I met some of the protesters marching from New York to D.C. today.
The scenes were awful and the anger was not just misplaced, but completely incomprehensible. And while it’s quiet in Happy Valley today, what happened on Wednesday cannot be wiped away.
Joe Paterno, in his 46th year coaching the Penn State Nittany Lions, was ousted yesterday as the school attempted to disentangle itself from a scandal so ugly it has tarnished both the coach’s legacy and damaged the school’s reputation.
Former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky has been charged with sexual assault of eight boys over a 15-year period. Paterno was alerted to the alleged abuse at least nine years ago. He then alerted the athletic director and school vice president, but no one contacted police and the abuse apparently continued.
Paterno promised to resign at season’s end but the school’s board of trustees, rightly, opted to make an immediate break and fired Paterno.
The response on campus — a riot.
As word of the firings spread, thousands of students flocked to the administration building, shouting, “We want Joe back!” and “One more game!” They then headed downtown to Beaver Avenue, where about 100 police wearing helmets and carrying pepper spray were on standby. Witnesses said some rocks and bottles were thrown, a lamppost was toppled and a news van was knocked over, its windows kicked out. ablaze
This needs to be put in perspective: The ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests have been peaceful, aside from attacks by overzealous police, though the issues they are focused on — economic inequality, a bought political system, unending war — are far more important than saving a coach tarnished by his own silence.
I spent two years at Penn State as a student and understand the absolute mania for Penn State football. But loyalty should only extend to the gridiron and should not be used to excuse Paterno’s good-soldier routine or trigger a riot.
My column today — well, yesterday — on Princeton Patch.
There remains in the media a love for the Clinton years that should be belied by the facts. Yes, the economy was doing far better then than it is now, but much of its greatness was based on the acceleration of a shift to a financial services economy that was impossible to sustain.
Clinton’s policies — deregulation of the financial industry, including the demolition of the commercial/investment bank wall — created a financial free-for-all that sent Wall Street on a gambling spree that first blew up the tech bubble and, when it finally popped, turned to the housing market, which went crazy and then collapsed.
The destruction of the American economy, which had been years in the making, was a bipartisan effort. But this history, as Dean Baker pointed out yesterday in a post on Clinton’s new book, seems to have been forgotten. Here is Baker’s take:
Clinton promoted both the growth of the stock bubble and the over-valuation of the dollar. The latter came about when his administration organized the “saving” of East Asia following its financial crisis in 1997. The harsh terms of the bailout required the countries of the region to run huge trade surpluses in order to meet their payments. This meant raising the value of the dollar against their own currencies.
Other developing countries wanted to avoid ever being in this situation so they too began to accumulate reserves at a huge pace after 1997 by keeping down the value of their own currencies against the dollar. This led to the huge run-up in the dollar and therefore the large trade deficit that we saw in the last decade and continue to see today.
The demand gap created by the trade deficit was filled by the housing bubble in the last decade. With the bubble now burst it can only be filled by government budget deficits until the dollar falls enough to bring trade closer to balance. Given the enormous disaster that resulted from his economic mismanagement (which could have been reversed had anyone in the Bush administration been awake), it is highly ironic that President Clinton would write a book offering economic advice to the nation.
Ironic, perhaps, but typical. War hawks, so wrong about Iraq, remain the dominant voices in the foreign policy debate, so why should we expect the mainstream media to listen to critics of the capitalist system or banish the men (and yes, it was primarily men) who tanked the economy.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: Congressional focus on the deficit at a time of severe economic malaise is downright foolish and dangerous.
And, as Dean Baker points out, it also is just one more example of how deformed our politics has become. The existence of a supercommittee, first, demonstrates a distortion in priorities. We need a rebirth of the commons, a sense of common good and shared sacrifice that has disappeared.
That means wrestling the economy back from the legalized criminal enterprises that control our economic lives. Corporations control our economy and our political system and they have used their power to rig things — to create, in Dylan Ratigan‘s words, “a platinum citizenship” — and protect their own prerogatives.
The supercommittee’s focus on “entitlements” — it’s not should we cut Social Security, but how much should it be cut — even as both sides avoid going after the bog boys just shows where Congress’ loyalties lie.
