[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Dennis Kucinich on the Democrats' Bailout Betrayal

Thu Oct 9 18:04:38 MDT 2008

by Chris Hedges

Truthdig (October 05 2008)

The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal.
The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up
blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.

We are on our own. And don't expect any help from Barack Obama and Joe
Biden, who lobbied hard for the bill and voted for it. Ignore their
rhetoric. Look coldly at the ballots they cast against us. We, as
citizens, have only a handful of representatives left in Washington,
most of whom were left sputtering in rage and frustration on the House
floor. The sad irony is that some of them were Republican.

"This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history
of this country", Representative Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, who
led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from
Cleveland. "It is a direct attack on the American people's ability to be
able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote
will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without
representation, to markets that are openly rigged."

"We buried the New Deal", he said of the vote. "Instead of Democrats
going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the
economy and start money circulating among the population through saving
homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders
chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a
way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all
the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional
roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have
unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are
not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the
American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a
so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block
this. This is an outrage. This was democracy's Black Friday."

Obama arrived on the Senate floor Brutus-like to thrust a knife into the
back of the working and middle class. He lobbied hard for the bill. He
did so, according to some who met with him on Capitol Hill, because he
feared that if he opposed the bailout and it triggered a market collapse
it could cost him the election. Better to placate the thieves on Wall
Street than stand up for the masses of enraged and swindled citizens.

Obama's betrayal is the betrayal of the Democratic Party. The Democrats
gave us the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped
down the firewalls that were put in place by the 1933 Glass-Steagall
Act. The 1933 act, designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now
experiencing, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC). It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from
hijacking the financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the
passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, tumbled gleefully
into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators. They achieved
fundraising parity with the Republicans. They used institutions like
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a welfare gravy train. The Democrats,
including Obama, are as compromised as the Republicans.

Obama's voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt
Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of
corporations and especially the credit card industry. Obama knows where
power lies in the United States. It is not with the citizens, who with
ratios of 100 to 1 pleaded with their representatives in Washington not
to loot the national treasury to bail out Wall Street investment firms.
Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not us, pick who
runs for president. You cannot be a candidate without their blessing and
money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential
Debates, a private corporation, determine who gets to speak and what
issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal,
not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to
NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script you become as marginal
and invisible as Ralph Nader or Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney.

Obama has always served his corporate masters. He opposed Representative
John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported
continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the
Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a
bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at
thirty percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious
Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land
for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill HR 676,
sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty
and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill - the Class
Action Fairness Act (CAFA) - that was part of a large lobbying effort by
financial firms, which make up Obama's second-biggest single bloc of
donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear
most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have
redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying
powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly
federal courts dominated by Republican judges.

Obama's support for the bailout, however, is his most egregious
betrayal. He had a brief, shining moment to prove he could lead, to
capitalize on a popular revolt that cut across the political spectrum.
He never attempted to address or mobilize the aspirations and passions
of the vast majority of Americans. He was as craven, servile and
cowardly as the party he represents. He returned to the campaign trail
after Friday's vote as a slick and polished sales representative for our
corporate state, telling us to calm down and accept the inevitable.

"Some of the most powerful speeches against this were given by members
of the Republican Party who are on the political right", Kucinich said.
"They did a superb job in poking holes in the underlying assumptions of
the bailout. They say what they believe. Give me somebody who says what
they believe and I can figure out how to get them to a new place. When
people say one thing and do another it is very hard to be able to move a
debate."

So let us honor, in our moment of defeat, the handful of elected
officials who valiantly defied their party leaderships in the House to
stage a remarkable revolt that at first succeeded. Kucinich is one.
There were others - Brad Sherman, Marcy Kaptur, Peter DeFazio, Lloyd
Doggett and Robert C "Bobby" Scott. They are about all that is left of
the old Democratic Party, the party that once looked out for the poor
and the working class. Send them a note of thanks. They deserve it. And
if you live in their districts make sure you get to the polls in
November. They did not sell you out.

"We had two take-it-or-leave-it propositions and the second one was
worse than the first", Kucinich said, referring to the plan that came
loaded with pages of tax cuts. "Tax cuts are antithetical to a bailout.
We never solved the problem. There were never any hearings on the bill.
This premise, that we could prop up the stock market with a $700-billion
investment and create some liquidity, was flawed. The problem is that
banks do not want to loan to each other. It is not a liquidity problem.
Banks are afraid they are going to collapse in short selling. There is a
war going on between security firms and banks. Banks are under assault.
They are not loaning. The dynamic is driven by the Accounting Standards
Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Fed."

The root of the financial crisis, as critics of the bailout plan point
out, is that millions of homeowners cannot pay their mortgages. The
bailout, as the market decline on Friday following the vote illustrated,
does not address the crisis. It solves nothing for the ten million
Americans who face foreclosure. It solves nothing for the growing
numbers of unemployed and underemployed. It may well be the equivalent
of tossing $850 billion of taxpayer money (including $150 billion in tax
cuts) into a furnace and watching passively as our economy continues its
plunge.

"We face a perfect financial storm", Kucinich warned. "The elements are
the deficit spending for the war of three to four trillion dollars, the
trillion and more tax cuts, the war itself and the lack of serious
investment in the country. We are being hollowed out.  We are going to
see more unemployment and more people losing their homes. With $700
billion we could have made a real investment in the country, in jobs, in
infrastructure and in homes. Instead, we got robbed."

_____

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer.
Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081006_dennis_kucinich_on_the_democrats_bailout_betrayal/

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