’s also been labeled a crisis of democracy, I would still encourage you to get into journalism – not only for its sake – but your own.
The reasons are many: it at least gives those of you disposed to writing, videomaking and investigating a chance to ultimately tackle challenging issues and have SOME impact, to merge your own values with work.
I would also encourage you, if you can, through internships or freelance assignments, to work in major media, not because you will subvert it from within – always a good idea but hard to achieve – but because it’s important to understand its debased if professional culture, with its disciples, compartmentalization, and hierarchies of control.
The idea is not to love it while trying to resist co-optation, but to learn from it. Yes it has built in biases and serves the needs of those in power, but it also has developed techniques and formulas that work in the battle every media person faces in building audience and having impact.
Once you master their techniques and that environment – like meeting deadlines, collaborating with all sorts of people, working in a professional organization – you can create some of your own. Young journalists can also get involved in media projects like ProPublica, Narco News Network, and the amazing Wikileaks.
I left mainstream media work because I wanted to cover issues that were being ignored, distorted, and marginalized. We called our company Globalvision because we believed it was important to take a global approach to issues in an age of globalization.
Our focus became reporting liberation struggles like the one against apartheid in South Africa because it raised issues of race and justice that resonated here. We launched the South Africa Now series to let the people there tell their own stories. It aired for three years, worldwide.
Our next major project, another TV series, was called “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights” television to focus on human rights issues worldwide. We celebrated human rights heroes as well as exposing abuses.
We later covered global health challenges like AIDS and Malaria, as well as peace initiatives. I went on to make films about 9/11, voter fraud in Florida, and Weapons of Mass Deception, a film about the manipulation of the news about Iraq. I also wrote books on all of these subjects. I have written eleven in all, and sometimes they feel like the best kept secret in publishing.
The point is not that what I have done was always successful – that’s always a struggle and not always easy to gauge – but doing nothing is never an alternative. If you are socially conscious, then you have a responsibility to your ideas and values. You have to find a way to express them, and to share what you know with others. Think of it as a duty of citizenship. Think of ways to make it engaging and even fun. Think of it also as a way of merging money and meaning and making a living, if you can.
Today, I am focused on the reporting about the financial crisis with my investigative film Plunder: The Crime of our Time and a companion book. It’s the second film and third book I have done about these issues, not to mention countless articles, commentaries and blogs.
Has my work stopped the crisis or even galvanized progressives to push for the prosecution of Wall Street criminals? I wish I could say yes, but I can’t. At the same time, I don’t think the work has been wasted. It has reached some and will reach others.
Often in history, ideas deemed controversial are at first refuted, then denounced. But ultimately, many are accepted as the conventional wisdom. No one ever said that seeking truth is easy. It’s a rocky road – and increasingly hard to make a living at – but it promises adventure and satisfaction in this world – and the next.
And as I finish this letter, another mentor of mine has moved on to that next world. His name was Daniel Schorr and he went from being one of Murrow’s boys at CBS to helping bring down Richard Nixon. He was still commenting on NPR into his nineties. I worked with him AT CNN, but later learned that that Daniel and this one shared a deeper connection: he started his career, as did I, on the Clinton News, the high school paper at DeWitt Clinton H.S in the Bronx. He made it big, and so can you.
If you stay true to your self and your beliefs, there’s no place to go but up.
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UPDATE: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL– CONGRESS SEES NO EVIL
July 26th, 2010 - by: danny
THURSDAY: Join Me Thursday Morning at l0 AM on Newsdissector Radio on ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com> Will discuss Wikileaks, Afghanistan, Finance and Netroots Nation Conf.
Tune in. Call in. Be There.
WIKILEAKS BACKLASH UNDERWAY. Website accused of putting US informers and Afghan collabortors at risk. So far, the evidence in vague. Conservative Senators Want Prosecution of WikiLeaks Under Espionage Act. Problem: (among others), the threat to the first amendment. US Government “investigating.” Afghan Government denouncing. 15, 000 documents still to come. Wall Street Journal Reports that Afghanistan is awash in drugs, a slightly more serious problem.
Click Here For Latest WikiLeaks news on Google.
WEDNESDAY: THE UNITED STATES OF WIKIDENIAL
Congressman Alan Grayson has discovered the poet Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Before his Second Coming, Yeats hung out up my street at the Hotel Chelsea and one wonders what the great Irish poet would have thunk about the dump of 92, 000 documents – most digital files – by WikiLeaks. He couldn’t help be amused by how quickly this sensational disclosure of the banality of killing and warfare – years of “incidents” that resulted in endless civilian death and the squandering of so many lives on all sides, not too mention trillions in national treasure.
Congress mostly saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke not much about evil as it rushed to pump billions more into the rat hole of Afghanistan even as another report found billions still unaccounted for “reconstruction” aid in Iraq, a still unreconstructed country.
No one commented on all the military contracts and jobs in all those Congressional districts intended to keep “our” representatives in line. The Repugs who have spent months crying about deficits, and couldn’t summon any compassion for the unemployed, led the charge to throw more good money after bad.
No sooner had the NY Times hit the stands, then the denial machine was in overdrive with smarmy “journalists” dismissing it all as nothing new, well before they even had a chance to read it or, heaven forbid, think about it. ‘Oh, we knew the war was not doing well. Didn’t you, you dummy’ And on and on, on channel after channel, op ed page after op-ed page as the Pentagon viewed criminal prosecutions and not of those who prosecute this carnahe, aand then President spun it all his political advantage while the punditocracy chewed it up and spit it out.
WikiLeaks wanted to show us the horror of war but there was no “stickiness” to that idea in our country, where much of our media which preferred to debate the role of Pakistan and heat-seeking missiles. Now you can see why so many soldiers are killing themselves because of despair over the folly they are serving and the crimes they are committing.
David Leigh, editor of the Guardian told Democracy Now
“Broadly, we see a similar picture in the three media. What we see is quite a different political perspective. From the New York Times’s point of view…it was interesting to see that the relationship with Pakistan was a political priority,” Leigh says. “With us, we’re more concerned about the casualties, I think. We’re troubled more, a European audience, by the toll this war is taking on innocent people.”
Our media is not troubled by that. They rationalize and celebrate it.
Headline: WikiLeaks Founder Says “Evidence of War Crimes” in Afghan War Logs, White House Downplays Leak, Claiming “No Broad New Revelations” No US media that I saw is pursuing the suggestion of war crimes
“(WikiLeaks Founder Mr Assange says he is a journalist, he he is not. He is an activist,” writes Andrew Exum, a non journalist flacking for the Center For A New American Security. And who Is Mr. Exum whose brilliant thoughts took over the Times Op Ed Page. His bio – not published in the newspaper-explains: “He led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Most recently, Exum served as an advisor on the CENTCOM Assessment Team and as a civilian advisor to Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.” He is, of course, objective while Mr Assange is a dreaded activist.
Oh the Times, brave on Sunday when they were telling; back to selling by Monday,
There is more than one pattern here. Recall that after the Pentagon Papers appeared, the Vietnam war was escalated with the Xmas bombing of Hanoi etc. Nixon was the one then, and it went on for another four years, as will this one unless politicians have the guts to stop it.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports from Mr, Assange’s native Australia:
“Washington is sweating, because WikiLeaks is preparing another tranche of 15,000 documents for release that reportedly include up to 10,000 cable messages from US embassies around the world on fraught issues such as arms deals, trade talks, covert meetings and unvarnished assessments of governments.
…However, the logs’ greater service to disclosure and transparency is the extent to which they reveal how the governments with troops in Afghanistan sanitize their public account of how badly the war has been going.
These are the raw accounts, soaked in the blood and sweat of combat, before they have been prettied up by the triage teams in the Washington and allied PR clinics. We knew there were civilian casualties, but not this many; we had heard of the secret CIA ground missions to assassinate Taliban leaders, now it is confirmed; we have had guarded reports on the use of unmanned drone aircraft in attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, now the picture is fleshed out.”
Even as these disclosure appear, the naysayers and downplayers are all over the media landscape as Michael Wolff explained:
“The Washington Post – its hurt status showing – went into contortions to minimize the effect of the report. Even its headline – “WikiLeaks documents cause little concern over public perception of war” – was willfully pretzel-like. So…the documents don’t make people concerned over people being concerned about the war?
“Lawmakers said that the trove of documents may harden opposition but is unlikely to suddenly alter impressions of a war that the administration had previously acknowledged is a tough slog amid declining public support.”
Or…in other words: Everybody is sick and tired of this war and believes it’s hopeless anyway, so what more could these documents possibly say to make people feel any more negative than they already feel?”
Stratfor.com echoes the pack consensus:
“Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.
In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.”
And so, the message is forgetaboutit, and look how quickly the media and the Congress is. Ho Hum. Forget the news; it’s back to snooze.
Let’s move on.
Tuesday, 28 July.
Watch: On RT Assessing The Impact of the WikiLeaks Disclosures
MEDIA WHORE ALERT: Leave it to TIME Magazine to spin the WikiLeaks disclosures into a ho-hummer, something we all knew before, no big deal, what me worry style report, that doesn’t touch the Obama Administration because it all happened before its “new” strategy was put in place. (Has it been put in place?)
WHITHER THE “ECONOMIC AGENDA?”
Unemployment is Worse Than We Know, The Recovery Challenge Harder Than We Think By Danny Schechter, Author of, ‘The Crime Of Our Time.’
As we move into the dog days of summer and a coming Congressional recess, the Obama Administration has shifted its focus back on to the economy and wants to convince one and all that an economic recovery is just around the corner.
In recent speeches, the President warns that the Republicans, if they take over, will support policies that will usher in a new recession, as if the current recession is over. “They are the same policies, ” he said, “that led us into this recession. They will take us backward at a time when we need to keep America moving forward.”
He wants to push “distractions” like the Shirley Sherrod affair and the BP spill out of media view so we can all get back to the economy.
Wake me up when reality intrudes into a “debate” that is flawed on all sides.
The “signs” of recovery, so breathlessly trumpeted by the politicians who want it to be true, is not generating the new jobs we need. The resumption of unemployment benefits will help those who were cut off but not all who need them. Foreclosures are rising, and government programs to stop them are not working.
It is unlikely that the current policies can remedy any of this and it is certain that extending tax cuts for the rich will not create jobs. There is no jobs bill about to be enacted. Many of the industries blue collar workers toiled in are going or gone. Bailed out General Motors just spent $3.5 Billion dollars to buy a new lending company to get those subprime loans restarted to move cars off the lot. Is this moving “backwards” or not?
Unemployment is worse than we know. The Daily Finance site reports that the firm TechnoMetrica which monitors the stats is finding the real figures shocking:
“The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department’s jobless numbers.”
The site adds, “For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.
In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low.”
Those books are apparently still being cooked. The Administration now admits there will no movement in the rate until 2012.
What may be more serious is the erosion of the middle class that well underway, Business insider cites these statistics:
• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975
While the middle class is shrinking, their wealth is being transferred to the rich. Senator Bernie Sanders has been livid in denouncing this:
“The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth. Four hundred families! During the last 15 years, while these enormously rich people became much richer their effective tax rates were slashed almost in half. While the highest paid 400 Americans had an average income of $345 million in 2007, as a result of Bush tax policy they now pay an effective tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest on record. Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made a combined $25 billion but because of tax policy their lobbyists helped write, they pay a lower effective tax rate than many teachers, nurses, and police officers.” [More here →]
The words of Shirley Sherrod on our growing economic inequality are worth repeating in this context.
“Y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And that made me realize I needed to work to help poor people – those who don’t have access the way others have.”
Speaking of “access,” last week we learned that the bankers siphoned off $1.2 billion for their own bonuses from bailout funds. They were scolded but no one is demanding the money be paid back. We also learned that the total bailout for the banksters was not just $700 billion but a whopping $3.7 TRILLION once you factor in the Fed, et. al.
And on top of that, companies are making money, hoarding cash, but not creating jobs. The Times reports: “Among the S.& P. 500 companies that have reported second-quarter results, more than one in 10 had higher profits on lower sales, nearly twice the number in a typical quarter … while wages and salaries have barely budged from recession lows, profits have staged a vigorous recovery…” If new jobs are to be created, it looks like small businesses will have to do it.
In light of all this, with jobs known as a “lagging indicator” of economic recovery, how can we expect the Obama Administration to effectively mobilize political support from the millions of Americans who are struggling harder than ever to survive?
The President is right about the Republicans threatening to make things worse, but is he really making them any better? He seems to prefer shadow boxing than ripping into his opponents, being a mediator rather than a fighter. Already, he’s getting a lot of flack for being “anti-business.” Bizarro!
Truth to tell, can he do what needs doing at all, given the conservative orientation of our politricks, and the reality that what we are dealing with are structural and systemic problems that political rhetoric of any stripe cannot overcome? As The Economist assessed the “unprecedented rise in the rate of long term-unemployment,” it noted bluntly, “sadly, no quick fix is available.”
More fundamental changes are needed than those that currently top the Obama agenda.
News Dissector Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime Of Our Time, investigating crime as a cause of the financial crisis. Comments to: dissector@mediachannel.org
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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