By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

 “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place”

That was Sen Richard Durbin, the powerful Senate Democratic whip, irate as the banking lobby, with foreclosures soaring across the nation, blocked a core reform for beleaguered homeowners that would give judges the right to modify mortgages in bankruptcy court.

But it isn’t just the banks. Agribusiness is protecting its obscene subsidies. The insurance companies are deploying legions of lobbyists to gut the public plan in health care reform, the heart of the Obama plan. The utilities are carving out exceptions for coal plants. Multinationals are clearly on way to disemboweling Obama tax proposals. The military industrial lobby is a good bet to frustrate DOD Secretary Gates modest procurement reforms.

This isn’t about America being a “center-right country,” the myth that pundits still peddle about the American people. This is about Congress being bought and sold, pure and simple. Each night, Washington slurps on political fund-raisers. Each day, the deals get cut; the favors get done. Now with Republicans lining up lemming-like to obstruct anything Obama, Congress can be bought on the cheap. The lobbies have only to enlist (suborn, bribe, seduce, finance) a few of what the press insists on describing as “moderate Democrats” in the Senate to stop any reform they don’t like.

What’s often forgotten in this squalid exchange is that the very Americans the legislators preen to represent are the victims of their various corruptions.

For example, with the swine flu alert sweeping the country, President Obama and the Centers for Disease Control urge people with flu symptoms to stay home. This is a common sense measure to limit the spread of what might be a dangerous virus.

Only one problem, as the New York Times reminds us in an editorial this morning. About 60 million Americans don’t have paid sick leave. Many can be fired if they stay home. And if not fired, many simply can’t afford to lose the hours.

43% of private sector American workers have no paid sick days at all. And needless to say the most vulnerable have the least protection. A 2007 EPI study showed that workers at the bottom of the wage scale, those making less than $7.38 an hour, are five times less likely to have sick days than workers at the top of the scale, those making greater than $29.47 an hour. Only 16% of low-wage workers have access to paid sick days.

This is a barbarity that is dangerous to your health. Women — who tend still to be disproportionately in part-time and low wage work — are particularly at risk.

More than 160 countries, the Times tells us, have laws that ensure all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness. The US does not. The reason goes no further than the influence of money on politics.

We once provided much of our social contract through the corporation rather than the Congress. Strong unions could negotiate a family wage, health care, overtime pay, paid sick leave, paid vacations, and pensions. Many non-union employers offered benefits similar to those provided by union companies. But over the last decades of this conservative era, as unions grew weaker under attack, more and more corporations simply shredded those agreements.

Now we’ll have to enact these basic guarantees — central to what Franklin Roosevelt called the Economic Bill of Rights — in law. But each reform will have to overcome the resistance of entrenched lobbies, buying the protection of compromised legislators.

In 2005, Senator Ted Kennedy and Rep. Rosa DeLauro introduced a bill entitled the Health Families Act that would mandate up to seven paid sick days for employees in firms with more than 15 employees (and pro-rated leave for part-time employees). You’d think this would be a no brainer. It never came to a vote in the Senate. Obama pledged to support seven day paid sick leave in his campaign. Many Democratic lobbyists will dine well off of that pledge.

In area after area, Americans are suffering from the accumulated corruptions of our moneyed politics. In the fifth labor of Hercules, an arrogant king tries to demean the hero by hiring him to clean out the Augean stables in a day. The stables containing the largest herd of cattle in civilization, had never been cleaned. Hercules, with a little help from Athena, changes the path of two rivers and quickly washes out the accumulated filth. But no one is about to change the course of the Potomac to cleanse the backrooms and lobbies of Capitol Hill. The only current strong enough to do that is an aroused public angry enough to sweep away those who stand in the way. Despite rumblings, despite growing awareness of the damage wrought by a sordid and selfish era, we aren’t there yet.

By Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

I recently spoke at a Federal Reserve conference in Chicago, on financial regulation. The keynote speaker was Ben Bernanke. Chairman Bernanke was unable to leave Washington, so he spoke live, via a giant TV screen, giving his speech a fittingly Orwellian cast.

This was the day that the results of the so called stress tests were released. Not surprisingly, Bernanke was upbeat, since restoring confidence was the whole political point of the stress-test exercise. No major bank was insolvent, and the 19 largest banks collectively needed to raise only about $75 billion in additional capital, although their losses might total as much as $599 billion. Citigroup, queen of the Zombie Banks, remarkably enough, was said to need only $5.5 billion in additional private capital. You could almost make up that paltry sum with executive bonuses.

At one point in his remarks, Bernanke, recounting just how rigorous the stress tests were, explained that “More than 150 examiners, supervisors, and economists” had conducted several weeks of examinations of the banks. That kind of let the cat out of the bag. If you do the arithmetic, that is about seven supervisors per bank, and all of the stress-tested 19 banks were hundred-billion and up outfits. When an ordinary commercial bank, say a $10 billion outfit, undergoes a far less complex routine examination of its commercial loan portfolio, it involves dozens of examiners.

So the stress test was not a set of rigorous examinations at all, but a modeling exercise using the banks’ own valuations of their assets. The most serious outside observers think the hole in the banks’ balance sheets is much larger than $75 billion or even the Fed’s worst-case estimate of $599 billion in losses. The International Monetary Fund estimates the hole as more like 2.7 trillion dollars, and informed economists like Nouriel Roubini put the number at as much as 3.6 trillion.

Why is the Fed low-balling the problem? The hope is that by keeping the banks afloat for a few more months, and trying to entice private capital back to the table, the recovery in other parts of the economy will spill over onto the banks. But the greater likelihood is that weakened banks will continue dragging down the rest of the economy.

Despite talk of “green shoots,” – economic indicators not being quite as bad as expected, and the stock market up – most of the news is still pretty grim. Unemployment was up in April by “only” 539,000 jobs. Home foreclosures keep rising, with a total of eight million projected this year. Manufacturing is dead in the water. The administration’s voluntary (to the banks) mortgage relief program will address only a fraction of the problem; and 12 Senate Democrats voted with the banking industry to deny bankruptcy judges the ability to modify the terms of a mortgage as a last resort – thus killing the one proposed stick in a program that is all carrots.

I also recently spoke at a convention of industrial construction companies. These are the people who build and maintain factories, power plants, and do other heavy industrial construction. I asked a room full of hundreds of executives how many saw signs of improvement in their order books. Not a single hand went up. Then I asked how many had had projects deferred because of difficulty getting financing. About two thirds of the people in the room raised their hands.

My guess is that the Obama administration will be back next fall, asking Congress for the money and authority to do the bank rescue right, after the current policy proves inadequate to restore the banking system and the economy to health. That would mean taking the insolvent banks into receivership, deciding how much public capital was required and where to get it, and then returning the banks to private ownership. Better late than never, but it’s a pity to waste six months.

Chatting with the bankers in attendance at the Fed conference, mostly bankers from the heartland of the Midwest, I encountered resentment bordering on fury at the double standard. The big Wall Street banks are getting propped up with literally trillions of dollars in aid from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, while community bankers that stuck to their knitting and did not go in for the sub-prime swindle are suffering collateral damage. That’s a pun, by the way.

Because of the huge losses to the FDIC’s insurance fund, small and medium sized healthy banks are having to pay increased premiums. And while the Fed and the Treasury are being extremely gentle in letting the big money-center banks like Citi value their distressed securities with great charity and forbearance, the community banks are having their loan portfolios examined with fine-tooth combs. With regulators breathing down their necks, and fewer sure-thing businesses in a position to borrow, the community banks are being made to raise their lending standards, contributing to the vicious circle of reduced business activity and reduced credit.

Why had the administration made this perverse alliance with Wall Street, and decided to prop up large zombie banks rather than taking them into receivership and getting on with it? You could blame it on campaign finance, or you could blame it on the quirk of history that Obama, once he became the nominee, decided to hire the Wall Street-oriented Clinton economic team.

The most hopeful and elegant theory I’ve heard is that for now, Obama’s main political project is to let the Republicans self-destruct; co-opting Wall Street (for now) is part of that game plan. He’ll get around to reforming Wall Street next year. Even Roosevelt had to take things one step at a time, as public opinion moved. The Second New Deal was more radical than the first. I’ve often said that Obama is smarter than I am, and if he is politically shrewd enough to have come up with that strategy, hats off to him. I’m also a Red Sox fan, and anything is possible. But for the moment, it looks more like a case of political expediency and even political capture.

I could excuse all that if the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke strategy of low-balling the scale of the banks’ problems and inviting speculators to bail them out actually worked. But the greater likelihood is that the economy will tread water at best for the remainder of this year, losing both precious time and political credibility in America’s heartland.

Robert Kuttner is co-Editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His recent book is Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution.

GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American manufacturing plants, terminate 21,000 of its factory workers and double the cars it builds in low-wage Mexico, China and South Korea and ships back to the U.S. to sell.

There it is: GM is demanding that Americans pay to send their own jobs overseas.

In the world where corporate executives live, the one in which boards of directors grant CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses even after companies tank, maybe that’s not a perverse proposition.

But in the world where real Americans live, we’ve had enough of this crap. Decades of foolish tax and other federal policies that encouraged American manufacturing firms to throw Americans out of work and expatriate were bad enough. To expect American taxpayers to bankroll GM’s plans to layoff American workers and move their jobs overseas goes too far.

We’re taking a stand. It’s gotta stop here. The United Steelworkers (USW), the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and the Mayors and Municipalities Automotive Coalition (MMAC) are conducting an 11-state, 32-city protest bus tour. At each stop so far, hundreds of people have cheered our message: “Keep it Made in America.” And they’ve signed our petition calling for support of a simple idea: Buy it here; build it here.      We will present the petitions at a teach-in conference in Washington, D.C. on May 19 when we will explain to elected officials why GM’s plan fails America and why they must require GM to submit a new plan supporting American jobs.

As much as for the UAW, this is a life and death struggle for the USW, American manufacturing, and for millions of Americans in good-paying jobs. Without manufacturing, America is in danger of attempting to subsist on an economy based on nothing more than amorphous derivatives, credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes. The Steelworkers represent hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs depend on the auto industry, from steelworkers who make the steel, to the rubber workers who make the tires, to the glass workers who make the windshields, to the paper workers who make the glossy pamphlets.

Altogether, more than 7 million paychecks depend on the U.S. auto industry, including healthcare, education, service, retail and other jobs. This bus tour is about preserving those jobs, all of those jobs.

In just the past eight months of this recession, caused in huge part by recklessness on Wall Street, this country has lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. GM cannot take tax dollars to slash more. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich agrees. Here’s what he told the Washington Post, “. . . it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of bailing out these big companies. If GM is going to do more of its production overseas, then why exactly are we saving GM?”

It’s not as if it’s impossible for a U.S. auto company to manufacture here. Ford Motor Co., which is not taking any bailout money, is investing $500 million in retooling its Michigan Truck plant outside Detroit so that it can make small cars that it will sell worldwide, including its next-generation, battery-electric Focus. And Chrysler, which is getting bailout money, has made a deal with Fiat under which the Italian car company will manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. assembly facilities, which, along with other long-term commitments, will eventually create 4,000 U.S. jobs.

On the first day of the bus tour, I was joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, actor Danny Glover, the angriest mayor in the U.S., Virg Bernero of Lansing, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, among others.

The Rev. Jackson drew cheers as he remarked that somehow we’ve given billions to the “banksters,” yet somehow we’re still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs and homes each month. He called for a moratorium on foreclosures and plant closings, and I’m with him.

Bernero is tired of Wall Street describing his father, a retired auto worker, as a legacy cost. His father is a human being, a senior citizen, who worked hard every day of his life and returned home exhausted from an honest day’s work. Now, however, Wall Street thinks it’s fine to reduce him to a sub-human term and cheat him out of the retirement benefits he earned.

Bernero’s father made things, real things that could be touched, held in the hand – not derivatives, not figments of the imagination that turned out to have less than no value at all.

Now Wall Street and GM must be made to understand that Main Street isn’t going to take it anymore. We’re not going to continue allowing corporate America to outsource the American dream. Bernero said it right: “This is America’s fight.”

Join us. Sign the petition. We have no intention of buying our own noose. We intend to win this fight.

 

By Fred Redmond
USW Vice President Human Affairs

Four hours into the New Year, a political activist who was also a well-known trade unionist was celebrating at a party in the town of Montoso when a political opponent stabbed him numerous times in the chest.

As Adolfo Tique lay dead, his six children fatherless, police interrogated the assassin.

Then they let him go.

By American standards, it’s a shocking story. But in Colombia, where it occurred, it’s not. It’s the kind of story I heard repeatedly, heartrendingly when I visited Colombia last month with a delegation of British Parliamentarians and unionists led by the United Steelworkers and Unite the Union, which together last year formed Workers Uniting, the first transatlantic union.

The visit left us with no reason to believe Colombia suddenly had become worthy of a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., Canada or the European Union.

The fact that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists seemed to have made the same impression last year on Democratic candidate Barack Obama. In April of 2008, at an AFL-CIO convention, he promised to oppose the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement. He said, “The violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

This April, however, President Obama stung U.S. unions, which worked hard for his election and the FTA’s defeat. After Obama and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez sat together at lunch and spoke several times at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs announced that Obama had asked U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk to work on the FTA.

Say it ain’t so, Mr. President! Say you haven’t turned your back on unionists just because you shared a sandwich with another head of state. Tell us you won’t ignore Tique’s six orphans or 2,700 slain unionists over the past 25 years because of Uribe’s charming banter over soup.

Terrible, disquieting signs suggest it is so, however. Uribe bragged that he’d gotten Obama’s autograph with this note: “To President Uribe, with admiration!” And later Kirk would say Obama is a “great admirer” of Uribe and the strides he has made in reducing violence against union officials.

Also, Uribe bragged that he’d explained to Obama how his administration had protected unionists. He said that before he took office in 2002, there were only two convictions for the murders of workers, but since then there have been 184.

The most reliable source of such statistics, however, the Colombian National Labor School, provides radically different numbers.  Luciano Sanin Vasquez, the school’s director, testified before the House Education and Labor Committee Feb. 12, that the number of successful prosecutions was 91.  So either Colombia doubled convictions within the two months’ time between Mr. Sanin’s testimony and the Fifth Summit of the Americas, or Uribe exaggerated his success in beginning to deal with the 40-year blood bath his country has endured as right wing militias fought left wing guerillas with trade unionists and human rights activists and rural populations caught in the cross fire.

And even Uribe’s inflated conviction number is hardly impressive. It still represents a 99 percent impunity rate. Kill a Colombian unionist, and 99 out of 100 times you’ll get away with it – the police may question you, but then they’ll just let you go, like they did in the Tique murder.

At lunch with President Obama, Uribe wrangled himself an invitation to the White House. No big deal, really. Uribe had been to Washington before, and Bush had never been able to persuade Congress to pass the FTA.

But Uribe also persuaded Obama to drop by Bogotá the next time he’s visiting Latin America. This, however, is significant. This is a trip Obama should make.

Having just returned from Colombia, I believe this excursion could make all the difference in the Colombian FTA for President Obama. But only if President Obama makes his own schedule and does not adhere to some sham show tour set up by Uribe’s people.

Obama needs to meet with some of the Colombian people who spoke with my delegation, including peasant farmers, human rights defenders and trade unionists. While I was in Colombia early in April, Hernan Polo Barrera, the head of the teachers trade union, SITRAENAL, was shot dead in front of his house. Because he’d received numerous threats, he’d asked for protection, but the government refused to provide it. He was the 13^th trade unionist killed so far this year.

When Obama goes to Colombia, I want him to speak with Mr. Polo’s 16-year-old daughter, Liseth, who was standing next to her father when he was gunned down and who was wounded in the attack. She was rushed to the hospital as the killers escaped on motorcycles. They have not been caught.

I also want President Obama to spend some time with the six year old son of Arled Samboni Guaca, an active member of the Colombian agricultural workers’ trade union, FENSUAGRO, who had received numerous death threats from Colombian paramilitary groups. Father and son were walking to a shop on Jan 16 when two gunmen approached them and shot Mr. Samboni seven times. The gunmen escaped. The little boy watched his father die.

Then there’s José Jair Valencia Agudelo, an activist in the Colombian teacher’s union EDUCAL. President Obama should speak with this assassination-attempt survivor. He was shot six times Feb. 26 in the town of Filadelfia a week after authorities refused to give him the transfer and protection that he’d sought because he’d received death threats.

President Obama must speak with one more grieving unionist. He is Jorge Caicedo, leader of the health workers trade union ANTHOC in the Colombian region of Narino. Paramilitaries tried to get to him through is wife, Cecilia Montano. They shot her three times in the head in the town of Tumaco on Jan. 5^th.

Before the new president is drawn in by Uribe’s contention that Colombia should be awarded an FTA because fewer trade unionists and human rights activists and rural peasants are murdered each year now, Obama must hear from the victims. And he should remember what Human Rights Watch wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last fall:

“Free trade should be premised on fundamental respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded. In Colombia, workers cannot exercise their right without fear of being threatened or killed. Without concrete and sustained results in addressing this basic problem, ongoing anti-union violence and impunity would, as President-elect Barack Obama has noted, make a “mockery” of labor protections in the agreement. We believe that Colombia should be in compliance with such protections before the accord takes effect, as has generally been demanded with FTA commercial provisions.”

 

By Jeff Merkley
U.S. Senator, D-Oregon

Over and over again, I hear from Oregonians that we need real health care reform that provides every American with access to quality, affordable care. That is why Congress and President Obama are so focused on this issue.

Of course there are folks in the insurance and hospital industries, from the medical profession, and both political parties who will have different ideas about how to achieve our goal. But I was shocked when I read a memo from Republican strategist Dr. Frank Luntz laying out plans to dismantle any effort to give all Americans access to quality health care. Dr. Luntz, the man who developed language designed to promote preemptive war in Iraq and distract from the severity of global warming, is at it again — this time with a messaging strategy designed to sink our historic opportunity for health care reform.

Let’s be clear: this is not a strategy to push certain ideas about health reform. It is a strategy intended solely to kill reform efforts altogether. In his own words, Dr. Luntz has stated, “You’re not going to get what you want, but you can kill what they’re trying to do.”

Not surprisingly, since the American public is strongly in favor of fixing the broken health care system, the Luntz strategy is predicated on deception.

In his memo, Dr. Luntz lays out multiple ways that opponents of health care reform can trick and manipulate the American public. One strategy that stood out to me is to call efforts to reform our broken health care system a “bailout for the insurance industry.” This is ridiculous. This statement is developed to serve the same interests who stopped at nothing to derail health care reform in the 90′s, who blocked health care coverage for low-income children, and whose top Medicare priority for 15 years has been transferring money from seniors and taxpayers to the insurance industry.

When support for a prescription drug benefit in Medicare became too powerful to ignore, President Bush and his allies created the convoluted system we now have. Rather than simply add a prescription drug benefit to the tried, true, and popular Medicare program as Democrats wanted, they devised a giveaway for insurance companies. For years Dr. Luntz’s clients have virtually abdicated health care policy making to the insurance industry; the last thing it needs is a bailout.

Today though, even the insurance industry is engaged in constructive negotiations about how to repair the health care system. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans who support reform, however, Dr. Luntz’s new game plan to stop change is being embraced by leaders in the Republican Party. In a briefing where Dr. Luntz presented his strategy to Republican House members, Rep. Mike Pence from Indiana, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, made it official by saying, “Frank is back.”

So expect a massive misinformation campaign coming to a health care debate near you. Opponents using Dr. Luntz’s doublespeak will argue for a “balanced, common sense approach” to health care but what they really want is to keep the system the way it is. They’ll say that a public plan will not be “patient centered,” but their real goal is to block accessible health care for every American. They’ll say reform will deny Americans “choice” even when every American will be allowed to keep their health insurance and their doctor. They’ll claim that the “quality of care will go down,” while callously ignoring the fact that millions of Americans have no health care at all and millions more are denied the medications and procedures they need.

What we are seeing, yet again, is that while Dr. Luntz and his clients may have excellent polling data, they are utterly clueless about what the American people want.

But, I have to give Dr. Luntz credit on one front: he points out that Republicans need to appear to be on the “right side of reform” or they lose the health care argument. The problem is that you can’t fake support for reform. You’re either for improving the quality and affordability of health care or you’re against it. You’re either for expanding coverage to every American or you’re against it. At the end of the day, no matter what talking points they use, each member of Congress is going to have to vote for or against improving our broken health care system.

With small businesses and families being buried by rising costs, with 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and American companies losing ground against their global competitors, it is evident to anyone that our health care system is broken. There are Republicans and Democrats, insurance executives and patient advocates, physicians and hospital representatives all working to meet one of America’s most pressing challenges. We certainly do not all agree on what a reformed health system should look like or how to get there, but there are people on all sides who are negotiating in good faith. The country deserves that debate on the merits, not poll-tested attack lines intended to prolong the broken system we have today.

Robert Kuttner
Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The American Prospect

We are hearing a lot about the need for a new “Pecora Commission,” to conduct a comprehensive investigation of all the Wall Street abuses that led to the financial collapse and the general recession that has followed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for such a commission. A House floor vote on a bill sponsored by Rep. John Dingell is expected this week. The bill would establish an investigative panel with full subpoena powers. A companion bill, the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, has bipartisan Senate sponsors, including Senators McCain and Grassley as well as several progressive Democrats. These efforts are an implicit rebuke to the Obama administration’s economic team.

The original Pecora committee was not a commission, but the Senate Banking committee operating in investigative mode. Its chief counsel beginning in late 1932 was a former New York City prosecutor named Ferdinand Pecora. The committee began its work in March 1932, and Pecora became chief counsel later that year. It continued throughout 1933 into early 1934. The new Democratic chairman, Sen. Duncan Fletcher, who took office when the Democrats began the majority party after the 1932 election, kept Pecora in the job. Today, Fletcher is a footnote; Pecora is the name people remember. (As a former chief investigator of the Senate Banking Committee, I love to see Senate staffers make good.)

Pecora’s work unearthed numerous conflicts of interest–a “preferred list” of investors (including President Coolidge and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts) kept by Morgan who had access to lucrative securities offerings not available to ordinary customers; the unsavory practice of bank presidents of borrowing money to short stocks, including sometimes their own; and the first wave “securitization,” in which investment banks made sketchy loans and repackaged them as bonds for unsuspecting investors.

Pecora’s work led to several resignations of bank executives, but more importantly in created a climate for reform legislation. Pecora’s findings helped inform the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 separating investment banking from government-insured commercial banking, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Most importantly, it functioned as a public shaming of Wall Street. It thus helped change the political climate so that radical reforms could proceed. President Roosevelt encouraged Pecora’s work and he encouraged the public indignation. Pecora was subsequently appointed by Roosevelt as a commissioner of the newly created SEC.

The Obama administration is proceeding very differently, and it has little enthusiasm for a Pecora Commission or for recriminations against financial elites. There has been no dramatic rupture with Wall Street. Rather, Obama’s economic team is working hand in glove with the same investment banking firms and commercial banks that invented and underwrote the financial products and subterfuges that creates the collapse.

Two of Obama’s top people, Lawrence Summers and Rahm Emanuel, did lucrative stints on Wall Street before returning to government (with an outlook substantially influenced by their time in the financial markets.) A third senior official, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was a senior member of the Bush administrations financial crisis team, in his previous job as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. So when Obama succeeded Bush, there was a seamless handoff from Geithner to…..Geithner.

Several other senior Obama economic officials were part of the Clinton economic team that was responsible for so much of the deregulation. Rather than channeling and affirming public indignation as Roosevelt did, the Obama sees populist backlash as a dangerous force to be damped down.

Although there have been some good individual hearings by particular committees on aspects of the collapse, neither of the key legislative committees in the House or Senate has shown much appetite for a Pecora-style investigation. Rather, investigative efforts have been diffused among the Congressional Oversight Panel chaired by Elizabeth Warren, which was created to oversee see the Treasury’s disbursement of $700 billion in bailout money, chaired by Elizabeth Warren; the reports of the Special Inspector General; investigative work by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo; and some good hearings by subcommittees. All of the Democratic committee chairmen, however, are under subtle pressure from the White House not to embarrass the administration.

But by refusing a Roosevelt-scale break with Wall Street, the administration embarrasses itself. So we need a new Pecora committee, less to unearth new information than to focus public attention and build support for sweeping reform. Between the work of the Special Inspector General, and the work of other congressional committees, and investigative reports of the financial press, much of the core story has already been unearthed. Commercial and investment banks, their hedge fund counterparties, the mortgage companies and the corrupted credit rating agencies, perpetrated systematic frauds on the public using levels of speculative borrowing that any uncompromised regulator would have shut down. The fraud was central to the business model. William Black has coined the useful phrase, “control fraud,” meaning that the fraud was systematic and emanated from the very top of the business.

With Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Ben Bernanke working closely with major investment bankers to restart the system of securitization, this time with the Federal Reserve’s money and loan guarantees from the Treasury, there will be a titanic struggle over what kind of regulatory system to have going forward. Wall Street is resisting any form of regulation of hedge funds and private equity companies, and hopes that a voluntary system for registering derivatives such as credit default swaps will head off stronger medicine.

For a time, it appeared that the issue of regulation of the shadow banking system would be finessed by making the Federal Reserve the “systemic risk regulator.” The Fed (the weakest regulatory agency of the lot) would decide what entities needed additional surveillance.) But that scheme, originally proposed by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in 2006, no longer has much support in Congress. So all of the issues about what to regulate, how, and by whom, are still very much on the table–and a consensus still needs to be created. We need a latter day Pecora Committee to arouse the public and the back-benchers in Congress. Otherwise, the reform moment will pass, and we will revert to something very much like business as usual.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is “Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency.”

 

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

The media coverage of the auto bailouts has focused on the need for union autoworkers to take big pay cuts, causing them to once again miss the real story. The Fiat-Chrysler deal shows that the pay problem is at the top, not the bottom. At the end of the day, the new Chrysler is still likely to be producing most of its cars in the United States. What the new company will be getting from abroad is technology and top management.

This big story was so easily missed because it runs against one of the main myths that our elites have cultivated about the US economy: that the country has a “comparative advantage” in highly skilled labor. In this story, the United States will continue to lose manufacturing and other “less-skilled” jobs as its economy becomes more concentrated in highly skilled sectors.

This story was convenient for our elites because it meant that the decline of manufacturing was a necessary, if sometimes painful, part of a natural economic progression. It also justified the growing inequality in US society that benefited not just Wall Street bankers and CEOs, but also millions of doctors, lawyers, economists, and other highly educated workers. These people took their six-figure salaries as a birthright, even as the pay of less educated workers stagnated or declined.

While this story of the US becoming a high skills center in the world economy may have been comforting to the elites, and was widely promoted by economists and the news media, there was never much truth to it. Highly skilled professionals did well in recent decades not because they succeeded in international competition, but rather because they were largely sheltered from it.

Trade agreements like NAFTA were explicitly designed to remove any barrier that made it difficult to export manufacturing goods to the United States, thereby placing US manufacturing workers directly in competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. Most of these restrictions had nothing to do with tariffs. Instead the key issues were rules protecting investment in the developing world along with limits on the ability of the US to exclude imports through safety or environmental regulations.

There has never been any similar effort to eliminate the barriers that prevent professionals from the developing world from coming to the United States and competing directly with their US counterparts as doctors or lawyers or in other highly paid professions.

The economists and the media somehow failed to notice that professionals were intentionally sheltered from international competition and instead just trumpeted them as the winners in the global economy. We were just treated to a beautiful example of this double standard when the media and the economists got all huffy about the “buy America” provision in the stimulus bill that might have protected a few manufacturing jobs in steel and other industries.

While this provision was roundly condemned and eventually watered down, the buy America provision in the Treasury’s latest bank bailout bill went completely unnoticed. This provision requires that any investment manager taking part in the program be headquartered in the United States. Even though the argument against protectionism in financial services is identical to the argument against protectionism in steel, no one bothered to make the argument when Wall Street was the beneficiary of protectionism.

The end result of this protectionism for those at the top is a bloated overpaid sector of top managers, which is what we saw at Chrysler. If we compare wages for assembly-line workers in Europe and the United States, there would not be much difference between the pay of UAW members and their counterparts in Europe. However, there would be a very large difference between the multi-million dollar pay packages of the top executives at the US companies and their European counterparts. The pay gaps persist among the more highly paid engineers and management personnel.

Therefore, it was only logical that a bailout of Chrysler would seek to take advantage of the lower cost management and design skills available at a European car company like Fiat. In Chrysler, as in other companies, the high pay packages for these people are like an anchor dragging them down in international competition. If the US is to be competitive in the 21st century, we must either bring the pay of those at the top back down to earth or we should look to follow the lead of Chrysler and contract out for these services.

Dean Baker is the author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.”

This piece was first published on Huffington Post.

QUESTION: Unemployment is at its highest point in decades. Foreclosures continue at alarming rates. Savings for retirement have been devastated by the stock market. How has the recession affected you or your family members?

 

Firms off-shoring jobs get Bush tax breaks; 
Sick workers get pink slips 

I’ll be 60 this year and am undergoing cancer treatment.  My oncologist wrote a letter listing needed treatment-related work restrictions; my giant corporate employer promptly laid me off so they could replace me with an Indian “resource,” who will definitely cost them less in wages, and will presumably not be extremely weak and tired.

So, among other things, many thanks (NOT) to Bush for his tax breaks to companies that off-shore jobs, and for his deregulation of investing companies - (gotta love that completely unfettered capitalism – can you give me a “rah!” for greed!) –  so that now my little bit of investments has almost disappeared. I didn’t save a whole lot until relatively recently, because I worked for a giant corporation, and one reason I chose them was because they offered a pension plan: Two-thirds of our salary, based on an average of our pay for our last five years of service, along with continuing medical benefits, until one day, when it was way too late for people my age to ever be able to make up for the change, they just “un-offered” it.  And somehow or other, this is all legal.  (I count on it that Bush and my former employer’s management will eventually reside on the appropriate level of Dante’s Inferno.)

 

Elizabeth Zelinger
Lakewood, Colo.

 

Homeowner battered by mortgage company, economy 

The Bush recession has resulted in a year-long boxing match with our mortgage company, the larcenous, perfidious Countrywide home loan corporation. We are constantly on the phone with this company, and we have been incessantly threatened with foreclosure and homelessness, and the registered letters and phone calls happen every week. 

It is stressful and time consuming, and makes our family sick. The value of our home has plummeted from 220k to 170k, and it is still falling. This long war has taken a toll on our credit, and we can’t get any financing for anything.  My car is a monstrosity, and I can’t replace it.  Virtually everyone I know is unemployed, and trying to make a living in the underground economy.  The world, as we know it, has been transformed into a meaningless vale of tears, so that a few rich bastards could consolidate their wealth. This was the worst time in our nation’s history.

Mark O’Brien
St. Paul, Minn.

 

Wife soon to lose job because of recession

My family has been directly affected by the “Bush Recession” in a very real way.  My wife is an administrative assistant for the loss prevention vice president of a jewelry company.  The company is now closing two of its three divisions.  The New York and Connecticut offices and warehouse are closing in May. 

Most of the company’s problems are related to the recession.  People who lost their jobs or fear they may join the ranks of the unemployed are not likely to buy jewelry.  It’s the kind of discretionary spending that most people will sacrifice during bad times.  Through no fault of their own, most of the folks in this company are getting the boot because of the collapse of other sectors of the economy.

So within a few weeks, our two income family will become a one income family.

 Kevin Sexton
Flushing, New York

 

Recession cost home, separated family 

I lost my home in New Mexico, my family had to move to other state in search of jobs, and I had to move to Philadelphia to live with my daughter.  My family lived together for 42 years but it became so costly just living in New Mexico, trying to make ends meet.  The Bush recession separated my family, and as a result, it was responsible for so many separations and tragedies among families.  It was devastating!

 Melva Rooney
Philadelphia, PA

 

Relatives facing foreclosure

We have been lucky enough to have paid off our house, but my brother-in-law and sister-in-law are facing foreclosure. My nephew has been laid off after building a house, and my niece is the sole support of a household that required a two person income. As in the Great Depression, the unions must be the strength of the people. My father’s Uncle Stan Coston took him to Detroit in the Thirties to see what Fords’ “goons” did to the labor union movement. It remained with him his entire life and was passed on to his children. My father, Alan Coston, worked hard to start the Teachers Union in New Mexico, and I worked as hard to start a Nurses Union (a miserable failure). In Union There Is Power.

Jeanne Jordan
Diana, Texas

 

A procession of recession losses

My sister has lost her job and my two next door neighbors have lost theirs.   Contractors that I work with are now doing work for no profit in order to keep their crews working.  Four consultants that are friends of mine have lost their jobs.  I have another two friends that are now close to losing their jobs.

Robert Stein
Laguna Beach, Calif.

 

Widow’s retirement, children’s savings disappeared 

My husband recently passed away, and over 50% of the not-so-large retirement he left for me has disappeared. So now I have little more than Social Security to live on. My grown children are also suffering financially – formerly successful small businesses now failing and savings almost used up, job income way down so they don’t know if they’ll lose their homes, etc.  But George Bush and his buddies are smiling and comfortable in the money they stashed off-shore. Don’t forget that the Bush Family Trust has for many years been heavily invested in Saudi oil, so their nest egg will last them quite a while.

Irene McDonald
Culver City, Calif

 

Teams to help unemployed needed

I was part of a team of United Steelworkers who helped assist the thousands of laid off Bethlehem Steelworkers, When our plant closed, we had 4,500 union brothers and sisters to help get new jobs . We did an excellent job because the USW trained us very well, and we had an excellent team.

 
We sure could use more of these teams throughout the US right now.

 
After we placed all these workers, the team found jobs for themselves. I was lucky to stay in the same line of work and now work for PaCareerLink. We also do an excellent job but are very busy, with hundreds of union and non-union clients coming in everyday.

 
I also see many Bethlehem Steel retirees forced back to work because their small pensions are not enough after their IRA’S have been cut almost in half due to the bad stock market.

 
Praise the Lord  the Bush Administration did not get their way and privatize social security, if they had gotten their way , our older generation would be living under bridges..

 
Tom Sedor
Northampton Pa.
SOAR 2599

 

Republican Senator just now learning of economic depression

I live in North Carolina, probably the most anti-union of the 50 states.  I live in the far-western section of the state.  In years past, Raleigh, the state capital, could have cared less what happened up here. 

Luckily, unions prospered without interference from state office-holders and a working person could make a good life for his family.

Without that union representation, and it had its own faults, I would never have been able financially to own a home, send my children to college, help them become home-owners or any of the other things that make life worthwhile.

If the labor movement doesn’t become international, we are all in for some very bad times, economically.

Sen. Burr R-NC and other political office holders are just now becoming aware of the Depression, so I would say they are at least 6 to 9 months behind the poor stiffs out in this world trying to provide for their families.

Ronnie Young
Waynesville, N.C.

 

Son loses condo home to foreclosure 

Since I am retired and any mortgages are paid, the main effect on me is higher food and fuel prices. My son lost his condominium, in which he had lived under one year, due to foreclosure.  The irony of that is, he bought it after the condo was foreclosed on another homeowner, and he considered it a great buy, since the price dropped $100,000. Unfortunately, he could not catch up with the payments, and had to agree to foreclosure. He is now living in another persons’ home. 

 Philip H. Troxler
Dover, DE.

 

85-year-old afraid to move 

I am afraid to move from my five story brownstone to a one floor loft condominium or coop, where this 85 year old artist could avoid countless steps.  Many condominiums were lost to single landlords during the great depression because owner-tenants could not pay the common charges; the buildings failed, and were taken over by affluent real estate speculators.  Fortunately, I have gentle caring neighbors.

Kendall Shaw
In a five story house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY
Where I love the neighbors and the neighborhood

 

Lost a lot of retirement money

Aside from losing a lot of money (on paper) in 401(k)/403(b) retirement programs, everybody is holding their own, thank God.

Thomas F. Wolfinger
Centreville, Va.

 

Lucky to have not fallen into the abyss

I am a federal employee so the unemployment crisis has affected me very little.  My job is quite secure. 

I also have always taken great care to live well within my means and am particularly careful not to take on continuing obligations such as a payment schedule if it is at all possible. 

On the other hand, my 401k, which forms a substantial portion of my retirement fund (I am not on the old federal retirement system which was a fixed pension), was affected.  I was hoping to be able to retire in two and a half years but do not think that will be possible now.

My sister is worried about her job security and that of her husband.  Fortunately, I am in a position to help out.  I already assist my other sister. 

Foreclosures also have not affected my immediate neighborhood.  Many are very long term residents and have paid off mortgages.  Also, the major realtors here live in the neighborhood–that really helps.  Nearby there are a number of homes for sale and there is increased crime. 

In short, I am very lucky.  I can see the effects around me, and it is depressing but so far I have not fallen into the abyss.

Renee Toback
Yonkers, NY

 

Two children laid off, one without unemployment

Two of my children have been laid off. One of the families has both breadwinners laid off. One of these has no unemployment benefits either.

They may loose their home if relief is not soon available. As an 81-year-old retiree, I don’t know how much I’ll be able to help. Needless to say, they weren’t taking part in any TEA parties. They just need jobs so they can once more become taxpayers.

Carroll Johnson
Douglassville, Texas

Grandkids suffering serious setbacks

The meltdown has not significantly affected me other than the increasing costs of food and other items. I am on social security.

However, it has adversely affected my children and grandchildren.  My youngest grand child has been out of work for six months and is struggling to survive.  Some of the family members are helping out financially, but it is still difficult. One of my grandsons, who is self-employed as a cement contractor, has not had but 2 jobs in the last 6 months. His wife, who is employed as a nurse at a hospital, helps them get by, but it is still very difficult.

My other grandson, who is a self-employed as a sales representative for a sunglasses and sports apparel company, has seen a reduction of 40% is his sales.

A.W. Ebright
Freedom, Calif.  

 

Credit card debt rising

I am retired and have a very limited income. The coming in has never matched the going out, and therefore my credit card debt increased over the years that I have not been working. I worked in the travel industry 40 years and had no retirement benefits. I had a friend who convinced my employer to establish a 401K, but he contributed only the first year. I had no power. Now the credit card companies have raised my interest rates and when I called to ask why, they had no reason for doing so. The have also decreased my credit limit and increased my monthly payment. I am now on the edge and not making it. We never realize that we are required to accept all these changes from credit card companies. We have no rights.

My dad was a UAW member, worked for Ford Motor and I remember as a child he needed to vote to strike. He said we can’t afford a strike but we need to support the union who is fighting for us.

Betty Winkler
Corona del Mar, Calif.

 

Retired workers supporting unemployed children

 
I am supporting my grandson who is 21 and unemployed.  My daughter and her husband have lost their business, a coffee shop in Ionia, Mich., and are looking for work.  They have no income, and there is not much of any safety net for them as they are ineligible for unemployment.
I am retired from the State of Michigan, and my funds cannot support everyone.  Hopefully, nothing will cut into my retirement, but the state is in dire straits as well. 
Many retired workers are supporting younger family members.  Please help us retain the funds we have.
 
Nancy Kay Kennedy
Belding, Mich.

 

No money left to repair car 

As I am retired an living on Social Security plus what is left of my I.R.A. The biggest downside is the decimated value of these savings. If the market doesn’t rebound in good fashion soon, I’ll be up the creek without a paddle. I have cut back on spending about as much as I can. The car needs tires and new rear struts, but I am reluctant to go into debt for them because there is no money to pay the obligation. 

John F. Conklin
Maricopa County, Ariz.

 

Country needs a better safety net

So far, I’ve been lucky.  I’d saved up the money from my last house, so I had a down payment for this one.  I work (still, I’m 67) in health care, so I have some hope of continuing.  But I’m aware, and fearful, that the prospects of my daughter and son-in law, respectively, a personal trainer, and an advertising professional, are less than rosy.  I’ve seen many patients over the past year who came in with major infections that probably would have been treated sooner with an adequate health care system.  I personally have Medicare, and so far it’s been great.  I believe it would be improved and strengthened if all citizens were allowed to buy into it, although I realize there is a lot of fraud that needs to be weeded out.  This country badly needs a more robust safety net for the people who, through no fault of their own, have made perilous choices. 

Charlotte Edwards
Summerville, S.C.

 

Child hurt by lack of medical insurance

I have been through these hard times before, as I am 76 years old. My parents knew how to deal with hard times, but one of my children fell victim more than the rest of us.  One suffered a grand mal seizure and had no insurance, and his business fell by 50%. Fortunately, my daughter then was hired on with a cruise line and quickly started the climb upwards with benefits.  I bailed-out the debts to IRS who were intent on jailing.
Then we paid off the credit cards and took my course in getting out of debt.  Two years ago I saw the writing on the wall and decided to take some of the money I had managed to save and re-invested part in a better house for less, and protected that much from the recession. 

Then, I lost a third of my IRA in about a week.  So, as a disabled retired school teacher who had worked until she was 71, I had to depend on my pensions that I had built up over my life, knowing I would need them.

I get on my computer every morning in order to communicate with blogging partners and start in telling my Congressmen what I think. I work with several groups and would love to send more money, but right now, my own family needs me.

 Joan E. Garrison
Eugene, Ore.
Retired union teacher

 

Recession damaged pension funds

I am a retired school teacher, so the Bush/GOP-Recession has not affected me personally. However, I am concerned about its effect on others. The Bush/GOP Recession has affected my mini-portfolio because the stock market cannot really rise unless more people have more money to spend. Wall Street has apparently forgotten the E, in the P/E ratio.  (This precept applies both nationally and internationally). The downturn in the stock market, precipitated by the inequitable distribution of wealth also affects Cal-STRS, my pension fund, since Cal-STRS actually runs a surplus when we have full-employment and decent wages.

I cannot understand why Wall Street doesn’t “get it.” We need to “redistribute the wealth.” After all that’s what Jesus had in mind when he told the rich man to sell all he had and give it to the poor. We need to make it easier for workers to organize in this country. We need to help workers overseas organize to get higher wages. And, we need to jump start all facets of the green economy. This will create a whole generation of new jobs – which can also be unionized. Since Cal-STRS has invested in green technology stocks, and since I am investing in green technology, the new green economy will affect me greatly.

But right now, I am far more concerned about how the Bush Recession will affect others than how it will affect myself.

William Joseph Miller
Los Angeles, Calif.

 

Job shipped overseas, causing unemployment, lower wages

I was unemployed for nearly two full years before I found a low wage assembly job, replacing a job that had been outsourced to the Phillipines.  I had been earning between $18 and $25 an hour, now I make $9, but I am just happy to have a job.

There is a current trend in my home state of Minnesota to constantly mess with unions and union members –  including constantly undermining the prevailing wage and finding loopholes in municipal laws to hire scabs when contracts specifically call for union workers.  I ran for the State Senate in my home district (SD 37) which contributed to my job issues.

But when I run again, against a hard core neo-con, anti-union, anti-worker, right winger named Sen. Chris Gerlach, R-Apple Valley, I will be making my support for our state’s version of the Employee Free Choice Act an important part of my campaign.

When organized labor and collective bargaining are respected, ALL workers benefit, even those not lucky enough to belong to a union.

I am a strong supporter of the United Steelworkers and its Associate Members program. 

Michael J. Germain
Apple Valley, Minn.

 

Sending factories overseas causes economic problems

I am retired and this problem has not reached me yet. I stand behind all union workers including the Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers. This sending factories to foreign countries is the number one cause of this situation. Why not send the gold in Fort Knox to China? The factories we have lost mean a lot more than the gold. The United States cannot survive without the factories we used to have. If we loose the automobile factories all is lost.

Richard Moeller
Bella Vista, Ark.

 

Pension benefits cut; Social Security increase needed

As a University retiree, my TIAA-CREF pension is a defined contribution plan. Its value has decreased about 40 percent. I receive a defined benefits pension from my deceased wife’s estate and Social Security. My wife’s pension is not COLA protected, so the value of each pension check diminishes monthly as the cost of living increases, whereas my Social Security is COLA protected, stays even with inflation.

Very few workers receive decent pensions.  Many workers have no pensions or have very poor plans. IRAs are under-funded and not guaranteed. Most workers receive small, insufficient pensions, way below what is needed for a decent retirement. Social Security must be increased (tripled) and become the universal pension plan for all American workers.

We must have lifetime Medicare for all Americans. Funding for Social Security and Medicare improvements will come from workers, employers and an asset taxes on the very wealthy. 

Bill Weiss
Morgantown, W.Va.

 

25 percent of retirement lost

 I am 88 years old. My retirement has decreased 25 percent since October, 2007.

David G. Wagner, M.D.
Portland, Ore.

 

Unions needed to deal with companies 

Unions are the one and only way working people have to honestly negotiate with the Corporate gang that make a lot of money at the workers’ expense and like it that way

Without a union, they tell the workers what they will be paid, how long they have to work — some without overtime pay. And if the worker doesn’t like it, they can get plenty of nonunion people to come in and settle for peanuts. 

Faye Clarke
San Diego, Calif.

 

Lost savings may cost place in retirement home

I have lost a considerable amount of my savings to the point that I am concerned about my ability to remain in the retirement community where I live.

Alice Hoffman
Haverford, Pa.

 

Retirement savings damaged

My 401k retirement account was rolled over to a Wells Fargo monthly account. It has lost 20% of its value since September 2007. 

Theodore John Wickoren
Brooklyn Park, Minn.

 

Too few defined benefit pension plans 

To begin with, this blog will not be a rant against Republican policy, though with few exceptions the stock market has fared better under Democrat administrations (Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan are two such exceptions). About half of my 300 income tax clients are retired; with few exceptions, I can tell you that my most (financially) comfortable retired clients are those who enjoy the monthly income provided by their defined benefit pension plans. For the most part the best defined benefit pensions are those of public employees, building trades, and large company plans where union representation remains high. Most employers don’t like defined benefit plans because caring for their retired workers creates a liability which in turn causes their business to be worth less money. In my practice it seems that the older the client, the more likely they are to have a defined benefit pension. My younger retirees, as well as those clients still working are more likely to have a defined contribution pension, such as a 401K.  I hesitate to call 401K’s (or similar defined contribution plans) “pensions.” In reality, a defined contribution plan is nothing more than a tax deferred savings account. Don’t get me wrong, 401K’s and similar plans are an important part of your financial future, and now is a great time to be pounding money into them, but they do not guarantee a retiree or their spouse a life time of income the same way a defined benefit pension does.

Most of the clients I have who depend on their 401K’s/IRA’s for income are in danger of outliving their savings. The stock market of the last 8 years has been so bad that many of these retirees have no chance of seeing their nest egg recover; the looming situation is that many will run out of money before they die. The effects of the bad market (and some people’s bad choices) can be mitigated to some extent by good planning, and I hope future retirees and their advisors will learn from mistakes already made. Real pensions can be created from defined contribution plans. The trouble is that few workers know how, financial advisers and brokers don’t seem to steer retirees towards them (maybe their commissions are too low), and for unions the subject seems to be outside of the employer/employee relationship.

My days battling employers are in my past, and whining about the “dubya” years isn’t productive. The average middle class working person neither plans nor saves sufficiently for their future. Unions and the financial industry need to find a way to help and educate the middle class about creating income streams that will last as long as they do.

Dan Smith
Holland, Ohio

 

Corporate greed cost Americans more than wars

Unions help out the common citizen. There is no debate about that. I saw it first hand. When my mother needed medical services, her Steelworkers and United Mine Workers medical coverage was there to help her. It was her devotion to these unions for herself and our family that made her life worthwhile.

Under President Bush, the CEOs of banks, investment firms, and insurance entities took many loaves of bread for bonuses by knowing that higher risky loans gave them higher bonuses. They left crumbs for every American’s retirement saving plan, proving you cannot trust the business leadership of America where bonuses are concerned. These people of greed did more to damage every American than any enemy of America during World War II or any war, when the value of all of our savings, investments, and retirement plans is now reduced by 40%.

When the little guy and gals are taken care of by unions acting together, everybody is taken care of, even non-union small business, doctors, lawyers and charities. Unions matter and help provide a working wage for everybody to live better.

 

Joseph Janos
Aliquippa, Pa.

 

Workers must have a voice!

I’m 68 and retired from a white-collar job, but my parents were both AFL-CIO at the time, and strong union believers.  I learned from them the value of having a voice when dealing with management.  I can’t believe what they have gotten away with these days!  I was shocked to hear all that has been given up since then:  little or no sick days;  limited hours to avoid paying benefits;  forced overtime; creating financial or other barriers for taking or earning vacation days; no health benefits; outrageous methods to discourage unionizing; attempts to stifle whistle-blowers, and perhaps no fair recourse to conflicts or complaints. Workers MUST have a voice!

Sheila Oden
Hayward, Calif.