Thank you for having the courage to stand up against the President and Wall Street and vote down a package of aid of $700 billion to the extremely wealthy megacorporations who brought this economic crisis crashing down on our heads in the first place. I know the Dow Jones "Industrial" Index fell several percentage points, but I do believe the market will get over it. Seriously. It's in the best interest of the market to do so.
Now that we have kept $700 billion from going down the drain of an unsustainable economy, lets put that money where it belongs: into building citizen confidence (note that I am not using that awful word, "consumer") in our communities and our institutions of government. $700 billion dollars is enough money to invest in citizen "bailouts" averaging almost $2500 per American adult and child. Every family of four could get around $10,000 to help make those mortgage payments, keep food on the table, pay down student loan and credit card debt, and make up for the retirement and college savings they just lost in the stock market crash.
$2500 for a single man or woman might make the difference between defaulting on student loans and just getting by. It might make the difference between affording those health insurance premiums and copays or going without -- as the cost of treatment doubles or triples. It might make the difference between having a bed to sleep in and becoming one of the nation's hopeless homeless.
So, what do you think? Lift up the people on whose backs our economic house of cards has been built, or prevent a few megacorporations from merging, buying each other out, and otherwise having a bad year? My answer is to help the people.
Taking a longer view, it is time to follow the example of our European neighbors and partially socialize our economy. It is time for us to shift from a notion of each individual and company pursuing their own best interests to a notion of the Greater Good. The individual must exist within a community, and if the needs of the community are not taken care of, the individual is at risk. We must switch from an economy of consumers to an economy of producers: the job of the individual (and especially the corporation) is not to make money for itself, but to provide for the common good...of which it is a part!
Very truly I tell you: by the end of the next decade, we must provide every human being in America with a bed to sleep in, three meals a day, and access to at least basic preventative health care or our country will fall apart at the seams. FDR saw this, and he held the country together with duct tape, self confidence, and federal job programs. We must do this again. We must build sustainable communities, sustainable economies, and sustainable ecology or there will be no community, economy, or ecology for my children and yours to inherit. The future depends on what we do today.
We must do this...why not start today?
Yours sincerely,
James Camp
4 comments:
So how do we form community as people are falling? It's not just those on Wall St -- they are falling, too, but they'll be ok. Not great, but ok. (Remember, however, that they are people, too... they just have better parachutes than we do.)
It's the people around us who are feeling the pain, who can't find jobs, who have no health insurance, no savings, no homes, nothing.
How do we form them into a community, provide for them, and change the world?
I have no answers. I wish I did. Giving people a $2500 check for each person and each child is nice, but not a long-term solution. It'll make ends meet right now (would pay my student loans for a while) but won't help us in 6 months or a year. How do we reshape America into a community within a global context?
(oops -- I posted twice, and deleted one... but it still shows up. Sorry!)
From the NYTimes, Floyd Norris' blog http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/ :
2:05 p.m. | Why It Isn’t Working: John Higgins of Capital Economics offers his analysis of why this is happening:
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If policymakers think that adding extra liquidity is going to solve the credit crunch on its own, they are going to be sorely disappointed. This is because upward pressure on interbank rates is a consequence, not a cause, of the crisis.
It is a shortfall of bank capital that has made financial institutions reluctant to lend to one another. Boosting liquidity is therefore only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for stabilising the financial sector. In fact, until banks are adequately recapitalised, funding pressures may even get worse.
This also explains why the markets’ reaction to the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) has been so lukewarm. Bank capital will only get a lift from the $700 billion “troubled asset relief program” if the authorities overpay for the assets they buy.”
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He thinks the Fed will cut rates to 1 percent or lower, from 2 percent now.
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