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On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave his long planned speech on Democratic Socialism, invoking great American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and reminding everyone that some of the most popular social programs we have today — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all once labeled socialist and aggressively opposed by monied interests, who FDR called “economic royalists.”
Not only were social programs opposed and called socialism; so were any kind of laws or regulations that intervened with the “free market” for the betterment of society. “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as ‘socialist,’” explained Sanders.
Of course, capitalists never come out and say that they want the government to get out of their way so that they can take advantage of workers or employ children or contaminate the water supply. They fear-monger about the threat of socialism and claim that as long as the government intervenes with their business, we can never have true freedom.
A young propagandist named Ronald Reagan issued such a warning in the early sixties, in opposition to what is seen as the predecessor to Medicare. “Federal programs,” Reagan warned, “will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until one day… we will wake to find that we have socialism.” Sounds familiar.
Today, we have “economic royalists” like the Koch brothers who, with their billions, fund the myths that have long sat in opposition to the social programs and market regulations that helped create the middle class. “A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value,” said Charles Koch in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year, “In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens.”
Koch puts forth the idea that an unregulated free market (or what he calls a “truly free society”) would solve most of society’s problems, and that any business — such as Koch Industries — that disrespects its customers will fail. There are many reasons why this is wrong. First of all, what is disrespecting a customer? Wrecking the environment? Violating safety regulations that end up killing innocent Americans? In that case, Koch Industries would have surely failed in a “truly free society” by now. Except it wouldn’t. When a corporation is as big and diversified as Koch Industries, most customers don’t even know when they’re buying a product from them (you may very well be using a Koch product in your own household), and “ethical consumerism” is, unfortunately, more myth than reality (consumers tend to look for the best deals before looking for products that comply with their moral code).
The truth, of course, is that an unfettered free market has disastrous affects on society, and that the freedom the Koch brothers and people like Sen. Rand Paul (R-KT) promote is a kind of barbaric freedom. This was witnessed back 2011, when Rand’s father, Ron Paul, was questioned at a GOP primary debate whether a healthy uninsured 30-year-old man who fell into a coma after something “terrible happened” should be treated or simply left to die. “What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul said, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” which was followed by some fans shouting “Yes!” to the question of whether he should simply be left to die (which led Paul to backtrack, realizing the barbarity of his answer).
Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, AlterNet, Counterpunch and openDemocracy. Follow him on Twitter: @dilgentbureauct.
If you haven’t yet seen “The Big Short” – directed and co-written by Adam McKay, based on the non-fiction prize-winning book by Michael Lewis about the housing and credit bubble that triggered the Great Recession — I recommend you do so.
Not only is the movie an enjoyable (if that’s the right word) way to understand how the big banks screwed millions of Americans out of their homes, savings, and jobs – and then got bailed out by taxpayers. It’s also a lesson in why they’re on the way to doing all this again – and how their political power continues to erode laws designed to prevent another crisis and to shield their executives from any accountability.
Most importantly, the movie shows why Bernie Sanders’s plan to break up the biggest banks and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (separating investment from commercial banking) is necessary – and why Hillary Clinton’s more modest plan is inadequate.
I’ll get back to Bernie and Hillary in a moment, but first you need to know why Wall Street wants us to forget what really happened.
The movie gets the story essentially right: Traders on the Street pushed highly-risky mortgage loans, bundled them together into investments that hid the risks, got the major credit-rating agencies to give the bundles Triple-A ratings, and then sold them to unwary investors. It was a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that had to end badly – and it did.
Yet since then, Wall Street and its hired guns (including most current Republican candidates for president) have tried to rewrite this history.
They want us to believe the banks and investment houses were innocent victims of misguided government policies that gave mortgages to poor people who shouldn’t have got them.
That’s pure baloney. The boom in subprime mortgages was concentrated in the private market, not in government. Wall Street itself created the risky mortgage market. It sliced and diced junk mortgages into bundles that hid how bad they were. And it invented the derivatives and CDOs that financed them
The fact is, more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private institutions, and nearly 83 percentof the subprime loans that went to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
Why has Wall Street been pushing its lie, blaming the government for what happened? And why has the Street (along with its right-wing apologists, and its outlets such as Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal) so viciously attacked the movie “The Big Short?”
So we won’t demand tougher laws to prevent another crisis followed by another “too-big-to-fail” bailout.
Which brings us back to Bernie and Hillary. Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to break up the big banks or resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act, as Bernie does
Instead, she’d charge the big banks a bit more for carrying lots of debt and to oversee them more carefully. She’d also give bank regulators more power to break up any particular bank that theyconsider too risky. And she wants more oversight of so-called “shadow banks” such as hedge funds and insurance companies like the infamous AIG.
In a world where the giant Wall Street banks didn’t have huge political power, these measures might be enough. But, if you hadn’t noticed, Wall Street wields extraordinary power.
Which helps explain why no Wall Street executive has been indicted for the fraudulent behavior that led up to the 2008 crash. Or for the criminal price-fixing scheme settled last May. And why even the fines imposed on the banks have been only a fraction of the banks’ gains.
And also why Dodd-Frank is being watered down into vapidity. For example, the law requires major banks to prepare “living wills” describing how they’d unwind their operations if they get into serious trouble. But no big bank has come up with one that passes muster. Federal investigators have found them all “unrealistic.”
Most of Hillary’s proposals could already have been put into effect by the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but they haven’t been – presumably because of the Street’s muscle.
As a practical matter, then, her proposals are invitations to more dilution and finagle.
The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is by taking on its economic and political power directly – with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down. Starting with busting up the biggest banks, as Bernie Sanders proposes.
More than a century ago, Teddy Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil Trust because it posed a danger to the U.S. economy. Today, Wall Street’s biggest banks pose an even greater danger. They’re far larger than they were before the crash of 2008.
Unless they’re broken up and Glass-Steagall resurrected, we face substantial risk of another near-meltdown – once again threatening the incomes, jobs, savings, and homes of millions of Americans.
To paraphrase philosopher George Santayana, those who cannot remember they were screwed by Wall Street are condemned to be screwed again.
Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. His latest book is "Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few." His website is www.robertreich.org.
Yes, Pope Francis is encouraging civil disobedience, leading a rebellion. Listen closely, Francis knows he’s inciting political rebellion, an uprising of the masses against the world’s super-rich capitalists. And yet, right-wing conservatives remain in denial, tuning out the pope’s message, hoping he’ll just go away like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement did.
Never. America’s narcissistic addiction to presidential politics is dumbing down our collective brain. Warning: Forget Bernie vs. Hillary. Forget the circus-clown-car distractions created by Trump vs. the GOP’s Fab 15. Pope Francis is the only real political leader that matters this year. Forget the rest. Here’s why:
Pope Francis is not just leading a “Second American Revolution,” he is rallying people across the Earth, middle class as well as poor, inciting billions to rise up in a global economic revolution, one that could suddenly sweep the planet, like the 1789 French storming the Bastille.
Unfortunately, conservative capitalists — Big Oil, Koch billionaires, our GOP Congress and all fossil-fuel climate-science deniers — are blind to the fact their ideology is on the wrong side of history, that by fighting a no-win battle they are committing suicide, self-destructing their own ideology.
The fact is: The era of capitalism is rapidly dying, a victim of its own success, sabotaged by greed and a loss of a moral code. In 1776 Adam Smith’s capitalism became America’s core economic principle. We enshrined his ideal of capitalism in our constitutional freedoms. We prospered. America became the greatest economic superpower in world history.
But along the way, America forgot Smith’s original foundation was in morals, values, doing what’s right for the common good. Instead we drifted into Ayn Rand’s narcissistic “mutant capitalism,” as Vanguard’s founder Jack Bogle called the distortion of Adam Smith’s principles in his classic, “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” The battle is lost.
Pope Francis, leader of the coming 21st Century American Revolution
In the generation since the Reagan Revolution, America’s self-centered, consumer-driven, mutant capitalism lost its moral compass, drifting: Inequality explodes, income growth stagnates, the poor keep getting poorer. Yet across the world, billionaires have explode from 322 in 2000 to 1,826 in 2015, with 11 trillionaire capitalist families predicted to control the planet by 2100.
But not for much longer, as Pope Francis’ revolution accelerates, as his relentless socialist message of sacred rights for all people makes clear. Why? Our mutating capitalist elite have triggered a massive backlash, a “profound human crisis, the denial of the primacy of the human person. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money.”
An aggressive Pope Francis is on a mission to transform the mutant ideology of today’s capitalist world with its rampant profits-centered climate-science denialism. Fortunately, the pope will soon confront and challenge America’s GOP Congress directly, then the United Nations General Assembly to challenge the capitalist world’s failure to take climate change actions. Maybe they’ll finally wake up.
Pope Francis’ recent trip to South America revealed a clear anticapitalism, socialist message, calling for a “structural change to a global economy that runs counter to the plan of Jesus,” as reported in Time by Christopher Hale. Francis warned:
“The future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers and the elites.” The future “It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize. It is in their hands, which can guide with humility and conviction this process of change. I am with you.” The pope is warning all capitalists everywhere. As Jesus says in the Bible, the poor will always be with you, but the rich may not be after the coming revolution.
Yes folks, Pope Francis is a revolutionary destined to end up in the history books right up there with Lenin and Marx, Mao and Castro. He is obviously inciting revolution, wants civil disobedience and political insurrection, he is egging the poor into rebellion against a vastly outnumbered rich.
In fact, Francis has become one of the world’s great revolutionary leaders. He not only is inciting an uprising of the masses against wealthy capitalist billionaires, he’s out in front of the emerging global revolution, encouraging the masses, shouting battle cries, a leader in the tradition of Washington.
So the media should stop mistaking Francis’s congenial nature, his perpetual smile, dismissing his true intentions. His is an aggressive call to arms, a call for a global revolution attacking today’s out-of-control, consumer-driven “mutant capitalism,” a call to replace capitalism with a new economic socialism giving the poor “sacred rights” on par with the superrich.
Time’s Hale went on to outline the four “foundations” of the pope’s coming “revolution.” Hale covered the pope’s tour in South America in, “Pope Francis Isn’t Holding Back — And U.S. Politicians Should Watch Out.” In Bolivia Francis warned that global capitalism is a failure and needs a “structural change” because it runs “counter to the plan of Jesus.” Hale then added that “leaders of both parties might regret their invitation to the 78-year-old Jesuit pontiff” to address a historic joint session of Congress in two months. Five reasons make the warning quite obvious:
1. Socialism: Everyone has a sacred right to land, lodging and labor
“Pope Francis argued that everyone has a God-given right to have a job, to own land, and to have a home.” These rights go “well beyond the traditional social teaching of the Catholic Church, which argues for the dignity of work, but doesn’t go as far to say that everyone has a God-given right to have a job.” But clearly, Pope Francis says the poor do have inalienable “sacred rights” on par with those guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. And clearly, Scott Walker and the GOP already deny a similar liberal agenda of “sacred rights” to a living wage, property and a home.
2. Humans, not capitalist profits, must be at the center of global economics
Pope Francis message is unambiguous: “Unbridled capitalism” has become a “subtle dictatorship,” is now the very “dung of the devil.” Ouch, that must hurt even the stone-cold Koch ego. Francis says that capitalism’s greedy “unfettered pursuit of money” is destroying the “common good,” setting a stage for revolutions. The pope urged the masses to “say no to an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules,” because capitalists will “destroy Mother Earth” in order to enrich the superrich elite. Yet another revolutionary call to battle.
3. Billions worldwide, cannot wait much longer for action
Earlier Pope Francis’ encyclical warned that “doomsday predictions” about climate “can no longer be met with irony, disdain” or dismissed without action. Now, Francis is aggressively pushing world leaders and humans everywhere to fight against all economic injustices against individuals. The clock’s ticking loudly, time is “running out: we are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home” here on Earth. Pope Francis also encourages people to start demanding, “We want change!” Remember the 1976 movie “Network”: where an anchorman gets listeners shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
4. Revolutions begin with angry citizens, not politicians or philanthropists
Time’s Hale says the pope’s call for “structural change won’t be the result from any one political decision.” The pope understands that politicians rarely lead. Real change is triggered from below, by angry mobs, they get “caught up in the storms of people’s lives,” fired up, rebel, motivated to act, then revolutions ignite and move fast like a wildfire on jet fuel.
5. Warning: Socialism is now a moral obligation, a commandment to obey
Admit it, Pope Francis is clearly inciting people to rebel with his passionate, provocative and inspirational message, which triggers memories of Marx, yet is directly from the Gospels of Jesus: “Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor is not mere philanthropy,” not just a handout from capitalist billionaires.
Instead Pope Francis shifts our focus: The socialism is now “a moral obligation. And for Christians, the responsibility is even greater: it is a commandment. It is about giving to the poor and to peoples what is theirs as a sacred right.” And if we fail to do give it freely, do not be surprised when revolutions explode across Planet Earth.
The shock and disbelief with which many political pundits have responded to Bernie Sanders’ description of himself as a “democratic socialist”—a supporter of democratic control of the economy—provide a clear indication of how little they know about the popularity and influence of democratic socialism over the course of American history.
How else could they miss the existence of a thriving Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs (one of the nation’s most famous union leaders) and Norman Thomas (a distinguished Presbyterian minister), during the early decades of the twentieth century? Or the democratic socialist administrationselected to govern Milwaukee, Bridgeport, Flint, Minneapolis, Schenectady, Racine, Davenport, Butte, Pasadena, and numerous other U.S. cities? Or the democratic socialists, such as Victor Berger, Meyer London, and Ron Dellums, elected to Congress? Or the programs long championed by democratic socialists that, eventually, were put into place by Republican and Democratic administrations—from the Pure Food and Drug Act to the income tax, from minimum wage laws to maximum hour laws, from unemployment insurance to public power, from Social Security to Medicare?
Most startling of all, they have missed the many prominent Americans who, though now deceased, were democratic socialists during substantial portions of their lives. These include labor leaders like Walter Reuther (president, United Auto Workers and vice-president, AFL-CIO), David Dubinsky(president, International Ladies Garment Workers Union),Sidney Hillman (president, Amalgamated Clothing Workers),Jerry Wurf (president, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees), and William Winpisinger(president, International Association of Machinists). EvenSamuel Gompers—the founder and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor who, in the latter part of his life, clashed with Debs and other socialist union leaders—was initially a socialist.
Numerous popular novelists and other writers also embraced democratic socialism, including Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Howard Zinn. Eminent scientists, too, became democratic socialists, including Charles Steinmetz and Albert Einstein.
Many well-known social reformers also joined the ranks of America’s democratic socialists, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton (women’s rights crusader), John Dewey (educator),Helen Keller (author and lecturer), and Margaret Sanger (birth control pioneer). Within the civil rights movement, particularly, a very important role was played by democratic socialists, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph,Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer.
In fact, although very few people know it, even Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist. “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he wrote to Coretta Scott (soon to become his wife) on July 18, 1952. This belief system continued throughout his life, and, in the late 1960s, contributed to his shift from championing racial equality to championing economic equality. In a 1966 speech to his staff, King declared: “Something is wrong . . . with capitalism.” He added: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.” Plans for the Poor People’s Campaign followed, as did his death while promoting the unionization of Memphis’s exploited sanitation workers.
Some might argue that democratic socialism, like these individuals, is dead and gone, replaced by its hierarchical enemies, corporate capitalism on the Right and Communism on the Left. But that contention is belied by the continued existence of large, democratic socialist parties that either govern other democratic nations or provide the major opposition to the conservative governments of those nations: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Australian Labor Party, the Brazilian Democratic Workers Party, the German Social Democratic Party, the Irish Labour Party, Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, South Africa’s African National Congress, the Israeli Labor Party, the New Zealand Labour Party, Chile’s Socialist Party, and many, many more around the world.
Nor is democratic socialism dead in the United States. In response to rising economic inequality and, particularly, the blatant greed and power of the wealthy and their corporations, Democratic Socialists of America—a descendant of the old Socialist Party of America, though an organization rather than a third party—is growing rapidly. Not surprisingly, it is fervently backing Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the presidency. Meanwhile, Democratic Party leaders are suddenly shying away from their corporate dalliances and picking up a few programmatic ideas from Sanders, democratic socialists, and their allies. These include a $15-per-hour minimum wage, expansion of Social Security, free college tuition, and opposition to two pro-corporate ventures: the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
These and many other democratic socialists, among them Bernie Sanders, have played an important role in American life. It’s a shame that so many political “experts” haven’t noticed it.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is professor of history emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion,What’s Going On at UAardvark?
Individually signed posts do not necessarily reflect the views of DSA as an organization or its leadership. Democratic Left blog post submission guidelines can be found here.
Techonomy Video | January 30, 2015, 12:26 PM | Techonomy Exclusive
Technologist and author Jaron Lanier wants to reframe the debate about income inequality, starting with semantics. He takes exception to the notion that income equalitywould ever be a good thing. “To really make incomes equal, there would have to be some sort of force that would pound people down and say, We will all be equal!” said Lanier during a talk at Techonomy 2014 in Half Moon Bay, Calif. Rather, Lanier sees inequality as an inherent dimension of a market economy, noting that “any world of freedom is going to create variation of outcomes.” The problem, however, lies in how these outcomes are spread across society. On the one hand, said Lanier, “if you believe in agency of people, you have to believe in distribution of outcomes.” On the other hand, “an incredible concentration in a tiny minority is just not sustainable.” The reason Lanier gives for this is straightforward: “There aren’t any more customers to buy your stuff.”
Instead of focusing on income inequality, which is inevitable, Lanier wants to shift the debate to the quality of income distribution. “What we should be talking about is how we can get the economy to be a fair measurement device … which by definition should be giving us a bell curve,” said Lanier, explaining that a bell curve represents a natural distribution of outcomes, with equal numbers of high achievers and low achievers and most people in the middle. “Nothing but a bell curve can be an indicator of freedom where there’s a system with a market economy,” he concluded.
t’s time to celebrate a candidate who deserves the spotlight, more so than other candidates fromeither side of the left-right false divide.
Here are 10 reasons why Bernie Sanders deserves more coverage from the mainstream media and, ultimately, your vote:
1) He supports a new Glass Steagall act- hell he even detailed 5 reasons explaining why it’s important; passed over 80 years ago, it had prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking. It was repealed in 1999, and banks used this new-found ability to plunder the savings of their depositors by making extremely risky “investments” for their own profit. This is the primary reason for the 2008 financial crisis, and the reason why the big banks had to be bailed out by taxpayers. Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to reinstate Glass-Steagall while Trump wants regulations on Wall Street to be weakened.
Reuters
