http://www.liveleak.com/e/096_1222744802
Consider recent events:
- Nearly two thirds of Americans are feeling the pinch from the economic downturn, according to The Washington Post.
- Factory workers facing the closing of their plant stage a sit-in demanding their severance and health benefits.
- Protesters line the streets in New York and elsewhere around the country to protest the Wall Street bailout.
The list could go on.
Are we witnessing a new populist movement, one growing from anger over the growing wealth disparities in this country? With the economy teetering at the edge of an abyss and the likelihood that the downturn we are in will get worse long before it gets better, it is important that American workers — and by that I mean not just blue-collar folks, but middle managers and everyone who puts in their 40-plus and gets a paycheck — make their voices heard.
That’s essentially what Emma Coleman Jordan (pictured, at right) — editor of the soon-to-be published book, The Short End of the Stick, and a professor of commercial law and economic justice at Georgetown University — told Bill Moyers this week. I was listening to Bill Moyers’ Journal this morning on a podcast — I rarely have time to watch it live — and was struck by something she said to close their discussion. The economy, she said, is fragile, especially with the auto industry on its final legs (or wheels, I guess). If the industry fails — “is allowed to fail,” she said — “it would create a death spiral of consequences that are so interlinked that we can’t properly calculate what the full impact would be.”
That, she said, will result in despair — a despair, however, that “is going to be dissipated by action by citizens, like those people who went into the plant – Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago.”
People have got to stand up. They’ve got to demand accountability. And I believe frankly that this past election was the beginning of a process of standing up by citizens who were tired of being disappointed in what they were told about the reasons for going to war, who were tired of getting stagnant wages when the highest paid people in our economy were getting windfall compensation packages for failure. And they decided that… enough. They wanted a different way of political leadership.
And I believe that this era of accountability is not over. And our new president-elect will see from this nearly energized democratic, small “d,” Republicans and Democrats and Independents, all insisting on his accountability. So he’s unleashed a set of energies in the country that will hold him accountable as well.
Energy — that would be refreshing.
I’ve been watching and following politics for much of my adult life and energy has not been the hallmark of our times. Rather, we have been dealing with a level of complacency and self-centered ignorance that has resulted in tremendous damage being done to the public sector. It is not just eight years of George W. Bush that have left us in these straits. It has been a decades-long effort that goes back to Jimmy Carter and has continued unabated.
Liberals who have come to romanticize the Clinton years do themselves — and workers — a disservice when they call for a return to the 1990s. The Clinton years slowed the acceleration of this movement, but did not stop it. Rather, with its support of Nafta and various banking and telecom “reforms,” it helped lay the groundwork for the damage that Bush has wrought.
The incoming Obama administration has an opportunity to reverse this movement — but it will require a vigilant citizenry applying pressure to keep him moving in the right direction. As I’ve written before, Obama appears to have solid progressive instincts that are at war with his more moderate and pragmatic self. The pragmatists — some of the old Clinton hands around him — cannot be allowed to dominate. It is up to us, the people working paycheck to paycheck, to push back against the Rubinites.
Hank Kalet 